Fox News host Greg Gutfeld made a spurious historical analogy when discussing gender-affirming care Thursday, likening Democrats who support pro-LGBTQ+ causes to the Confederacy’s effort to defend slavery by taking up arms.
On the same day that Fox News was called out for misleadingly substituting “gender-affirming care” for outdated terms like “sex change” when publishing licensed content from wire services like Reuters and the AP on its website, Gutfeld chose to characterize the practice narrowly as the “removal of healthy organs from children who are going through some kind of confusion.” (Surgical procedures represent only a small subsection of gender-affirming care, which also includes things like mental health services and hormone therapy, among others.)
Gutfeld then turned his ire on Democrats like Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who earlier in the day praised a Texas doctor after she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to a state law that prohibits gender-affirming care.
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“So if you—the Democrats, Dick Durbin—you want to defend the removal of healthy organs for kids, have at it. You’ll just start another war like you did with slavery and you’re going to lose this one too, because no one thinks this is good. No one thinks this is moral,” Gutfeld said on Thursday’s edition of The Five.
Texas recently joined several other red states—including Missouri, Oklahoma, North Dakota and West Virginia—in banning gender-affirming care.
Slavery was not the only societal scourge that Gutfeld invoked.
“You have to ask yourself, when people were defending slavery and when they were defending Jim Crow, or when they were going through Nazi Germany, why didn’t people realize what they were doing was evil?” he asked.
“There are doctors that are removing healthy organs. They’re removing external genitalia, breasts—they’re blocking puberty, which billions have gone through,” he continued. “The idea of stopping it—maybe perhaps it’s for a rare cancer—but this is not what we are talking about. These people don’t see themselves as villains. They don’t. But they are.”
It will take 10 years, Gutfeld predicted, for the wrongs that he sees in gender-affirming care to be recognized as such by the public.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the state Sen. Dick Durbin represents.
