Attacks on Adult Healthcare Commence in Earnest at Daily Wire

A Matt Walsh “investigation” into provider letters for gender confirmation surgeries didn’t demonstrate anything, except that attacks on transition-related medical care for adults are escalating.

by Evan Urquhart

On Twitter, Matt Walsh claimed yesterday to have unethical practices by gender-affirming telehealth providers. In a 20-tweet thread which includes a handful of short home video clips, some screenshots, and clips from what Walsh describes as a training session for providers, the anti-trans personality bragged that an associate, Gregg Re, defrauded a provider by pretending to be a transgender woman to procure a letter recommending testicular removal surgery. According to Walsh, this successful fraud proves that such letters are given out too easily.

Doctor or provider letters confirming the medical necessity of gender confirmation surgeries are required by insurance companies before they will agree to pay for surgery. While many trans people have a regular doctor who can write such a letter based on long experience, the process can be more onerous for trans people in rural areas without access to specialists, as well as trans people living in poverty. Telehealth providers have stepped up to fill the gap, allowing greater access to these necessary, at times lifesaving, treatments. With robust evidence that such procedures are associated with improved outcomes and very low rates of regret, the trend has been for affirming providers to treat the process as a collaborative talk with patients about their needs, rather than an exercise in looking for excuses to deny coverage.

Enter Matt Walsh’s Twitter thread. Referred to as an investigation by a Daily Wire article reporting on it, it is unclear why the “investigation’s” sole produce was a 20-tweet thread, rather than an article or full-length video. Walsh’s thread includes a handful of different elements. The first are snippets of video from a training session for doctors on how to write letters to insurance companies’ standards. Although Walsh presents the clips as controversial, even considering the brevity and lack of context it is still clear that the speaker (who Walsh identifies as licensed social worker Ari Groner), is primarily discussing how doctors can reassure patients who lack trust in medical professionals by demystifying the letter writing process for them.

In addition to brief clips of training materials for doctors, Walsh provides screenshots from a transgender healthcare provider, Folx, that explain not every patient will fit the diagnosis of gender dysphoria perfectly, but such a diagnosis is necessary for insurance to cover the surgery. In the American medical system insurance companies’ rigid bureaucracy and eagerness to deny necessary treatment on the smallest pretense is a well-known problem. Doctors in all specialties have been forced to learn to code their diagnoses carefully so that insurance will cover them. This is neither a new issue nor one confined to gender-affirming healthcare.

The most interesting tweets are numbered 8 through 15, and detail Walsh’s claims of a successful fraud perpetrated on Plume by his associate, Gregg Re, a former head writer for Tucker Carlson. Plume is an online service that provides hormone therapy prescriptions and surgery letters via telemedicine, described by Walsh as the largest “trans healthcare provider” in the US. Walsh again provides only extremely short clips of video showing Re’s consultation, which he claims lasted 22 minutes. Even in the clips it’s clear that Gregg claimed to be a transgender woman who had been on hormone therapy for an extended period.

While Walsh makes a lot of hay out of the fact that Re claimed not to have experienced gender dysphoria for longer than 6 months, it’s unclear how a professional would have interpreted that claim in the context of a trans woman who had been on hormones for an extended period and now desired surgery, or what else Re had to say to sell the provider on that story.

Walsh’s also describes Re’s presentation in the consultation was very masculine with no attempt to present himself as a woman. Re has short hair and does not seem to be wearing makeup in the video. The masculinity of his presentation past that is better left to the eye of the beholder.

This half-assed Twitter thread is not exactly a bombshell, in other words, but it is notable for what the Daily Wire is attempting to do with it. In a follow up article today the far-right propaganda outlet contacted Republican attorneys general and lawmakers for comment. The outlet’s agenda seems to be to push states to crack down on adult transgender healthcare, following the precedent set by Florida which has imposed onerous regulations which has resulted in most trans adults in the state being cut off from access to even simple prescription refills.