The Black Panther Party is Back and They’ve Got Hormones
A Fox News story touted the link between the 1970s Black Panther Party, a group of community health centers fouded in the 80s, and a middle school clinic that lists gender-affirming care among its offerings.
by Evan Urquhart
Watch out, America, the Black Panther Party is back, and they’re transing your middle schoolers. This is the premise of a Fox News article from earlier this week that attempts to make something out of the fact that one effort of the radical Black power movement of the 1960s was to provide social services to the community. One remaining vestige of this effort is the nonprofit Country Doctor Community Health Centers in King County, WA, an organization that was formed in 1988 out of a merger between the Country Doctor Community Clinic and the Carol Downs Family Medical Center, the latter of which had been founded by the Seattle Black Panther Party in 1970. The CDCHC in turn operates two School Based Health Centers serving Meany Middle School and Nova High School which list physicals, vaccinations, and therapy as services along with reproductive health care and gender-affirming care.
The CDCHC proudly describes its historic link to radical political movements in the 1960s and 70s on its website, making it easy for lazy reporters to make the connection. A more difficult task would be finding an example of a middle schooler wh recieved cross-sex hormones through the Meany Middle School Clinic (the centers don’t list puberty blockers among their offerings), and the Fox story doesn’t attempt to find any. It is therefore unclear if any Meany students have recieved cross-sex hormones through the clinic, with affirming therapy being by far the most likely offering for this age group.
The lack of evidence of middle schoolers recieving these meds, of course, does not deter Fox from claiming that children “as young as” 11 are being given free cross-sex hormones by the Black Panther Party.
screenshot from Fox News
While the most recent WPATH Standards of Care does not include strict age limits for starting cross-sex hormones, the guidelines require youth who are considered for these measures to have been consistent about their gender identity for an extended time, and for them to have the cognitive and emotional maturity to understand the risks and benefits of hormone therapy. The guidelines direct providers to determine that adolescent patients are able to reason through the risks and how those risks apply to them, which is a level of cognitive development that is not present for most 11-year-olds. As a result, 11-year-olds do not typically receive cross-sex hormones.
It’s a dishonest article! There’s no evidence provided of any students of any age actually recieving cross-sex hormones through either of these student health centers, much less being harmed by them, and the Black Panther Party link is so tenuous as to be ridiculous. This is, unfortunately, the state of anti-trans propaganda where the more absurd and ridiculous the claims are the more the right rushes to print them.