TWIBS: RFK, Jr., Shockingly Incompetent and Wrong, Again
Kennedy, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is promoting misinformation. Again. Uh, again… again again. Again.
Humor by Alyssa Steinisek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Jeez… okay, look, I’ve written about RFK, Jr., before. I’ve talked all about Kennedy’s escapades staging bear cadavers and chainsawing the head off of a whale carcass, the dead worm taking up space in a whole in his brain and the fact that he has absolutely no qualifications (professional, medical, or moral) for the position he currently holds as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. He’s a conspiracy theorist who thinks that AIDS isn’t caused by HIV and that 5G can give you cancer.
Suffice to say, the majority of brainwaves escaping this dude’s noggin are coming from the worm corpse in his grey matter. To say nothing of the fact that he looks like whatever happens when you leave grapes out in the sun too long and they advance beyond raisins.
Kennedy has long been a dangerous enemy of the transgender community, even before he became a part of President Trump’s administration, and his most recent attack against transgender people comes in the form of a tweet from the HHS Twitter account detailing a letter sent to health care providers “urging immediate updates to treatment protocols for minors with gender dysphoria based on HHS’ comprehensive review that found puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries have very weak evidence of benefit, but carry risk of significant harms, including sterilization.”
Again with the obsession about kids’ freaking fertility. In what world are we the weirdos?
In Kennedy’s letter, he suggests that gender-affirming care and WPATH guidelines have been “discredited,” and urges healthcare providers to read a recent HHS “study” (I’m being generous here) for guidance regarding care for trans youth. The study in question was, upon release, immediately dismissed as blatantly political and factually inaccurate on basically every level, so I would consider that bad advice from Kennedy. In case you weren’t sure.
Hey, you know where folks should be looking if they want a sound study on gender-affirming care for trans youth? The recently released Utah Review, a 1,000-page politically neutral review of existing studies on gender-affirming care that found those “discredited” treatment protocols to be safe, effective, and almost never cause for regret. Strangely, most mainstream media outlets and politicians have been silent about this, as compared to the effusive praise shown for the much shoddier and biased Cass Report and HHS study.
Kennedy wants to dishonestly misconstrue gender-affirming care as dangerous and untested, but the indisputable facts just don’t support his evidently biased conclusions. Besides being woefully unqualified for his job and blatantly incompetent at performing it, what has Kennedy ever done to inspire trust in his medical opinions?
Just firing from the hip, here: Kennedy is a huge raw milk guy, despite the risk of E. coli; he supports removing fluoride from drinking water for no discernible reason; he believes that we’re turning the frickin frogs gay, along with our children; he thinks horse medicine cures COVID; he believes COVID was specifically engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people; and he spikes his water with the blue food dye Walter White put in his methamphetamine. What the hell do you even do with this guy? He shouldn’t be allowed to hold political office, he should be studied in a lab deep underground, then sealed in a vault beneath a mountain like radioactive waste once they’ve gleaned all they can from him.
Like, that isn’t even all the stuff about RFK, Jr., that I could bring up. I just had to draw a line somewhere and stop listing things.
I can’t believe I’m saying this but when it comes to gender-affirming care for trans youth, don’t listen to the HHS Secretary, do listen to that new Mormon country study.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
