The other day here, I linked to a chunk of an interview that Jon Stewart did for his AppleTV show, The Problem with Jon Stewart. (I like this show, by the way. The only problem I have with The Problem with Jon Stewart is that it's on AppleTV where a lot of folks who oughta see it won't.)
In the episode, Stewart interviewed Leslie Rutledge, the Attorney General of Arkansas about a law that state has enacted that bans gender-affirming medical care for minors. In the excerpt to which I linked, Ms. Rutledge did a pretty awful job of defending the reasoning behind this law. If you watch the whole episode — which you can do here for free — she did an even worse job.
Among other evasions and disingenuous replies, she claimed to not remember which medical experts and organizations had testified about the wisdom of this law when the state held hearings. It sounded like there had to be a lot of them to cause Arkansas to disregard the recommendations of the American Medical Association, The American Association of Pediatrics, The Endocrine Society and others. She said the experts they relied on are listed in the reports on those hearings.
She further said, "We had plenty of people come and testify before the legislature" and that "For all of those physicians, all of those experts, every single one of them, there's an expert that says, 'We don't need to allow children to be able to take those medications…'" Well, Alejandra Caraballo — a Clinical Instructor at Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic — looked up those reports and she says there were but four "experts."
One, according to Caraballo, is a former plastic surgeon who now runs a Botox clinic and who "never worked with trans patients and has no experience treating gender dysphoria." The others, if we believe Caraballo's findings, sound like they have little to no experience with patients with gender dysphoria but lots of experience opposing gender reassignment. In other words, the "expert" witnesses were selected to present one point of view and there weren't even very many of them. Caraballo tweets about all this in a thread starting here.
Thanks to my pal Bob Elisberg for letting me know about this. I expected it would be a small, lopsided group but I didn't think it would be that small or that lopsided.