Jesse Watters Claims Doctors Profiteering off Trans Surgeries
On Friday, Jesse Watters, who has become Fox News' Sultan of Smug, launched a disinformation campaign against the medical profession and the trans community on the network's daily chatfest "The Five." In a segment devoted to puberty blockers and minors transitioning (one of the network's favorite scare topics), he claimed his bogus theory.
According to the Daily Beast, he began by "arguing that gender reassignment surgery is some sort of money-making conspiracy among doctors."
He continued without offering any proof: "So, surgeons can only make so much money until they invent new surgeries." He added: "When plastic surgery came along, a lot of surgeons got very, very wealthy, and that's fine — on adults."
And added that those doctors were so greedy they broke ethical boundaries. "So all of a sudden, they found out a way to make more money, and it's off children. So what they do, Jessica," (addressing the show's liberal co-host, Jessica Tarlov), "is fund studies that say, 'It's fine, we're saving lives, no one has ever regretted [transitioning].' So, there are studies on both sides."
Watters added that he had every right to address the issue because it happened in his own family years before.
"We adopted a young child, and at age five, he was playing with dolls, and everybody knew he was gay, or was going to be gay. And it's not like all of a sudden we took him to the doctor and chopped him off. No one would ever do that," Watters revealed. ("Chopped him off" is his definition of gender reassignment surgery.)
At this point, Tarlov corrected him: "Well, 'gay' and 'trans' are different, and that's not how 'gay' works, either," she rebutted.
But Watters disagreed with more uninformed rhetoric. "I don't believe it is. A lot of these people are just gay — or lesbian," he asserted. "And what they're [the doctors] doing is they're intervening in a regular gay or lesbian life, and that's a new experience, and it never used to be like that."
He ended his conspiracy theory with a joke about another colleague, saying that another female on the panel had shared "intimate details about their adolescence" with him that he wanted to share: "They said they experienced feelings when they were in middle school that they, perhaps, were a lesbian."
"She was in college," corrected Judge Jeanine Pirro.
"And that person was Judge Jeanine!" Watters said, perhaps joking.
"Liar! Liar!" countered Pirro. But Watters continued:
"And thank God they didn't transition you!" Watters said, apparently still not understanding the difference between being gay or lesbian and transgender. "You were a beautiful woman."
Watch the segment at this link: https://www.thedailybeast.com/jesse-watters-being-gay-and-transgender-are-the-same.