To go on Fox News and defend transgender children, as the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate Abdul El-Sayed did on Monday, is no small act of bravery and deserves enormous praise.
El-Sayed stuck to his principles on gender-affirming health care in a prime-time interview during which he moderated positions on other hot-button issues. The Michigander advocated for the Green New Deal, a 10-year plan to phase out fossil fuels, when it was proposed by Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019. But when Fox News’s Jesse Watters asserted, “You want to get rid of the internal combustion engine,” El-Sayed protested, “No, I don’t.” And when Watters reminded, “That’s what the Green New Deal says,” El-Sayed said for the first time, “I’m not going to defend the Green New Deal.”
Watters also asked what should happen to “criminal aliens” if we abolished the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, as El-Sayed has urged. The candidate indicated he still wanted to see immigration laws enforced—just with a different agency. Replied El-Sayed, “Long before we ever had ICE, we had INS,” the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was incorporated into ICE as part of the 2002 creation of the Department of Homeland Security. “We were able to enforce our immigration policies without shooting people in the face and in the back of the head.” The implication is that El-Sayed’s position isn’t just Abolish ICE; it’s really Abolish and Replace ICE.
Your mileage may vary regarding whether El-Sayed was wise or weak in making those recalibrations. But when Watters asked, “Sex changes for minors, do you support that?” El-Sayed did not pivot. Despite all the widespread belief in the political consultant class that support for transgender rights is electoral poison, and in the face of a hostile interviewer, El-Sayed calmly offered a clear, succinct, and reasonable principle: “I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of health care you should have. And if you’re a minor, that’s between you and your doctor and your parents.”
However, seconds later, bravery crossed over into bravado.
As Watters pressed the issue, El-Sayed went down a bizarre path:
WATTERS: So, you think it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off? You think that’s OK?
EL-SAYED: Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised?
WATTERS: Yeah, but I mean, that’s a personal question, doctor!
EL-SAYED: Ok, then you probably should want to move on. You probably should want to move on.
WATTERS: Circumcision’s different than castration.
EL-SAYED: I think it’s a problem that you think that you get to decide what happens between a parent, a doctor, and a patient. And I’m just saying that, yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling. So, if you really want to bring that up, you can. I just think you guys are really selective about how you want to talk about these things.
Writing the following makes bile creep up my esophagus: Jesse Watters was correct. At least, he was regarding the obvious difference in long-term consequences between millennia-old and sometimes religiously proscribed removing the foreskin of a penis and the far rarer removing an entire penis (though technically speaking, “castration” is the surgical removal of testicles). That both are genital surgeries doesn’t mean Watters was using a “selective” double standard.
El-Sayed’s misfire has all the hallmarks of an overconfident candidate who keeps his own counsel, as I have a hard time believing “are you circumcised?” would have survived five seconds of a debate prep session with a minimally competent communications team. And El-Sayed amplified the cringe with his attempt to spike the football—“Do you really want to have this conversation?” and “You probably should want to move on”—while being far away from the end zone.
Seeking to paint the former Wayne County, Michigan, public health chief as outside the cultural mainstream, Fox News and other conservative media outlets have mercilessly mocked El-Sayed’s circumcision argument. However, I am skeptical that this right-wing backlash will have any electoral consequence. I’ve written previously about elections in the Midwest where attempts at stoking anti-transgender sentiment flopped, without Democrats throwing transgender people under the proverbial bus, in part because the issue is low on the list of voter priorities. El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers, seems to agree; the part of the interview he chose to highlight was not the snippet about transgender minors but the part about the Green New Deal.)
Regardless, El-Sayed’s odd response has inadvertently aided the right-wing anti-transgender rights misinformation campaign. A better prepared El-Sayed would have responded to Watters’s both childish and histrionic question, “You think it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?” by rejecting the premise: transgender girls rarely have their male genitalia surgically removed before adulthood.
A 2024 research paper published by doctors and biostatisticians from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, Brown School of Public Health, and Boston Children’s Hospital, examined nearly 23 million insurance records of minors from 2019. In those records, researchers identified only a minuscule 85 cases of gender-affirming surgical procedures. And nearly all of those, 82 of 85, “were chest-related procedures” not involving genitalia.
Instead of taking the opportunity to drop a truth bomb, El-Sayed—who, again, bravely displayed good intentions by standing up for transgender children—has now allowed Watters and his ilk to feed the misconception that critical gender-affirming care for minors is synonymous with cutting off penises.
I suspect the seeds of El-Sayed’s circumcision debacle sprout from an aversion to debating like a stereotypical liberal nerd who tries to win with boring facts instead of with macho flexes and spicy zingers. That aversion is cheered on by El-Sayed’s fans who delighted on social media when, on Fox News, he mocked Rogers as a “beta,” and they declared victory when Watters admitted “I like him for some stupid reason,” partly because he’s a “guy’s guy.”
Having seen the left side of social media explode in euphoria in 2018 when Democrat Andrew Gillum roasted Ron DeSantis to his face as someone who “the racists believe [is] a racist,” only to miss out on the midterm Blue Wave and lose the Florida gubernatorial race by a hair, put me down as skeptical that trash talk leads to swing-state glory. Granted, we have all learned the hard way that facts alone are insufficient to win elections. But transgender rights and the availability of gender-affirming care for minors are not only electoral matters, if that. They are human rights and health care matters. To protect human rights and deliver critical health care, the facts will matter no matter how noble the feelings behind them.
