In the Jon Stewart interview with Arkansas AG Leslie Rutledge, she said they had "experts" in their brief that supported their state ban on gender affirming care. The "experts" are not qualified and are ideologically motivated. Let's take a look at them.
A Thread: 🧵
There are a total of four experts relied on by the state of Arkansas:
Dr. Stephen Levine
Dr. Mark Regnerus
Dr. Paul Hruz
Dr. Patrick Lappert
Let's take a look at them.
Dr. Patrick Lappert is a plastic surgeon who's allowed his board certification to expire and no longer practices surgery. He runs a botox clinic in a strip mall in Alabama next to a Pizza Hut. He's never worked with trans patients and has no experience treating gender dysphoria.
Dr. Paul Hruz is a doctor affiliated with the hate group Alliance Defending Freedom. He objects to gender affirming care on religious grounds and doesn't care about trans youth. He stated "some children are born in this world to suffer and die."
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
Hruz is unqualified and the court in Kadel rejected most of his testimony finding him to not qualified. "He has never diagnosed a patient with gender dysphoria. . . conducted any original research about gender dysphoria. . . or published any scientific, peer-reviewed literature"
Dr. Stephen Levine makes his entire living on denying trans people access to gender affirming care. In his testimony, he's referred to trans people as "narcissistic" and has practiced a form of conversion therapy on his patients.
Read more here:
wired.com/story/inmates-…
Dr. Levine almost entirely subsists on being an anti-trans "expert." He's in his 80's, rarely sees patients, and does not publish any peer-reviewed research. Levine gets paid more than $20k by earning $400+/hr per case he's involved in as an expert. It's about the money for him.
Dr. Mark Regnerus wrote the infamous "New Family Structures" paper in 2012 on same-sex couples and the effects on children with a terrible methodology. The paper was ideologically driven by animus and it attracted significant controversy for being flawed.
austinchronicle.com/news/2013-03-2…
Regnerus was thoroughly discredited by this study and he has no expertise in the care of gender dysphoria in trans youth. He went to significant lengths to undermine LGBTQ families with a severely flawed paper that was driven by his animus.
These are the experts that Leslie Rutledge relies on in pushing back against Jon Stewart. It's no wonder she couldn't answer the question. The experts she relies on are bigots and quacks with no expertise on treating gender dysphoria.
This is why they consistently lose in court. They have no experts. Gender affirming care is the standard set by every major medical organization in the US. They have to rely on these hacks because they are driven by hate and animus, not a genuine concern for trans youth.
I've litigated cases with Levine, Lappert, and Hruz. I helped prepare rebuttal witness testimony against them. I mean it when I say these so called "experts" are unqualifed. Their bias against trans people is palpable and it'a reason why most of their testimony was stricken.
To close out the thread, I presented a peer reviewed paper at a UCLA Law health justice conference this past week dealing with this exact issue and how to push back against pseudoscience and unqualified experts. I'll post the link to the paper when it's published.
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