Local TV pundits spew anti-trans rhetoric without pushback - until now

Atlanta's Sunday TV talk diet includes one local program - WAGA-TV/ Fox 's "The Georgia Gang." I watch it occasionally and happened to have some time Sunday to catch the most recent episode, and I'm furious but glad I caught it.

Two pundits - Phil Kent and Martha Zoller - notably the right-wing participants, spewed anti-trans swipes, which I suppose should be unsurprising. That they did so with zero pushback from the show's moderator or the two left-wing participants, however, is disappointing.

The pundits zeroed in on the prior week's Senate subcommittee skewering of Trump HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kent whined that Warnock was "rude" and wandered into an attack on Dr. Demetre Daskalakis (without citing him by name), labeling him a "trans promoter," (I suppose) simply because he used the term "pregnant people" and offered his pronouns of preference in his now-infamous resignation letter.

Listening to he and Martha Zoller fumble around in an anti-science uproar over CDC pandemic strategy "in the moment" and current vaccination conversations is cringy enough, but weaving in anti-trans swipes is just beyond the pale repugnant, and it's time someone called it out. So I did.

Later in the show, the conversation of school shootings came up, what with the one-year anniversary of the Apalachee High School shooting and the recent Minneapolis catholic school shooting. Zoller, citing a "series" (it's two, lady - nowhere near the leading number of heterosexual white men who've victimized hundreds over the years) of incidents involving trans shooters, leaned into the mental health aspect.

"...DSM 5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) took that out as a mental health problem but clearly there's a mental health problem there," she said.

She almost gets it. Gender dysphoria isn't a "mental illness," in the latest DSM. She's right. However, as the Philadelphia Mental Health Center points out , "gender dysphoria is listed as a mental health diagnosis, but it is not considered a “mental illness” in the traditional sense," continuing "gender dysphoria is not seen as a pathological condition. The focus of treatment is not to “cure” someone of their gender identity but to alleviate the distress they experience due to societal pressures or physical incongruence."

In other words, bigots like Kent and Zoller are a driving reason trans people seek mental health treatment; the dysphoria isn't something needed to be treated as a mental health condition.

Bloop.

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The ICE raid on the southeast Georgia manufacturing plant was meant to be a use of fear and intimidation aimed at Hispanic people working in construction, but hundreds of South Korean nationals were swept up (without any Korean-speaking ICE officials - which tells you ICE wasn't prepping to take them). So says Dustin Baxter with the Kuck Baxter Law Firm, an Atlanta-based immigration firm. He joined me to discuss.

The "visa waiver" program was the likely channel the temporary guests from South Korea were here under the guise of, but this is just another situation where it is painfully obvious American immigration laws are woefully inadequate for modern needs.