Fox News host Jesse Watters wanted Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to answer for what happens to transgender kids' bodies. He liked it much less when El-Sayed asked about his own.

A culture-war question boomerangs

El-Sayed, a physician and former Michigan health director now running for the U.S. Senate, was midway through a discussion about his home state when Watters abruptly pivoted. "Sex changes for minors. Do you support that?" he asked. El-Sayed responded that the government shouldn't be inserting itself between patients, parents and doctors, comparing it to conservative arguments for right-to-try laws. Watters escalated, asking whether it was acceptable for a parent to let a doctor "slash his kid's ding-a-ling off," describing a procedure that, as El-Sayed noted, does not happen to children.

Rather than let the framing stand, El-Sayed asked Watters directly whether he was circumcised. Watters admitted he was, then immediately objected that it was "a personal question." El-Sayed's reply landed the point: if the question felt too invasive for Watters' own body, maybe he understood why parents and doctors, not politicians, should be making calls about surgery on children.

Are you circumcised?
Abdul El-Sayed

Watters insisted circumcision was "different than castration" and called El-Sayed's position "sick stuff" before pivoting again, this time to transgender athletes. El-Sayed pushed back on the whiplash of subjects. "You have not asked me one time about the issues that people actually care about in Michigan," he said, listing gas prices, groceries, health care costs and Trump's trade policy. When Watters tried to pin him down on "men in women's sports," El-Sayed said decisions about sports eligibility belong to the governing bodies that run sports, not the federal government.

The surgery that doesn't happen

El-Sayed's circumcision comparison pointed at something real: it's an elective, largely irreversible procedure performed on infants who cannot consent, and it remains common. What Watters was actually describing, gender-affirming surgery for minors, is close to the opposite of common. Major medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, say care for younger kids typically means counseling and social support, with medical intervention considered only later under individualized clinical review.

That same JAMA Network Open study found surgery rates of just 0.1 per 100,000 among 13- and 14-year-olds and 2.1 per 100,000 among 15- to 17-year-olds, with the vast majority being chest-related procedures. The evidence base for youth gender-affirming care overall is still debated among researchers, and more than 20 states have already banned puberty blockers and hormones for minors. But the specific scenario Watters kept invoking, surgical alteration of young children, simply isn't happening at any meaningful scale.

That hasn't stopped the federal government from acting as though it is. The Trump administration finalized a rule this month cutting off Medicaid and CHIP funding for gender-affirming care for young people, and the Justice Department has issued more than 20 subpoenas to hospitals and clinics for patient records, part of an investigation that recently got a green light from an appeals court to continue against telehealth provider QueerDoc.

MQ's Take

Watters didn't get baited into an awkward moment, he built the trap himself. He wanted a debate about other people's children that he could control, and instead got a physician who actually treats patients asking him to sit in the discomfort he was so eager to hand out. That discomfort is the entire point: politicians who want veto power over medical decisions rarely want the same scrutiny applied to their own bodies or choices.

El-Sayed's frustration also tracked with something bigger than one segment. Fox News has spent weeks fixated on trans athletes in the WNBA and beyond, even as its own hosts have occasionally admitted the coverage has gotten excessive. Meanwhile, actual Michigan voters are dealing with grocery bills, gas prices and a trade war. El-Sayed will face Republican former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers in November in a race that could help decide control of the Senate. How much airtime that contest gets versus how much gets spent litigating imaginary surgeries on children is, itself, a story worth watching.

Sources: them., LGBTQ Nation

Cover photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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