Topic: WorldNetDaily
A few years back, we documented how CNSNews.com believed that federal money going to pay for research on LGBT Americans was a waste of money. It looks like WorldNetDaily has decided to feel that bigoted sentiment as well.
Alicia Powe grumbles in a Sept. 26 WND article:
Despite President Trump’s reversal of Obama-era policies on transgenderism, his administration still is spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on transgenderism research, the government watchdog Judicial Watch warns.
[...]
Yet, the Trump administration is allocating hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to research how “non-conforming” transgender people cope with the stress of being “minorities,” according to a U.S. government grant announcement.
The federal government is providing $200,000 to the National Institutes of Health to examine children and adults who are transitioning from one gender to the other.
[...]
Judicial Watch investigater Irene Garcia asserts that the Trump administration is spending just as wastefully as his Democratic predecessor.
“This just seems to be government overreach. This is the kind of thing we saw a lot of under the Obama administration, and of course many were hopeful would stop under Trump. Clearly it isn’t. This is $200,000 allocated to this. And the wording in the grant speaks for itself,” Garcia told WND Tuesday.
“Government programs with this much money and very little oversight – there’s going to be waste, there’s going to be fraud and Judicial Watch tries to expose that,” she said.
Powe uncritically repeated assertions by Judicial Watch's Garcia that the money will be wasted because it involves transgenders, as well as her ignorant views of what being transgender is:
The language used in the grant is ambiguous, Garcia explained, making the funding allocated to the research likely to be abused and frivolously spent.
“If you look at the way the grant announcement is written, it’s difficult to kind of justify it. It talks about individuals who ‘may’ transition. It identifies them as individuals whose gender identity differs from the sex on their original birth certificate or whose gender expression varies significantly,” she said.
“What if I said, I don’t want to be a woman anymore, I want to be a rock? Are we going to allocate taxpayer dollars to research women born as women on their birth certificates, but identify as a rock? Where do we draw the line?
“The government could spend the money on something more productive, and we will see, because we are going to follow through and see what this research leads to – what these $200,000 of these taxpayers’ money is going to buy us. That means usually more money is coming,” she said. “We’ll monitor this."
Garcis does not name any instance in which a person suddenly decided he or she wanted to be a rock.
As usual with such WND stories, Powe can't be bothered to report the other side. At no point does she indicate she talked to anyone at the NIH for their views on the grant. Powe's goal here was to help Judicial Watch ignorantly bash transgenders for no real purpose other than historical right-wing animus toward them.
