PREMIUM: Planned Parenthood’s Gender Transition - Journalist Jennifer Block explains how it happened.

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the last decade, Planned Parenthood has become one of the country’s leading providers of gender transition hormones for young adults, according to insurance claim data. In August, journalist Jennifer Block published an article in The Free Press entitled “How Did Planned Parenthood Become One of the Country’s Largest Suppliers of Testosterone?” The article follows the story of a teenager who visited her local Planned Parenthood and was fast-tracked into medical transition and then surgery that she almost immediately regretted. In this conversation, Jennifer talks about how this happened, why the public has been slow to realize it, and how to find an intellectual consistency between supporting abortion rights and opposing medicalized gender transition for young people.

GUEST BIO

Jennifer Block is an independent journalist who writes frequently about health, gender, and contested areas of medicine. Her articles and commentary have appeared in The Boston Globe, Romper, The BMJ, The Cut, The New York Times, The Baffler, **and many other outlets. Her 2007 book Pushed, led a wave of attention to the national crisis in maternity care and is a foundational text in university curricula and birth worker training. She’s also the author the 2019 book Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I think the ethos at Planned Parenthood, and in the reproductive health community in general,
0:08.9	you know, I spoke with another clinic director out, you know, not a Planned Parenthood and an independent clinic.
0:13.6	And, you know, she had the attitude that this is about bodily autonomy.
0:19.7	And, you know, if we believe that girls, once they are old enough to get pregnant, are
0:24.8	able to decide that they want to prevent pregnancy, we should also respect the autonomy of
0:32.5	young people to tell us who they are and that they need testosterone or estrogen.
0:40.4	And that seems to be the governing ethos right now.
0:46.4	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down.
0:50.3	If you're a liberal-leaning person who came of age in the post-sexual revolution, post-second
0:56.2	wave feminism era, planned parenthood may be as sacred an American institution as you can think of,
1:03.6	I guess next to NPR, Apple Pie, and, well, NPR. But like many hallowed liberal institutions, Planned Parenthood has been going through
1:12.8	something of an identity crisis in recent years. Much of it centered around its involvement in
1:17.9	medicalized gender transition for young people, including teenagers. This past August, my guest,
1:24.3	Jennifer Block, published an article in the free press entitled, How Did Planned Parenthood
1:29.6	become one of the country's largest suppliers of testosterone? The article followed the story of a teenager
1:36.0	who visited her local Planned Parenthood and was fast-tracked into medical transition and then surgery
1:41.8	that she almost instantly regretted.
1:49.5	According to insurance claim data, in less than a decade, Planned Parenthood became the country's leading provider of gender transition hormones for young adults.
1:53.7	And in this conversation, Jennifer explains just how that happened.
1:58.3	She also joins me in wrestling with the various dimensions of how to square
2:02.7	this with Planned Parenthood's original mission. This is a premium episode. That means that if you are
2:08.7	not yet a paying subscriber, you're going to hear a portion, and then you're going to want to join
	...

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