An article about a 14-year-old German transsexual going on hormone therapy to postpone puberty until she can undergo genital reassignment surgery, prompted much shrieking from the far-right Concerned Women of America, who blogger Autumn Sandeen thinks are the ones who’ve really got identity issues:

I love satire–it makes me smile. That’s why I have always been a big fan of the Concerned Women of America (CWA), which I suspect more and more might be a creation of the true geniuses at The Onion Magazine, who snarkfully proclaim themselves “America’s Finest News Source.” I think CWA may be America’s Finest Views Source.

These CWA folks on more than about six million occasions have written very concerned (and womanly and American) sounding screeds abut transgender people in which they inevitably use the word “confusion”–usually in the context of “gender confusion.” The brilliance therein is that the spokesperson for the CWA is almost always not a woman and therefore probably not a concerned woman of America, although maybe, I suppose, a confused woman of America.

Thankfully yesterday, the group tipped its hand, presumably because we were too confused to get the joke they were so anxiously playing on us all. Sure they went a little over the top, but now we at least see the joke.

They start a press release (and remember the “of America” part of their name) with the words “a 14 year-old German boy.” Apparently, somewhere in the Germany part of America, a fourteen year-old, in consultation with parents and doctors, has opted for medical treatment that said parents and doctors believe is appropriate for that person. I don’t know the particular case, so I am unwilling to pass judgment on the diagnosis or treatment, although I too am concerned and a woman and of America.

The best part for me about the story is that in this case the spokeswoman for CWA is a not gender-confused concerned woman named “Matt Barber”–which I hope is not some sort of tacky homosexual euphemism I don’t know about.

Thank you, CWA. Now I get it. You are not women, you are not of America and you are not concerned–except maybe about other people’s medical treatment and raising money for your hatemongering.


As Betty said: snark does not always connote pithy, meaningless statements. Sometimes it grabs the jugular and doesn’t let go. Snark away Autumn….