Celebrity Doctor Mehmet Oz, who is running as a Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, is coming under fire in recent days over his soft history with transgender ideology, giving a platform to those advocating for the left’s radical views.
Dr. Oz’s platform largely centers around rebuilding what he describes as “the middle layers of society – institutions like family and community – that have been hollowed out by failed policies, narrow thinking, and toxic culture wars.” However, in recent months, the left has made a significant push to advance radical transgender ideology — even on school children — and Dr. Oz’s history of giving a platform to activists and advocates is now under sharp scrutiny.
Fox News, laying out the concerns, noted that Oz had given a platform to “transgender children, parents who changed their gender identities, and a surgeon who performs transgender surgery, even before Bruce Jenner’s transgender splash in 2015” on his show. That same year, he featured famed transgender teenager and LGBT activist Jazz Jennings, telling his mother, “I love the support you’ve given your daughter. It’s wonderful. And you can see the beautiful young woman she’s becoming because of it.”
Now, Jazz is 21 and admitting to struggling with mental health issues which led to 100 pounds in weight gain. That was not the first time Oz provided transgender activists with a platform, either.
Five years prior, Dr. Oz featured a special on his program titled “Transgender Kids: Too Young to Decide?”:
During the show, Dr. Oz also spoke with pediatrician Dr. Robert Garofalo, who later credited his appearance on the show for enabling a change in his “career path to think more broadly about the transgender health and specifically to the inclusion of children and families.” He reportedly started a transgender clinic, giving minors cross-sex hormones and surgeries, in 2013.
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Dr. Oz also hosted two fathers who “had become moms,” discussed a couple’s sex life, and said it was “wonderful” that a child now called her dad-to-mom “mom-squared.”
Dr. Oz also hosted two segments with Dr. Christine McGinn, a surgeon who performs transgender surgeries and who also identifies as transgender. McGinn discussed how to change male sex organs into female sex organs.
It does not end there, either, as Oz hosted an online series called the “Queer Family Tree,” which featured a discussion on the “importance of pronouns.” While Fox News notes that Oz himself did not appear in the videos, the series was hosted on “Oz Tube.”
Critics mainly point to the fact that Oz did not host critics of the radical transgender movement on his program as he did for those in favor.
However, Dr. Oz’s spokesperson said that he is, indeed, a conservative who “doesn’t believe biological men should play women’s sports” — a major social issue. Yet, when asked about Lia Thomas, the biological male at the University of Pennsylvania who has been smashing women’s records, the candidate said we “have to have compassion” for transgender adults.
“The transgender issue is kind of diluted a little bit,” Oz said at the time:
The suicide rate amongst transgender adults has grown [inaudible]. This is critical to understand. We have to have compassion on this problem. It is a devastating one. And transgender folks who are adults, when they are processing this, have to figure out if they wanna keep living the lie – they don’t think they’re who they are – or be who they truly are and are [inaudible] because of it. So that’s like the baseline.
“But then you layer on top of that changes to our society that hurt other people in an effort to protect one group of people, and that’s not fair. That’s not fair,” he said, adding that “feminists have very eloquently fought for the ability to have women’s sports be on equal [inaudible] as men’s sports, and this takes away that ability.
“I would argue that what I just said can’t be said – I definitely couldn’t have said it on [The Dr. Oz Show] – and you need to be able to say those things,” he claimed. Yet, during the show, Dr. Oz also featured segments with Dr. Christine McGinn, “a surgeon who performs transgender surgeries and who also identifies as transgender,” another example of his tendency to give a platform to transgender activists.
Once again, though, Oz’s spokesperson said the candidate now “does not support a big government takeover of the health insurance industry” and “would not have voted for Obamacare.”
A recent Fox News poll showed businessman David McCormick as the frontrunner in Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary race, leading Oz by nine percentage points.
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