Scrolling through Instagram, reading and watching tributes to Dolly Parton, I came upon a clip featuring her spiritual and moral opposite: Fox News anchor Jesse Watters. Watters, who made his reputation by mocking Asian people, interviewed Michigan Senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed this week, and trotted out Republicans’ bizarre obsession with trans people, asking Dr. El-Sayed if he, as a physician, “think it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?”
Here’s the exchange:
Opinions vary on how El-Sayed handled this moment. To my mind, he did okay. He didn’t dodge the question, but also acknowledged that it was preposterous. He reframed the issue in terms of whether the government should meddle in family medical decisions — “it’s a problem that you think you get to decide what happens between a parent, a doctor, and a patient” — which is a good way to talk about the issue. And he declined to get self-righteous, instead mocking Watters and asking about his own “ding-a-ling.”
But his performance wasn’t great either. Right-wing media said El-Sayed was equating circumcision with castration, which isn’t true (his point was that private medical matters should be between people and their physicians) but isn’t completely false either. Some outlets depicted the remark as bizarre, apparently or intentionally missing the point of the analogy. Most importantly, to me anyway, El-Sayed didn’t say the most obvious thing about Watters’ question: that it’s a complete lie, and that Watters is a stinking piece of shit for spreading it.
Because, in fact, no one is cutting their kids’ genitals off. That is a pernicious falsehood that right-wing assholes — there is nothing special about Watters here — have used to ban actual medical treatment for trans teenagers, which is overwhelmingly non-surgical and overwhelmingly shown to be of benefit, and to score points against Democrats in elections. It is categorically false.
Watters must know this. He knows he’s lying, and there he is doing it anyway, with his usual idiotic smirk. I’m interested in how people like this live with themselves. I couldn’t do it. You probably couldn’t either. But thousands of extremely important, rich, and influential assholes like Jesse Watters apparently can.
I’m interested in why.
1.
Let’s start with the lies.
First, genital surgery on children is nonexistent. In fact, surgery of any kind on trans kids is extremely, vanishingly rare. In a 2024 study, Harvard public health researchers “found little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender-diverse minors in the U.S.” Among all surgeries — top and bottom — there is a zero rate for kids under 13. For adolescents aged 13-14, the rate among trans kids was .1 for 100,000 – literally one in a million. And for 15-17 year olds, the rate was 2.1 per 100,000. We’re talking about a few dozen kids in the country.
And even that vanishingly small number includes both ‘top’ (breast reduction) and bottom surgery, with the majority being the former. (Another fact: most breast reductions among teenagers are done on non-trans boys who develop breasts due to various medical conditions — i.e., most gender confirmation surgery is for non-trans boys).
In other words, this basically never happens.
Watters has to know this. So do whatever researchers and writers work at Fox News. I’m familiar with this field and with the 2024 study, but I spent a whopping three minutes running a quick search in Claude which confirmed it, cited other studies (which checked out), and concluded that “feminizing genital surgery on AMAB minors specifically is essentially unheard-of in the U.S. surgical literature; almost all [surgery] is chest/top surgery.”
So the claim that parents “slash their kid’s ding-a-ling off” is not a matter of opinion or perspective. It is a pure, stinking lie. Which, despite being easily disproven by five minutes of lazy research, millions of people now appear to believe. And that lie has led, perversely, to the banning of actual transgender medical care, like hormone therapy, and to the placing of thousands of kids at increased risk of suicidality and other mental health conditions. It has also persuaded many voters that Democrats are too focused on transgender kids and sports, rather than kitchen table issues like inflation. In fact, Democrats almost never talk about transgender issues except when asked by people like Watters.
Lie upon lie upon lie.
2.
Now, maybe all is fair in love, war, and politics. Republicans and conservatives are trying to win elections, and so they’ll do whatever they can to do so. As Watters said in the interview, “Michigan’s not going for that. That is sick stuff.” That part, at least, is true.
But is this really politics as usual? And is there any left-wing equivalent of this? Or is this, rather, a hideous and asymmetrical cynicism that has no parallel?
In the 2024 election cycle, Republicans spent $215 million on anti-trans television ads, often based on the same kids of lies and distortions. I defy anyone to find any equivalent of this on the left, whether among politicians or journalists. Just as there is no Democratic equivalent of the Big Lie about the 2020 and 2024 elections, there is no Democratic or progressive media equivalent of these massive lies about transgender people.
So, no, this isn’t just politics. This is a particularly venal, nasty, rage-baiting right-wing politics with no equivalent on the other side. As with Trump’s lies about immigration, the cruelty and vulgarity is the point. There is no both-sidesing this kind of rhetoric, Hasan Piker notwithstanding.
And of course, the lies are not mere words. The Trump administration has designated trans people as domestic terrorists, attempted to get lists of everyone who has received gender-related medical care, and tried (until stopped by courts) to withhold Medicaid funds from any hospital that provides it. Apart from immigrants, trans people are arguably the single most vilified minority (vilified by this administration, that is) in America. I find it terrifying, both as someone with several trans friends and, honestly, as a Jew.
Now, I am both idealistic and cynical: idealistic in the sense that I think it’s vitally important for Democrats to win elections, and cynical in the sense that I’ll support just about anything that helps them to do so. Back in the rosy Obama years, I publicly disagreed with Michelle Obama that “when they go low, we go high.” (I assume she never read what I wrote, but years later, I learned that her speechwriter did.) I don’t think that strategy worked then, and I don’t think it works now. Progressives have to fight to win, just as nationalists do, and sometimes that means fighting dirty.
But I cannot conceive of a cynicism so great as to allow this kind of persecution and deceit. We’re talking about vulnerable kids who can’t get life-saving medical care because people like Jesse Watters lie about what trans medical care actually is. That is not the same as a few sharp insults (which El-Sayed made quite well) or opportunistic attacks. It is truly evil, a word I do not use lightly. What other word describes knowingly lying in a way that harms innocent people and enflames rage against them?
What motivates people like Watters?
The most charitable explanation I can give is that they believe that they are fighting for the soul of America, and they will do anything they can to save it. So, sure, maybe it’s a fib that parents are cutting their kids’ ding-a-lings off, but threats to traditional concepts of gender are real, and so it’s fair game to exaggerate to try to win the war.
Or maybe the battle is even broader, between America as conceived of by right-wing nationalism and America as conceived of by liberals like me. Those are two radically different concepts, as I’ve written about in these pages before, and if there is indeed an existential battle between the two, maybe a few lies about trans people are justified. Whatever it takes to save America, in this view, is justified.
Or, who knows, maybe it’s all about the Benjamins. Jesse Watters reportedly makes $5 million a year; maybe he really is just cashing in. We saw in the Dominion court cases that Fox News suffers from audience capture; they have to give their fans the red-meat ragebait that they want, or the fans will go elsewhere. So there is constant pressure, we learned in the lawsuit, not to be out-ragebaited. If OAN or Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens is pissing people off more, Fox News loses viewers.
Or maybe lots of white Republican men are just obsessed with penises. I really have no idea.
Now, unlike some of my fellow progressives, I think it is reasonable for people to have concerns about the increased rate of gender dysphoria diagnoses, the long-term effects of hormone replacement therapy, and the ways in which gender issues have become interwoven with mandated ideological conformity. I think it’s fine to critique all of that. And while medical decisions are ultimately matters that, as El-Sayed said, are between teenagers, their parents, and their doctors, still, public health policy does exist, and it’s appropriate for reasonable, science-based conversations to be held about it.
But that is not the discourse we have, neither from the right nor from supposedly rational centrists on trans issues. Professional hysterics like Abigail Shrier and Jesse Singal endlessly distort the issue, inventing fake terms (like ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,’ which only anti-trans people think is a thing), exaggerating data (like that of ‘de-transitioners’), and, ultimately, simply denying that gender dysphoria is a thing and that trans people actually exist. As I’ve written many times before, I often wonder if these people have ever sat down and talked with a trans person. Because the people and phenomena they are describing have nothing to do with reality.
So maybe this isn’t even about left and right anymore. Maybe it’s about a shift in political ethics and moral temperament to a cortisol-rich cocktail of fear, rage, and deception. Maybe it’s about whether we choose to be cruel or kind.
3.
Of course, it was a coincidence that Watters popped up in my feed at the same time as the Dolly Parton news. But the juxtaposition still caused me to reflect.
Often, divisions in America are ascribed to societal or demographic factors: red state/blue state, country/city, uneducated/educated, religious/secular. But Dolly was as country as they come. Famously born in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, she rose to the top of the country music world and then the pop world as well. If geography and culture were destiny, she should’ve turned out right-wing, MAGA, and anti-everything.
But as is well known, she was the opposite. Dolly was a champion of love, inclusion, and tolerance for diversity, including gay and trans people. In 2016, when North Carolina was debating its “bathroom bill” she said that
I think everybody should be treated with respect. I don’t judge people, and I try not to get too caught up in the controversy of things. I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are. I just know if I have to pee, I’m going to pee. I don’t care where it’s going to be.
And in 2017, she told Larry King:
We’re all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who you are… If you’re the fine Christian that you think you are, why are you judging people? That’s God’s job. We’re not God, we’re not judges, we’re supposed to love one another, we’re supposed to not judge, we’re not supposed to take vengeance on other people. That’s God’s job. I’ve got to much work to do to try and do God’s work.
Here’s the video of that interview, which offers a remarkable contrast with Watters:
Dolly Parton’s life and values belie the claim that the divisions in America are between country and city or religious and secular; on the contrary, notice how she frames her values in explicitly religious terms. (“Judge not lest ye be judged” said Christ in the Sermon on the Mount.) I think the real divisions in America are between people who pause, think, and feel empathy for others, and people like Jesse Watters who exploit fear, tell people lies, and fan the flames of hate. There are good people on all sides of our political and cultural divides — and there are bad ones too.
Jesse Watters does not get a pass because he speaks for the ‘real America.’ He does not. He’s a multi-millionaire television personality with a team of writers, producers, and handlers around him. He knows that he is lying, and just keeps on lying. And again, he’s not special in this regard; the same lies he is telling circulate all over the Right, which has convinced millions of Americans that trans women are sexual predators and the parents of trans kids (including many friends of mine) are castrating their sons because of social contagion. None of this is about real patriotism or the “real America.” It’s about weaponizing those things for the benefit of rich motherfuckers so they can get richer and richer and richer by conning hard-working Americans into believing that someone else is their enemy.
Dolly Parton was the real America: country as heck and committed to ‘live and let live’ and to understanding people as they really are and helping all of us “to be how you are and who you are.” She almost made it seem obvious. God bless her and the version of America which she represented.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to my paid subscribers for enabling this work to exist. Here’s some stuff I’ve been reading lately:
A bit out of the box, but I was fascinated by this JP Morgan report on climate tipping points, which shows quite clearly that Big Capital knows exactly what is happening to the Earth’s climate and is already taking it into account.
The biggest story of 2026 may be how much election interference Donald Trump will get away with. This comprehensive tracker from the New York Times is an indispensable resource in understanding it.
Not the biggest story of 2026 but a highly weird one is the tale of Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s biggest young, blond fangirl. Michelangelo Signorile did an excellent summary of it.
Of the many wonderful encomia to Dolly Parton I’ll highlight this one by John Pavlovitz which includes the line “She was a vaccine-supporting, nature-preserving, book-loving, trans-defending gay icon, and nearly everything she stood for flies fully in the face of the cruel, sneering, exclusionary narcissism of [MAGA’s] vile, bloviating, spray-tanned messiah and his hateful movement, which you so joyfully partner in.”
Here is some optimistic 2026 election analysis.
See you next week.
good work!
Nailed it Jay. Fantastic piece.
Good luck