This story originally appeared on The Advocate.
Fox News host Jesse Watters wanted Abdul El-Sayed to account for what happens to transgender children’s bodies. He was less enthusiastic when the Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee asked about his.
During El-Sayed’s appearance Monday on Jesse Watters Primetime, Watters abandoned a discussion about Michigan and demanded, “Sex changes for minors. Do you support that?”
El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official, said politicians should not dictate healthcare decisions that belong to patients, parents and medical providers. “I remember having great conversations with my conservative friends about right-to-try legislation — the idea that the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have,” El-Sayed said.
Watters responded by asking whether El-Sayed thought it was acceptable for a parent to “slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off,” invoking a procedure that is not performed on children.
Related: Rosie O’Donnell tells Jesse Watters to ‘stay out of my orbit’ before roasting Trump on Kimmel
‘Are you circumcised?’
“Do you really want to have this conversation?” El-Sayed asked. “Are you circumcised?”
Watters answered yes, then objected. “That’s a personal question, doctor,” he said.
“So you probably should want to move on,” El-Sayed replied.
Watters insisted circumcision was “different than castration.” El-Sayed said Watters’ objection illustrated the contradiction. “I think it’s a problem that you think that you get to decide what happens between a parent, a doctor and a patient,” El-Sayed said. “And I’m just saying that, yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling.”
El-Sayed’s analogy pointed to an elective surgery performed routinely on infants who cannot consent. Johns Hopkins researchers examined more than 1.5 million U.S. hospitalizations involving boys up to 28 days old and found that the share involving circumcision declined from 54.1 percent in 2012 to 49.3 percent in 2022.
Those figures do not include circumcisions performed after discharge or outside hospitals, including religious ceremonies, meaning the total share of boys who undergo the procedure is higher.
Watters called El-Sayed’s position “sick stuff” and pivoted to transgender athletes. El-Sayed accused him of cycling through culture war subjects instead of asking about groceries, gas prices, healthcare costs and President Donald Trump’s trade policies. “You have not asked me one time about the issues that people actually care about in Michigan,” El-Sayed said.
Related: Jesse Watters warns women should ‘be careful’ around testosterone-boosted troops: ‘wild animals
An argument built on something that does not happen
Gender-affirming surgery is not provided to prepubertal children. Their care, when needed, can include counseling and social support. Medical interventions are considered only later and in accordance with individualized clinical standards.
Surgery among teenagers is extremely rare.
A 2024 study in JAMA Network Open examined insurance records covering nearly 23 million minors. Researchers found no gender-affirming surgeries among children age 12 or younger in 2019. The rate was 0.1 per 100,000 among those ages 13 and 14 and 2.1 per 100,000 among those ages 15 to 17. Of the 85 procedures identified among minors, 82 were chest-related.
Trump is putting the government inside the examination room
The government interference El-Sayed warned about is already becoming federal policy.
As The Advocate has reported, the Trump administration finalized a rule this month cutting off federal Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program funding for gender-affirming care for young people. States may continue paying for it themselves, but the federal government will no longer share the cost.
The administration also proposed excluding hospitals from Medicare and Medicaid if they provided certain care to transgender minors, regardless of how an individual patient paid. The Department of Health and Human Services abandoned that broader proposal after receiving more than 30,000 public comments.
Across the country, the Justice Department has issued more than 20 subpoenas seeking patient information, billing records and communications from hospitals and clinics. Judges blocked some demands, but an appeals court recently allowed the investigation of QueerDoc, a telehealth provider, to resume.
Watters keeps making other people’s bodies his business
Watters continues to say inflammatory things for attention. In July, The Advocate reported that Watters laughed while warning women to “be careful” around testosterone-boosted troops he predicted would become “wild animals.”
Last week, Rosie O’Donnell told him to “stay out of my orbit” after his crew confronted her outside a New York theater.
El-Sayed will face Republican former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers in November in a Michigan race that could help determine control of the Senate.
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