Dr. Keith Ablow


Fox News published one of the most over the top and poisonously transphobic articles I have ever read this week.

Commenting on the decision of Chaz (formerly Chastity) Bono's decision to compete on the forthcoming ABC series of Dancing With The Stars, the cable news station published a five alarm freak out article by a Dr. Keith Ablow that evidences infinitely more ignorance than insight.

'Millions of young people who do watch Dancing with the Stars will have to ponder this question,' Ablow wrote, 'Maybe my problems really stem from the fact that I’m a girl inside a boy’s body (or a boy inside a girls body). Maybe I’m not a tomboy; I’m just a boy! Maybe I’m not just being bullied because I’m a sensitive, reflective young man interested in flowers, not football. Maybe I’m not just uncertain about my sexuality. Maybe I’m a girl!'

It's quite breathtaking to observe a so-called psychiatrist allow himself to be consumed by this much hysteria without checking himself. As well as being a titanic drama queen, Dr. Ablow seems to have abjured his professional training.

One does not become a monk having witnessed one; one does not become a pilot from passing one on the airport concourse - and one does not become transgendered from having watched one on TV.

I mean to say, what kind of psychiatrist would make so many baseless value judgements in one paragraph?

Why, thoughts are very dangerous, Ablow implies - and they ought to be controlled, see. Otherwise anything could, yanno, happen. To Ablow the prospect of watching Chaz Bono on television could lead to the breakdown of his own sexual identity, apparently. After that American democracy itself will likely collapse.

For God's sake, is there no end to religious right's bigotry, this time wrapping itself up in a veneer of bogus medical 'theory?'

FoxNews.com posted and then quietly removed Ablow's utterly disgraceful piece on Chaz Bono yesterday. Presumably Fox is starting to realize that giving a forum to this kind of viciously hateful vitriol could affect its relationships with its own advertisers and the general public - whose heads don't in fact explode at the prospect of someone who isn't a white conservative Christian.