March 11, 2015
Fox News Faux Psychiatrist Blasts Planet Fitness for Pro-Trans Policy
EDGE READ TIME: 2 MIN.
Knock Knock
Who's There?
Ablow
Ablow who?
Ah blow yourself!
While discount health club chain Planet Fitness was lauded by many this week for booting a transgender judging gym member, conservative morning mouthpiece Elisabeth Hasselbeck and the "intelligentsia" at Fox News have a decidedly different take on the situation, Media Matters reports.
On the March 10 edition of "Fox & Friends" in a segment titled "Legal Insanity," host Hasselbeck invited discredited psychiatrist and frequent Fox News contributor Dr. Keith Ablow to discuss the case of a Yvette Cormier, a Michigan woman whose Planet Fitness membership was revoked when she complained of seeing Carlotta Sklodowska, a transwoman, use the women's locker room.
The segment began with Hasselbeck referring to Sklodowska as a "man" before turning the focus over to Ablow who repeated his war cry that regular folk are "being bullied into accepting things that are untrue to our core feelings."
"It's tough to speak about because we're so politically correct now that we get tongue tied. We can't say the obvious, which is this is craziness," Ablow said. "You're kicking out members because they feel uncomfortable that someone who seems to be a man to them and is genetically is looking at them naked when they're unclothed as women? That's craziness."
Used persistently by the conservative 24-hour news network, Ablow has made numerous transphobic statements.
Wikipedia notes that in April 2011 Ablow wrote a health column for FoxNews.com, which criticized designer Jenna Lyons for publishing an advertisement in the J. Crew catalogue in which she was depicted painting her young son's toenails hot pink. Ablow wrote gender distinctions are "part of the magnificent synergy that creates and sustains the human race."
Dr. Ablow has not been a member of the American Psychiatric Association since he "resigned in protest" and was referred to in recent AP article as "a narcissistic self-promoter of limited and dubious expertise." by Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University.
