Misgendering is the real COVID crisis

If it’s true that coronavirus is less likely to kill people with high levels of testosterone, Dr Rachel Levine — the Secretary of Health for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania — may be in luck.

Dr Levine, who is leading the state’s response to the coronavirus epidemic, asked local radio host Marty Griffin to stop misgendering her after he accidentally called her ‘sir’ several times during a press call on Tuesday. ‘It’s really insulting,’ Levine added, prompting Griffin to apologize and insist it was not ‘malicious’. But it was too late — the leftist mob was already on its way to claim Griffin’s head.

Griffin begged for forgiveness on Twitter: ‘I apologize. I apologized twice. I truly did. It was not intentional. It was not. I was not focused. I was doing six things at once.’

Sorry doesn’t cut it, Marty. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto canceled an interview with Griffin’s station, KDKA-AM, later that day, saying that he would ‘not support [their] behavior’.

Unfortunately, Griffin’s error has distracted from the fact that Levine is facing real scrutiny for her leadership on COVID-19 for several reasons. For one, Levine is not an infectious disease expert; Levine’s ‘medical’ background is in pediatrics and psychiatry. For another, Levine moved her mother out of a nursing home and into a hotel, even as other COVID-positive patients were forced back into nursing homes. The majority of Pennsylvania coronavirus deaths, by the way, have occured in senior care facilities.

In spite of the nursing home misstep, countless are rising to Levine’s defense over the brutal misgendering she suffered at the hands of Griffin. Over the past few days, a sea of virtue signalers have been tweeting ‘#RespectforRachel’, while members of a Facebook page named ‘Dr Rachel Levine – We Love You’ call Levine ‘our sweet angel on earth’ and ‘Pennsylvania’s calming mother’.

One particularly egregious column by Julia Terruso of the Philadelphia Inquirer entitled ‘Pennsylvania’s Health Secretary Rachel Levine fights hate, fear, and the coronavirus’ lauded Levine for calmly announcing death toll statistics with ‘an instructional, sing-song-lilt’. Based on that description, Marvel might as well announce Levine’s debut superhero flick.

As Levine is now one of the most prominent transgender politicians in the nation, an abundance of articles and opinion pieces have been surfacing about ‘hate speech’ directed toward Levine. Forget the additional three million Americans who filed for unemployment this week and the nearly 90,000 dead in the United States alone — America just needs to be talking about pronouns again.

It appears that many others on the left are likewise blindly focused on their own agenda rather than addressing the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this week, House Democrats unveiled the $3 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act which, if passed, would beat out the CARES Act for the largest stimulus bill in American history. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell labeled the legislation ‘a totally unserious effort’, saying that House Democrats had cobbled together ‘a seasonal catalog of left-wing oddities and called it a coronavirus relief bill’.

In addition to cash stimulus payments and expanded unemployment insurance, the HEROES Act proposes several items that cannot conceivably have to do with coronavirus, such as $5 million for Congress to get some swanky new laptops and a provision that would let cannabis businesses — and perhaps drug cartels — access traditional banking systems. As a result, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and others noticed that the bill mentions the word ‘cannabis’ more than the word ‘jobs’. Cockburn realized at this point that he would likely need a hit of the green stuff in his pipe to get through the rest of the 1,800-page bill.

As Nancy Antoinette and other Democratic legislators sit at home writing bills that only a person high as a kite could feasibly support, and as their disciples attack local radio hosts on Twitter for not being woke enough, it is clear they have severely misplaced their priorities during this crisis.