Justin's Political Corner

Fox News’ Dr. Keith Ablow is a strong advocate for plastic surgery as a means to improve a person’s self-esteem and self-image, so long as that person isn’t transgender.

During the October 3 edition of Fox & Friends First, co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked Ablow for his thoughts on a viewer who was considering getting plastering surgery for her nose. Ablow, a psychiatristwho is a member of Fox’s “Medical A-Team,” called the woman “nuts” for hesitating to undergo the procedure, adding:

From the 10.03.2012 edition of FNC’s Fox and Friends First:

ABLOW: You know why she’s crazy? Because she hasn’t done it. Look, she’s looking in the mirror for thirty minutes, “I don’t think I like this, that.” Go! Get a plastic surgeon. Take the leap because I wonder what else in this woman’s life she hasn’t been willing to do even though she knows she wants to.

EARHARDT: In your experience, people who get the plastic surgery, are they usually happy with it?

ABLOW: Usually. I mean, I think plastic surgery gets a bad rap because the bottom line is it helps a lot of people feel better about themselves. What’s so terrible? It’s not a terrible thing. Go, get the nose job. 

Ablow’s ardent support for cosmetic plastic surgery is in stark contrast to his stance on transgender people pursuing gender reassignment surgery in order to feel comfortable with their bodies. Last year, he criticized transgender people who “grotesquely amputate” their body parts, writing:

[E]ncouraging the choosing of gender identity, rather than suggesting our children become comfortable with the ones that they got at birth, can throw our species into real psychological turmoil—not to mention crowding operating rooms with procedures to grotesquely amputate body parts[.] Why not make race the next frontier? What would be so wrong with people deciding to tattoo themselves dark brown and claim African-American heritage? Why not bleach the skin of others so they can playact as Caucasians?

Why should we hold dear anything with which we were born? What’s the benefit of non-fiction over fiction? [emphasis added]

Got that? People who don’t like their noses should pursue plastic surgery, but people with intense gender dysphoria – a condition marked by strong desires to be of the other gender – should just learn to deal with it.

h/t: Equality Matters