We regret to inform you that Katie Couric has a new documentary.
Let’s hope they lawyered it and then some. Couric, you see, is still fighting a $13 million defamation lawsuit over her last documentary. In it, Couric asked a room full of gun rights advocates how terrorists and the criminally insane could be kept from getting guns if federal background checks weren’t required. The advocates met her challenging question with a painfully long patch of befuddled silence. Or at least that’s how the clever editors of the documentary made it appear. In reality—as proved by an audio recording of the interview made surreptitiously by the gun advocates—Couric’s question prompted a swift, cogent, and lively response.
We’ll see whether Couric’s new documentary, this one on gender identity, is any less fake-newsy. The one thing you can’t say is that it isn’t trendy. Appearing on Ellen to promote the film, Couric asserted that the issue is so fundamental that even fetuses can have gender identity problems. “In the later stages of development, it’s when your brain is wired, and sometimes a surge of testosterone can make . . . a female fetus feel as if that baby is male or that person is male,” Couric said. “And the opposite, if there’s not enough testosterone.”
The Scrapbook will leave for another day the question of whether fetuses can feel transgendered. But we will be happy to stipulate that fetuses can feel. Indeed, after abortion advocates have spent decades denying that unborn children can feel something as basic as pain, now we are to believe that fetuses have feelings about something as complicated as gender confusion.
Well, if you say so, Katie, just as long as we don’t have the one without the other. ¨
