Megyn Kelly owes Taylor Swift an apology

Taylor Swift attends the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards on September 11, 2024, in Elmont, New York. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for MTV)

Megyn Kelly, formerly of NBC and Fox News, is enraged that Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president. The global superstar endorsed Harris in an Instagram post on September 10, immediately after the debate between Harris and Donald Trump. Kelly was particularly incensed at the section of the endorsement where Swift praises Harris' selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) as her running mate. Swift wrote:

I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.

I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. 

Kelly responded to Swift's endorsement that evening on YouTube, highlighting Swift's praise for Walz's endorsement of LGBTQ rights:

So this woman is fine with [Walz's] plan to take custody of the children from parents who don't want them to chop off their body parts and put them in Minnesota Court's custody so the body parts can be chopped off and they can be sterilized outside the custody of their parents. That's what led Taylor Swift to endorse her… I'm allowed to criticize Taylor Swift and I don't give a shit who gets upset. This is disgusting. If she wants to vote Harris/Walz she can do it all she wants. But to say the reason she is doing it is because of Tim Walz's on LGBTQ? F you Taylor Swift!... This is unbelievable. The left is losing its mind. 

Kelly reprised the rant during an appearance on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson's live tour on September 13. "Screw you, Taylor Swift," Kelly said. "That is how I want to begin." Kelly then described the purported impact of Tim Walz's LGBTQ policy:

A little girl is going to find herself down a rabbit hole on Reddit. Reddit is going to tell her she is actually a boy and she's going to get sucked into this gender cult. And she's going to say, "Mom and Dad, I want puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones." Which will sterilize her. And they are going to say, "No, you’re a girl." And she's going to say, "I want top surgery." This benign thing. This double mastectomy where I'll have tubes coming out of me and I'll never breastfeed. "I want that too." And they're going to say, "no." And she's going to go to a judge in Minnesota. And because of Tim Walz, the court will take custody of her [and] use the Medicaid funds in Minnesota to provide her all of those things.

If this was accurate, it would be alarming. But while Swift has done her research, Kelly has not. Everything Kelly said about the LGBTQ legislation signed by Walz in 2023 is a lie. 

Minnesota's law does not terminate parental rights — it protects parental rights 

The lynchpin of Kelly's argument is that the Minnesota law signed by Walz allows for the termination of parental rights. The law, however, does the opposite. 

The law protects the rights of parents in Minnesota if another state terminates custody rights for helping their child receive gender-affirming care. This is typically a situation where there is a dispute between two parents about how to care for a child. The law states that court orders “for the removal of a child issued in another state because the child’s parent or guardian assisted the child in receiving gender-affirming care in this state must not be enforced in this state.” The law was enacted around the same time that many nearby states, including North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa, adopted laws limiting access to gender-affirming care.

There is no provision of the law that allows Minnesota courts to terminate parental rights based on a parent's refusal to provide gender-affirming care.

Minnesota's law does not allow the state to take custody of children 

There is also nothing in the law that allows the state to take custody of a child or provide gender-affirming care over the objection of a child's parents. Rather, the law allows for Minnesota courts to exercise “temporary emergency jurisdiction” over a custody dispute that crosses state lines. This means that courts have “the ability to resolve conflicts when parents disagree on whether their child should receive gender-affirming care,” but “it does not remove custody from parents who decline such care,” Kat Rohn, executive director of LGBTQ rights advocacy group OutFront, told the Washington Post. 

The law allows the court to hear these cases, but this does not mean that courts will rule in favor of the parent seeking to help the child obtain gender-affirming care. Instead, the courts will decide based on "evidence about what is in children’s best interests."

There is no scenario under the law in which Minnesota can provide gender-affirming care to a minor over the objection of both parents. 

The truth about gender-affirming care for trans children

Kelly is outraged about something that almost never happens: surgery for trans children. Gender-affirming surgeries for minors almost never occur, and “many health care providers do not offer them to minors.” 

A study done by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that “gender-affirming surgeries are rarely performed for transgender minors.” The study found no cases of surgeries for children 12 and younger in 2019. Among teens, 97% of gender-affirming breast reduction surgeries involved cisgender males.

Kelly's misinformation spreads to Trump and Vance 

Kelly has been spreading lies about Walz’s transgender rights policies since the day Harris selected him to be her running mate. “Tim Walz signed a bill that lets the State take away ur kids if you d/n/agree to sterilize them & chop off their body parts in the name of ‘gender affirming care.’ So if your 14-yr-old is sad but thinks it’s gender confusion & u object to castrating him, the St takes custody,” Kelly posted on X on August 6.

Shortly after her original post, Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH), began amplifying Kelly’s falsehoods. At a campaign event in Montana on August 9, Trump said that Walz signed a law that lets “the state kidnap children to change their gender so that they go home.” 

On August 7, at a campaign event in Wisconsin, Vance said, “I think it’s pretty weird to try to take children away from their parents if the parents don’t want to consent to sex changes. That’s something that Tim Walz did.” Vance repeated the claims in an interview with ABC News on August 11, calling the policy “kidnapping.”