By David Futrelle
Cis woman are much more likely to survive coronavirus than their male counterparts, and we don’t know why. Could if be differences in lifestyle? (Men are more prone to smoke and less prone to wash their hands.) Or could it be something more basic — like the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone — that offer cis women special protection from the deadly virus?
The New York Times reported yesterday that scientists in New York and California are testing the latter proposition, giving (consenting) male patients with coronavirus doses of estrogen or progesterone to see if this helps them survive. In the giant game of telephone that is the internet, this news quickly turned into “doctors are giving men estrogen to protest them from coronavirus,” as if this had suddenly become some sort of widespread practice.
And the people who are already obsessed with the alleged dangers of estrogen to manly men started to lose their shit.
On 4Chan’s /pol/ board, the news quickly became “Jews are injecting you with estrogen now. They don’t even hide it any more.” One anon charged that
They want [to] trivialize HRT usage, make it a regular medicine and low key put in the mind of people that masculinity is a disease. It’s no coincidence that a jewish woman is behind this.
Responding to a photo of one of the researchers, another anon wrote:
Just look at her fce, she’s a dyke who have been fantasing about feminizing men for a while and this is just an excuse.
On Twitter, meanwhile, assorted conspiracy theorists put forth similar, er, hypotheses.
The timeline is CLEAR: 5G tower test trials in Wuhan lower immune responses which allows Cabalist laboratories to unleash the novel coronavirus to much sucess. The only cure? Estrogen. Wouldn’t be surprised if the stuff was harvested from female adrenochrome-drained blood#Qanon
— Q Jim(@qanonjim) April 27, 2020
You know, Q Jim, I would be surprised if that was the case. Very surprised.
It’s no shock that a Qanon conspiracist has glommed onto this news. I’m just waiting for the incels and MGTOWs to discover the story.
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