It is sad in the extreme to read a letter from a local resident confidently lecturing a board-certified OB/GYN after watching a viral clip rather than the hearing it came from.

In Michael A. Glass’s letter, “Medical professionals shouldn’t need a biology lesson” from Jan. 29, he claims a medical professional “could not answer yes or no” when asked whether a man can have a baby. The physician in question is Dr. Nisha Verma, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist who works with Physicians for Reproductive Health and serves as a senior advisor on reproductive health policy for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

What Mr. Glass omits is what actually happened.

During a Jan. 14, 2026 U.S. Senate HELP Committee hearing on the safety and regulation of medication abortion, Sen. Josh Hawley repeatedly pressed Dr. Verma with variations of that question, despite it being irrelevant to the purpose of the hearing.

Dr. Verma’s response was not confusion. It was restraint.

“I’m not really sure what the goal of the question is,” she said, before explaining that she treats patients with many identities and complex medical realities, and that polarized language and bad-faith questions do not serve patient care. The hearing was broadcast live on C-SPAN and remains publicly available.

That is not a failure of science. It is a physician refusing to participate in a performative culture-war stunt during a congressional hearing.

Mr. Glass urges us to keep this “sixth-grade simple,” so let’s do exactly that.

Sixth-grade simple means understanding that medicine deals with real patients, not political hypotheticals. Transgender men and some nonbinary people retain the biological capacity for pregnancy. Physicians acknowledging this are not denying chromosomes or rewriting biology. They are describing clinical reality.

Sixth-grade simple also means recognizing bait when it is dangled. Sen. Hawley wanted a viral moment. He got one. Mr. Glass repeated it here.

The irony is hard to miss. A letter titled “Medical professionals shouldn’t need a biology lesson” ends up demonstrating that watching a clipped outrage video is not a substitute for understanding medicine, ethics, or context. Declining to answer a bad-faith question is not ignorance. Treating a political stunt as scientific evidence is.

If this community is going to debate serious issues, we can do better than recycling faux culture-war scripts designed for social media engagement and pretending they represent concern for science.

Perhaps it is time we start talking about issues that actually affect people here: the cost of living in the Upper Peninsula, affordable housing, rising utility bills and the ongoing loss of rural health care services.