Journalists love to boast that they are "Facts First" people, that they are the brave souls seeking out "truth." But when it comes to transgenderism, facts go out the window, and truth is triggering.
When the Supreme Court upheld state bans on boys in girls' sports, NBC anchor Craig Melvin sounded apologetic in live coverage. "The terms that we're using here during our reporting, biological male, biological female, the high court put those terms in quotations in their decision and their dissent." They know that referring to boys and girls, those polar opposites, are a highly controversial set of terms.
NBC reporter Kelly O'Donnell lamented President Donald Trump "often sort of boils it down into bumper sticker language, talking about transgender athletes ... It's obviously much more complex."
No. It's not. There are boys, and there are girls. Anyone who can't understand that probably shouldn't be in journalism. They should never assert themselves as "fact-checkers."
Another pro-trans trope is to claim the number of "trans athletes" is a "tiny slice" of competing students. But if you're the girl who loses to a boy at a swim meet or a track meet, it doesn't matter how "rare" it is. The same goes for girls who have been injured in competitions by stronger male interlopers.
On ABC, reporter Devin Dwyer was feeling the pain of "Becky Pepper-Jackson," promoted as "the only known openly transgender student and athlete in the state of West Virginia," who "bravely brought this case to the Supreme Court, insisting that she had an equal right to play with the girls." He mourned "it's certainly a blow to that transgender community and student athletes on this last day of Pride Month."
Dwyer has no sensitivity to girls on the other side of the case. A teammate, Adaleia Cross, claimed in a legal brief that "Becky" sexually harassed her in the locker room with taunts like "Suck my d**k."
Speaking of terminology, the two sides of this argument are the "conservatives" or the "conservative states" versus "trans Americans" or the "transgender community." They can't label the Left, and there are apparently no "liberal states" in America.
Then comes the miasma of terms like "assigned at birth." Assigned by who? God? Well, the term manglers are implying that God can make mistakes. On CNN, anchor Laura Coates explained, "The argument that they were using to support a ban was that there was an unfair advantage provided to those assigned male at birth in women's competition."
Later, Coates repeated it: "Here was the crux of the issue: It was whether or not somebody who was assigned the male gender at birth would be allowed to play in traditionally so-called girls' sports." So reserving a sport for girls is "so-called"? It's only "so-called girls' sports" once you mandate putting boys into it.
She added that women claiming sex discrimination when boys are allowed in is "at the heart of many culture wars." When conservatives object to the long, slow, ideological march of the libertine Left, it's a "culture war." When the LGBTQ army tramples through the culture imposing its unnatural orthodoxies, that's somehow not a "culture war." Their revolution is just an outbreak of "diversity and inclusion."
A New York Times poll question last year (that included the term "athletes who were male at birth") found 79 percent of Americans oppose boys participating in girls' sports. That doesn't stop our crusading media elitists. They think this vast majority is on the "wrong side of history." But they're on the wrong side of facts.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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