Some publications are upset that NR’s Caroline Downey committed the offense of reporting the facts about a male convicted murderer housed in a women’s prison.
On Saturday, the publication LGBTQ Nation published an article titled “Prison forces trans woman into solitary confinement at a men’s facility,” reporting that a “transgender woman” was removed from the Washington Corrections Center for Women and transferred to the men’s facility, Monroe Correctional Complex, thereby “marking the first time a trans person was removed from gender-affirming housing by the department.” About halfway through the article, the following paragraph appears:
At Monroe Correctional Complex, Kim was put into solitary confinement, for allegedly “refusing transfer.” In March, she became the subject of a transphobic National Review article that revealed she had engaged in sexual relations with another inmate, a common occurrence but a violation of the Department of Corrections’ (DOC) rules. The article misgendered and deadnamed her, and resulted in an investigation into the leak since the DOC views gender identity as confidential information.
The Huffington Post similarly covered the prison transfer and included this:
In March, the National Review published an inflammatory story about a leaked disciplinary report describing Kim having sex with another woman. The story, which deadnamed and misgendered Kim, included no allegations of assault or non-consensual activity, but suggested that transgender women are “male inmates who identified as women” to sexually exploit incarcerated women.
The “transphobic National Review article” and “inflammatory story” in question is Caroline Downey’s report that Bryan Kim, a male felon who now goes by “Amber Kim,” was caught having sex with a female inmate at a (formerly) female-only prison in Washington State, where he was transferred in 2021 under the state Department of Corrections’ gender-inclusion policy. A document Caroline obtained stated “I/I [Incarcerated Individual] Kim’s hands were on I/I Nerton’s buttox in a spread open position while I/I Kim’s erect penis was penetrating I/I Nerton’s Vagina.”
Is it transphobic to report that the erect penis involved in a penetrating sex act belonged to a male, as all penises do? Is it transphobic to refer to a male as a male? Is it inflammatory to “deadname” by using the name under which a felon was convicted? Is it inflammatory to cite cases where male inmates who self-identify as women sexually exploited female inmates? The left-wing media, eschewing any commitment to truth, answers emphatically and without hesitation: Yes.
In the LGBTQ Nation and Huffington Post articles condemning National Review for “misgendering” and “deadnaming,” nowhere are Kim’s crimes mentioned. At age 19, Kim was found guilty of murdering his parents and sentenced to life in prison. Kim stabbed his father and bludgeoned and strangled his mother. Kim was also found guilty of second-degree possession of stolen property and second-degree theft for stealing $1,000 from his father. Prosecutor Jack Driscoll told the jury that Kim killed his parents because they had been charging him $1,000 for rent and were about to evict him, adding that “Bryan Kim knew exactly what he was doing and why.” (Instead of mentioning this information, the Huffington Post story claims that “trans people face disproportionate rates of incarceration” and that “many prisons . . . attract conservative staffers with transphobic views.” The article includes a link to its 2023 profile of Kim that focuses on “the brutal struggle for trans care in prison.”)
The media has a standard: Criticize conservative writers who commit imaginary offenses when accurately reporting facts, and ignore the actual crimes of murderers who have achieved infallibility by claiming to be “transgender.”