The ACLU defends the ‘right’ of sex offenders to receive state-funded sex changes, and NPR praises a ‘dad’ who gave birth.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recap the worst Pride-Month takes, call attention to a big headline mistake from Time, and cover more media misses.
Media, Activists Show True Colors during ‘Pride Month’
We’re 19 days into “Pride Month,” and activists and the mainstream media have ensured we have no shortage of gender identity–related insanity.
The ACLU led the pack with its tweet about the execution of convicted rapist and murderer Duane Owen and how the state of Florida never provided “necessary gender-affirming care” to Owen, who identified as a transgender woman. As such, the group argued that the state caused Owen to face “enormous suffering” for decades.
Owen was convicted of raping and fatally stabbing a 14-year-old in 1984 and raping and killing a 38-year-old woman that same year. He also allegedly attacked two other women, who survived.
The state of Florida never provided medically necessary gender-affirming care to Duane Owen — causing her enormous suffering and violating her right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment for the more than 30 years she was in state custody. pic.twitter.com/kjmzCrY2uh
— ACLU (@ACLU) June 16, 2023
While the ACLU blames the state of Florida for not providing “gender-affirming” care to Owen, a community note appended to the organization’s tweet noted that Owen’s defense team argued that the rapist suffered from gender dysphoria, but state psychiatrists disagreed.
NPR, meanwhile, opted to use Father’s Day as an opportunity to highlight the story of a transgender man who gave birth to two children after transitioning from female to male.
The story of Kayden Coleman was featured alongside the tale of a military father and an immigrant-refugee parent. Coleman briefly stopped taking hormones in 2013 in order to have a double mastectomy, or “top surgery,” and ended up pregnant.
“A few years later, assuming that he’d been taking hormones long enough to avoid another pregnancy, he found he was expecting again,” the article read. “Today, he is raising two young daughters.”
Coleman said, “I experienced a lot of pushback and discrimination within the medical system based on preconceived ideas of what a pregnant person is supposed to look like.”
“I had to convince a lot of people that I was pregnant and that I wasn’t just a strange man trying to infiltrate the OB-GYN’s office,” Coleman added. “I got offered abortions an astronomical amount of times. I think that comes from the idea that people think that trans people either don’t want to have kids or shouldn’t have kids.”
But Coleman said there are benefits to being a transgender dad: “Being a trans dad means I was assigned female at birth and I was essentially raised to adhere to societal standards of what a girl is supposed to be, how a girl is supposed to act. I think that because of that upbringing, I inherently have a kind of nurturing side. I also have insight into how women are perceived by society.”
The NPR story comes after Glamour U.K.’s June issue sparked backlash for featuring a pregnant transgender man on the cover who posed topless for a photo with the article.
CBS News aired a segment on “Challenges Facing America’s Doctors.” Among those challenges, according to the report, is having to contend with red-state laws limiting or banning gender-transition treatment for minors.
Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, the new president of the American Medical Association, told CBS News that the laws are unethical and unscientific and that they are “criminalizing health care.”
The outlet aired Ehrenfeld’s comments, including that “backseat drivers” are “telling us what to do” on reproductive care and “gender-affirming care,” without mentioning the mounting concerns that medical professionals and parents have about the long-term health consequences of surgeries and hormone treatments, and whether minors can meaningfully consent to the procedures.
“In at least six states now if I practice evidence-based care, I can go to jail. It’s frightening. When a patient shows up in my office, if I do the right thing from a scientific, from an ethical perspective, to know that that care is no longer legal, criminalized, and could wind me in prison,” Ehrenfeld told CBS.
PBS News recently aired an interview with Brown University professor of pediatrics and clinician educator Dr. Michelle Forcier, who likened a child knowing they are transgender to a child feeling like they have an earache.
“If I had a 10-year-old or an 8-year-old who told me their ear hurt, I wouldn’t look at them and say, ‘You’re only 8 or 10, you don’t know if your ear hurts,’ right?” Forcier said. “It’s important that we listen to kids. It doesn’t mean that a kid says, ‘I’m trans,’ and two hours later they get hormones. It means that we respect kids as individuals.”
Meanwhile, ABC News published a completely normal and very real-sounding story about a family who chose to flee Texas over the state’s “anti-LGBTQ” laws. The article includes the story of Susan and her “7-year-old transgender daughter, Elsa, whose parents asked that she be referred to by a pseudonym for safety reasons. . . .”
It continues: “Elsa’s parents describe her as wise beyond her years. She had expressed that she was a girl from an early age and guided her parents through her gender journey — asking to wear dresses, change her name, and to be referred to as a ‘daughter’ by her parents.”
“‘When she was 3, one day, she told me, ‘I’m a girl person,’” Susan said in an interview with ABC News. It was National Daughters Day, ‘and she said, ‘Can I be your daughter?’ — which made me cry.’”
However, the Associated Press emerged as an unlikely beacon of sanity when it issued guidance on the use of the term “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” or “TERF” to describe women who object to the inclusion of transgender women in women’s spaces.
On our updated Transgender Topical Guide: trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
We recommend avoiding the vague and politicized term to describe cisgender women or others who object to the inclusion of transgender women in women’s spaces.https://t.co/HEBdoiEWnM pic.twitter.com/zSet75MbU5— APStylebook (@APStylebook) June 14, 2023
Jezebel did not take kindly to this advice: “Considering that trans people are under siege right now and fighting for their literal right to exist, it’s quite a time to decide you should step up and protect the feelings of the cis women who hate them. So in response to the styleguide dropping its TERFy new rule, the internet, you know, did its thing.”
The article includes several tweets criticizing the AP’s guidance, including one that asked, “what if I chased you around with a shovel.”
The piece concludes by offering an “open letter” to the AP Stylebook: “We will absolutely continue to use the word TERF to describe women who are masquerading as feminists and gay allies while actively oppressing trans people. And we respectfully request that you turn your attention to more pressing issues, like headlines using the passive voice to describe police shootings, the vague and politicized term ‘groomers,’ the deliberate misgendering of LGBTQ people in news stories, and major outlets using terms ‘racially tinged’ and ‘racially charged’ to avoid saying a thing was racist. Thanks!”
Despite the increasing takeover of Pride Month, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed at a “Black Women Lead” conference last week: “We’re in Pride Month, where the LGBTQ+ community is literally under attack. Literally!”
Disgraced former CNN anchor Don Lemon made a similar argument while hosting the Native Son Awards and took an apparent dig at Target’s decision to pull some of its “Pride Month” merchandise from store shelves after receiving backlash from conservatives.
“Some corporations have gone as far as removing Pride gear and decorations from their stores. They pair those actions with some type of empty statement claiming that they still respect our communities,” he said.
He added: “Corporations today should be inspired to act on the side of justice and equality and never concede to the demands of a bigoted minority because actions speak louder than words.”
Lemon went on to decry “book bans” across the country.
“There’s also been an avalanche of book bans attempting to censor stories that center us. So, let’s just be real. These book bans are rooted in anti-Blackness and transphobia and queerphobia,” he said.
It’s worth noting that much of the book-ban rhetoric has centered on Florida, where the idea that books are being banned or censored has been repeatedly debunked. When Governor Ron DeSantis showed some of the materials in question at a press conference earlier this year, several media outlets had to cut their feeds because of the graphic content included therein.
Yet Maryland governor Wes Moore took his own criticism of the so-called book bans one step further, claiming during an interview with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki that the bans are about “castrating” students.
“I continue hearing people making the argument that we’re doing it because we want to prevent our students from having discomfort or guilt because we don’t want our students to be able to really wrestle with these really difficult things in times when they are maturing as individuals,” he said.
He claimed the alleged bans are “about telling other kids that they shouldn’t understand their own power. It’s castrating them.”
Over in Ireland, it’s seemingly okay to ban free speech, if doing so purportedly protects members of the LGBT community.
Lawmakers are weighing the “Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022,” which includes a provision that would allow a person to be imprisoned if they “prepare or possess” material that is “likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics,” including “gender” identity.
Irish Green Party Senator Pauline O’Reilly said the legislation is necessary for the “common good.”
“When one thinks about it, all law and all legislation is about the restriction of freedom. This is exactly what we are doing here,” O’Reilly said. “We are restricting freedom but we are doing it for the common good.”
She continued, “If a person’s views on other people’s identities make their lives unsafe and insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, our job as legislators is to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”
And while Pride Month has activists intensely focused on eradicating alleged homophobia and transphobia, a University of California–San Francisco professor argued that another minority group is in need of protecting: bicycle riders.
“Just as those who tolerate or encourage racist, sexist and homophobic or transphobic comments on social media contribute to emboldening the people who attack and menace particular groups, people who parrot stereotypical comments about cyclists on social media subtly encourage those who would harm them,” Professor Ruth Malone wrote a column in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Ultimately, hate of bicyclists comes from the same place as racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia: a desire to cling to the status quo power arrangements that favor some over others,” she added.
And in the most absurd line of all, Malone wrote, “But just as gay people are no longer willing to stay in the closet, nor women in the kitchen, bicyclists are no longer willing to settle for crumbs in terms of use of our public roadways.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Time magazine published a headline last week that left readers scratching their heads: “How Ukraine’s Dam Collapse Could Become the Country’s ‘Chernobyl.’”
After astute readers noted that Chernobyl was, in fact, Ukraine’s Chernobyl, the magazine updated the article’s title to, “How Ukraine’s Dam Collapse Could Have ‘Generational Consequences.’”
Time learning in the quote tweets that Chernobyl is Ukraine’s Chernobyl pic.twitter.com/pAlR7ZDPyw
— James Felton (@JimMFelton) June 12, 2023
Media Misses
• PolitiFact did the important work of “fact-checking” a comment President Biden made earlier this month that “in the U.S., ‘a person can be married in the morning and thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon.’” The “fact-checker” rated the statement “mostly true.” “In 22 states, gay couples can be legally booted from restaurants. How often that happens is unclear,” PolitiFact reported.
• The Washington Post has taken a far more laid-back approach to covering Hatch Act violations by the Biden administration as compared to violations by the Trump administration. In August 2020 the outlet published, “As Trump appointees flout the Hatch Act, civil servants who get caught get punished.” But this week when it’s about Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, WaPo had a different take: “Biden’s Press Secretary Violated the Hatch Act. And . . .?” “Enforce it? You and what army? And that gets to the crux of the matter. OSC has no power to discipline very senior administration officials who violate the Hatch Act.”
• The Washington Post also brought us a new hit piece on Florida first lady Casey DeSantis, writing that while the governor and his wife “could have the look of a traditional husband and wife” they are actually very “insular” and “private.” The relationship is “an inner circle of two,” the outlet reports, as if that were an unusual description of a marriage.