How The News Makes You Hate Trans People
On 3 types of anti-trans media bias.
Real quick up top: you can now sign up for my summer course on plastics! This course is worth actual college credit and will teach you everything you need to know about how plastics are made, what makes them unrecyclable, and what we can do about it. You don’t even need to be a current Five College student to take it! Learn more about how to enroll here and check out the course syllabus on my website. Thanks!
I know I haven’t posted about STEM education in a while, but hey, it’s Pride Month, so you’re gonna have to deal with it. Love you!! <3
We’re halfway through Pride Month and have already seen several note-worthy attacks on trans people in the media, including outright false information being spread about us. News outlets are rarely sympathetic to pro-trans causes, and even many liberal-leaning sources such as the New York Times repeatedly promote anti-trans talking points, making it difficult for the average person to know what to believe about trans people and what we’re fighting for.
We all know that media outlets are biased, but what exactly does it mean for a news outlet to be biased? What sorts of things should you, the savvy media consumer, look out for when reading news about trans people?
This week, I want to return to a pre-print article about media bias that I wrote about half a year ago. The paper is primarily about the media biases of CNN and Fox News, as well as how people change their views when exposed to different information. The highly-encouraging finding was that Fox News viewers did change their mind about topics ranging from COVID-19 to mail-in voting to climate change after changing their media diets from Fox News to CNN. Pretty neat stuff!
But why did that work, and how can we be more critical of the media we consume so we can keep ourselves as informed as possible? The paper specifically looked at three major types of media bias, which are summarized below: agenda setting, framing, and partisan coverage filtering. There are obviously many types of media bias, but I’ll just be focusing on these three and some accompanying news articles related to transgender issues. To help, I’ll also be taking advantage of Ground News, an app designed to show the political leanings of various news articles (which I also wrote about previously).
First up is agenda setting, the practice of talking about one subject disproportionately to others. For example, when conservative news outlets discuss culture war issues more frequently than bread-and-butter issues like the economy, it’s only natural that their viewers end up feeling like they matter far more than they do.
We saw a stark example of this in the days leading up to Pride Month, with the concurrent news stories of Target pulling their Pride Collection after threats to workers and a high-profile Catholic sex abuse scandal. Reportedly, between May 23rd and May 31st, 2023, Fox News spent a combined two hours discussing fun rainbow shirts and twenty-two seconds covering the alleged grooming carried out by clergy members in Illinois.
Trans people often joke that “conservatives are obsessed with us”, and it’s not hard to see why. From pundits like Jordan Peterson and Matt Walsh to actual sitting politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, there are political figures who’ve essentially built their entire careers on hating trans people. It’s quite the popular industry, which is to say, there is a huge market for it. But much in the same way that nobody wanted a smart phone until the companies that sold them successfully convinced us that we needed them (ca. the iPhone’s launch by Apple in 2006), the market for transphobic news had to get created at some point.
This excellent video by lawyer Leeja Miller provides an excellent breakdown of where modern transphobia “came from”, but suffice it to say, this is all repackaged homophobia from ages ago, which itself was repackaged fear-mongering of other marginalized groups throughout history. Here’s my personal interpretation, which you are free to take or leave: conservatives have no solutions to the world’s problems. They are running on the deeply-unpopular platform of cutting social services and taking people’s rights away. The only way they stay in power is by fabricating a villain, a scapegoat, a perceived source of society’s problems (trans people, immigrants, BLM protestors, etc.) so that they can activate their voting base (largely rural white Americans) who are too bigoted to notice that they’re being screwed over too.
Another form of media bias is framing, the practice of choosing one’s words to get viewers to think about a topic in a different way. Since it’s physically impossible to provide raw data about world events to media consumers (say, in the form of 1s and 0s), framing is perhaps the biggest contributor to media bias. Luckily, if you’re media-literate enough, you can basically tell right away what views are being portrayed in an article or news segment based on the language being used.
In the modern media landscape, terms like “gender affirming care”, “gender confirmation surgery”, and “hormone replacement therapy”—terms that are scientifically accurate and emblematic of the idea that transition care is a legitimate form of health care—become “sex changes”, “damage”, or even “mutilation”—visceral, permanent, terrifying. Partisan framing allows the same questions to be asked in ways that lead people to different conclusions, such as “should trans girls be allowed in girl’s sports?” versus “should biological males be allowed in girl’s sports?” Think of the phrase “gender ideology”, which itself implies that a) trans people all share some consistent worldview (we do not) and b) that this worldview (an “ideology”) runs counter to common sense, that it’s a position to be defended against the default, the things that normal people believe, so that the burden of proof is on trans people to defend their existence, not on society at large for rejecting us. Even the liberal New York Times features headlines such as “Parents and Schools Clash on Gender Identity” (rather than “Transphobic Parents Upset At School Policies Designed To Protect Their Kids”). Children’s lives become abstracted into battlegrounds for political warfare, and parents everywhere are assured that they’re not the problem, no need to change or think critically, it’s “wokeness in schools” that’s the real issue.
Most interesting to me is the framing of “Trans Activists” or “The Trans Lobby”. Trans people, as a group, are largely suffering right now; tens of thousands of us are fleeing our homes due to lack of safety, many more have set up GoFundMe pages in a desperate attempt to secure housing or health care, and even those of us in blue states still face discrimination in employment, housing, and more. In fact, conservative groups are the ones with near-infinite resources to influence state and national policy. But if you hear them tell it, it’s us trans folks who have our finger on the scales of culture, and grassroots Republican groups who are “fighting back” against the mega-powerful “Trans Lobby”.
Finally, we should discuss partisan coverage filtering. Two media sites can be reporting 100% factual information, but the specific stories, events, and information each side chooses to share says a lot about their core beliefs.
Ground News is especially useful to demonstrate this phenomenon, because it actually documents which stories are covered by which “sides” of the political aisle, and can even show how each side writes their headlines. I could pick apart a hundred different stories for you, but instead, I’ll just show some of the top news stories in their “Transgender” category from June 16th, 2023.
News sources with a right-leaning bias overwhelmingly cover culture war issues, continuing to be obsessed with my TikTok colleague Dylan Mulvaney (yes, we’re mutuals) and even connecting their transphobia with misogynoir (not that these concepts are unrelated). They also cover stories of individual trans people who have allegedly done some heinous things; while murdering three people is obviously terrible and I Hereby Condemn Them On Behalf Of The Trans Community, this story is clearly not reflective of the trans people as a whole, or even the pro-trans movement as a whole. The story is merely being linked with the movement for aesthetic symmetry in the minds of those who already think that all trans people are criminals and perverts. (Also, the murders happened in 2016, and the murderer’s “activism” amounts to winning an anti-discrimination case in 1999, making them in no way related to the LGBTQ+ movement of the past few years, though the headline certainly implies otherwise). Trans people don’t have the privilege of individuality; if one of us does something awful, we all must be condemned.
Meanwhile, news sources who are more centrist (or biased toward the left) are reporting (in my opinion, accurately) about how trans people continue to be discriminated against, including several articles about an anti-trans legislator whose non-binary child was begging him not to pass a bans on drag art and gender-affirming care. (Note: the bills did pass. Happy Father’s Day, by the way!)
What more do I have to share than a child pleading to their own father to not pass a law that would revoke their human rights? What more can I say about how Republicans are sowing division and tearing families apart? What more can I say about the state of modern politics, one side begging for love, care, connection, and inclusion while the other side uses state violence to silence them?
All three of these media bias techniques are useful to know about, but there’s still another thing to consider: sometimes the media will just straight-up lie about trans people. They will report that the transition regret rate is as high as 80%; actually, it’s more like 1%, lower than knee surgery, and much of that 1% only regrets due to transphobia, not because they’re Not Trans. The Connecticut cis girls who sued trans girls for taking away their opportunities by beating them in sports (though not taking 1st place) are, in fact, getting many opportunities, while the trans girls are not. Trans people are said to be the weird ones for pursuing gender-affirming care, but the global market for HRT is more than $20 billion and is dominated mostly by cis women (with products ranging from birth control to thyroid medication to menopause pain management), not to mention Manly Man Products For Men as well as the masculinizing surgeries done by cis men. And above all, media figures on all sides move with the attitude than being trans was a thing invented on Tumblr in 2015, which ignores the long history of trans existence stretching back millennia. Even liberal news sources are guilty of some of these attitudes, especially the latter two.
Naturally, this is upsetting to us trans people, especially those of us who become content creators and spend years of our lives debunking the same talking points over and over again, just for most cisgender people to believe whatever they hear in the news, stories written about us, without us. It’s exhausting. Even in a time where trans perspectives are more accessible than ever thanks to social media, since your feed is driven by algorithms tuned into what you’re already interested in and what you already believe, you never have to listen to a trans person if you don’t want to.
So…wanna know the real solution to anti-trans bias? Want to consume media in a way that doesn’t make you hate trans people?
It’s simple: Talk to a trans person!!! If you don’t know a trans person, follow some on social media, thereby incorporating our perspectives into your media diet. Basically, Change Your Algorithm! Get our experiences straight from our mouths, not some outside party’s twisted, pathologized interpretation of them.
Yes, we should all be open to critique from outsiders; the trans community is far from perfect, and well-meaning criticisms are welcome. But once you start following enough of us, and really listening, you will start to appreciate not only the complexity of gender issues, but you’ll start seeing us as people. After all, the first step in learning about another group is realizing the ways they’re just like you: messy, complicated, flawed, sometimes happy, sometimes angry, sometimes depressed, but human all the same, no less deserving of love and care.
Currently Reading
Some positive press for my Queer Science Conference two weekends ago!! :) I’m incredibly proud to have helped out with the 2nd year of my event for LGBTQIA+ teens to network with LGBTQIA+ researchers at UConn!
After the Apple Vision Pro reveal, Dr. Casey Fiesler, a professor of tech ethics and TikTok mutual of mine, reminded me of this excellent fake ad for the Google Glasses from a decade ago. My thoughts on AR/VR tech are essentially contained in my previous piece about the Metaverse, but in short, I really hope that big tech doesn’t convince us all to carry out 100% of our lives in a set of goggles. My thoughts were affirmed by this piece by Paris Marx; “screens are profitable”.
A great list of rules for academic writing; worth sharing with your students!
A scathing piece on Elon Musk’s anti-Semitism. I can’t stress enough how dangerous it is that the owner of Twitter is a massive bigot. Related: the article from earlier in this newsletter about how Twitter has become harmful for LGBTQIA+ people and posts about the shutdown of various trans subreddits. The Internet is becoming dangerous for trans people, and it’s unclear what the next step is for a community for whom our social network is our life support system.
Watch History
This week I binged all of “Ultimatum: Queer Love” in 24 hours, which I may or may not review in the paid newsletter next week. Subscribe for that, or just watch Tee Noir’s breakdown!
A quick summary of the downright evil fake estrogen scam ran by the alt-right.
From Intelexual Media, a great video to watch in advance of Juneteenth and a great discussion of media literacy.
A sincere and passionate defense of Superman’s underwear.
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
The Age of Pleasure is upon us!!!! (Fav track: “Phenomenal ft. Doechii”, “Only Have Eyes 42”, and “The Rush ft. Nia Long & Amaarae”)
Alan Palomo (formerly Neon Indian) is back!! His new album drops in September, and you can listen to “Stay-At-Home DJ” now.
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna
This article makes me wish Substack was like Medium where I could give this article 50 claps. Amazing piece, Anna Marie.