The Media Research Center’s Culture & Media Institute is on quite the transgender-bashing tear of late. Following up on its freak-out over a 5-year-old boy with painted toenails in a J. Crew ad that it painted as transgender “propaganda,” a June 7 CMI article by Paul Wilson pulls the usual MRC depiction-equals-approval fallacy of portraying coverage of transgendered people as a “celebration” of them.
Wilson was offended that in one school a student “born a boy and retaining male reproductive organs” was voted prom queen while at another school a student “born female and wishing to be male” was voted homecoming king. Wilson huffed, “In both cases, the issue was presented as one of fairness. Students were voted in by their peers, and were either accepted by a tolerant school or opposed by a reactionary school. The biological identity of Andrew or Oakleigh was irrelevant.” Wilson doesn’t explain what law is being violated that prom queens must be female and all homecoming kings must be male.
Wilson continued: “But the mainstream media has a history of celebrating high-profile transgendered people as blazing a trail while simultaneously seeking to normalize them. In these stories, skeptics are either absent or presented as bigots.” Wilson doesn’t explain why they’re not.