CNSNews.com intern Emily Robertson wrote in an April 1 article:
The Biden Administration is engaging in “institutionalized child abuse” by encouraging children to transition genders, Walt Heyer, who was formerly transgender, argued to Fox News host Laura Ingraham Thursday.
Ingraham invited Heyer, who was born a biological male, transitioned to female at the age of 17, and then detransitioned some years later, on to share his regret of transitioning along with addressing the consequences of parents and the government encouraging children to transition.
“This is institutionalized child abuse; they’re working on destroying an entire generation of children,” Heyer told Ingraham. “None of these children need hormone blockers, they don’t need to transition. One of the things that nobody ever seems to talk about is this one word called ‘consequences.'”
Robertson didn’t even get Heyer’s origin story straight; he transitioned at age 42, not 17. Robertson simply repeated what Ingraham had said about Heyer and didn’t bother to fact-check. She also failed to describe Heyer — who has published a few commentaries at CNS over the years — as the right-wing, anti-trans activist he is and that his views on transgenderism are out of date. As Media Matters noted:
Heyer’s experience isn’t reflective of the experiences of the overwhelming majority of transgender people; he even admits that he was “misdiagnosed” and was actually suffering with “a dissociative disorder that required talk therapy, not surgery.” His views about transitioning aren’t rooted in research or medical expertise. The idea that many transgender people experience “transition regrets” has been widely debunked and contradicts the positions of major professional medical organizations, which all view transitioning as an important and beneficial step for people who identify with a gender identity that doesn’t correspond with their biological sex.
The fact that Robertson just did stenography (and even then got a major fact wrong) and didn’t include a balanced view shows us that CNS is teaching its interns to be partisan activists, not journalists.