The Media Research Center’s year of hating transgender people continued, courtesy of Clay Waters, whose main job these days appears to be spewing hate at PBS for not hating people like he does. Waters huffed in a May 13 post:
Tax-supported PBS has attracted heat of late for indoctrinating children on “queer,” transgender, and related issues, including through its PBS LearningMedia brand used in schools, under the rubric “Understanding LGBTQ+ Identity: A Toolkit for Educators.”
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed funding for the state’s PBS station for “indoctrination and over-sexualization” of children. Citizens Defending Freedom also called on PBS to be defunded for promoting an LGBT ‘toolkit’ for schools, and cited videos included in the package, including “All Oppression is Connected,” one of many examples of left-wing “intersectionality” propaganda in the education toolkit, which was initially created by the NYC Department of Education.
Citizens Defending Freedom picked this quote out from the “Oppression” clip:
“If you line up all the people who are against the black people, and all the people who are against the gay people, and all the people who are against poor women or abortion, chances are they’re related to each other, they know each other, and so therefore, it’s the same enemy.”
That “enemy” would include the majority of taxpayers that are unwittingly helping to fund content like this. The intro pages even include speaker Staceyann Chin’s preferred pronouns.
Such radical tax-funded PBS content supports the argument that public broadcasting is pushing gender agendas onto children.
Yes, Waters really thinks that it’s “radical” to not hate LGBT people.
A July 29 post by Waters raged that a transgender state legislator was not treated like a freak:
PBS News Hour White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez, whose reporting down the homestretch of the 2024 presidential election has so far been wretchedly partisan, was at it again on Friday’s edition, painting a potential second Trump Administration as a threat to the lives of transgenders, and even chiding the Biden Administration for suggesting transgender surgery on minors should be limited.
She engaged in a 100% sympathetic interview – no actual journalism was committed – of Leigh Finke, a biological male “trans woman” elected to the Minnesota legislature in 2022 and executive director of something called the Queer Equity Institute.
It’s no surprise PBS is all-in on pushing anti-Republican fear-mongering and “gender identity” propaganda, given its recent history of coverage, wholly ignoring that the legislation under which the Public Broadcasting Service operates requires balance when covering controversial news stories.
[…]How bad is it if Trump were re-elected? Finke said it would be “catastrophic,” that “If we were to add the federal government on top of that backing these states, trying to export the harm and the hate and the cruelty of these red states that are attacking trans people in just the most vicious ways possible, to export that to the federal government and to see the damage that could be done, I mean, it’s very difficult to overstate how hard that would be and what lengths we would have to go to survive.” They need to “elect a President Harris.”
Finke’s hyperbolic left-wing rhetoric stood unchallenged by any journalistic pushback, courtesy of tax-funded PBS.
Waters, meanwhile, made no effort to dispute anything Finke said, and he made no mention of the right-wingers on Fox News who face no journalistic pushback.
Waters had another PBS-related transphobic meltdown in a Sept. 5 post:
Friday’s edition of the tax-supported PBS NewsHour reacted with alarm about the news that what the left calls “gender-affirming medical care” for children (i.e., puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and irrevocable surgeries) has been outlawed in Texas. It featured reporter Laura Barron-Lopez, surely busy between her fixation on teenage gender dysphoria and her official job as NewsHour’s White House correspondent.
[…]Puberty blockers were used off-label to treat “gender dysphoria” and whose side effects, including possible infertility, have not been comprehensively explored. While the U.S. healthcare complex continued to roll them out, medical groups in Europe and elsewhere were withdrawing previous support.
The father explained in detail the family’s difficulties seeking out so-called gender care, while Barron-Lopez wrung her hands about all the “disruptions to their life,” including “more financial burden.”
She even chided President Biden — from the left — for being insufficiently involved in helping one family help their boy somehow become a girl.
Waters returned for more bashing in a Sept. 27 post:
Wednesday’s PBS News Hour provided the latest piece of transgender propaganda to air on supposedly objective and balanced public television, brought by reporter Laura Barron-Lopez, the show’s most biased reporter.
With apparently nothing going on at the White House these days (“Where’s Joe?” would be a decent story to run), the show’s White House correspondent has more time to spend on her obsession with Texas teens suffering from gender dysphoria, framing controversial stories of possibly irreversible medical interventions with a soft, celebratory focus.
[…]Rhyan was put on puberty blockers and is now on testosterone, as if hormone replacement therapy will magically transform her female DNA into male DNA. Barron-Lopez respected pronouns, basic biology not so much.
After Barron-Lopez pointed out that medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics endorse gender-afforming care, Waters smeared the group as “dishonest liberal hacks” for not hating transgender people like he does:
The institutional credibility of the dishonest liberal hacks of AAP has been on a well-deserved decline since it recommended masking up toddlers, requiring student athletes to compete in masks, and disappeared its own previous insistence that seeing faces is critical for early childhood development.
Barron-Lopez seriously soft-pedaled the global discrediting of transgender-related procedures and surgeries for minor children, and rejected concerns for child well-being as a cynical Republican tactic.
[…]No scientific debate was offered regarding the wisdom of gender transitioning for teenagers, no discussion of the side-effects of puberty blockers. “Reporter” Barron-Lopez did no reporting, merely laid out her protagonists’ journey as a hero’s quest against implacable opposition.
Waters has never presented himself as an expert on medical care, pediatric or otherwise, so there’s no reason to treat his transphobia as authoritative.
Waters raged further at PBS and Barron-Lopez in a Sept. 29 post:
The subject line of the PBS email read: “How a trans youth care ban affects this family.” Inside was an essay based on a PBS News Hour segment on the travails of a transgender teen from Texas, after a new state law forbid “gender-affirming” medication that will somehow transform teenage girl Rhyan into a boy.
The plight of “transgender” teenagers in Texas are the new specialty subject of PBS’s White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez, who doesn’t seem to have much to do on that beat these days. Her fawning story on Wednesday was awful. The newsletter version, “compiled by Joshua Barajas,” was worse.
Waters then went into denial about how much his fellow Republicans hate transgender people:
No, transgenders weren’t being denied “medical care” by Republicans. There is no “medical” need for gender-denying treatments.
[…]Republicans are not trying to block “gender nonconforming” students from schools or bathrooms, but only demanding they acknowledge biological reality, and that biological boys don’t belong in girls’ sports or bathrooms.
If you’re blocking students from some bathrooms because of anti-transgender animosity, Clay, you are in fact blocking them from bathrooms.
Waters also attacked a study on suicide attempts among teen transgender or nonbinary youth because he deemed it too supportive of them:
All researchers on the study were current or former members of the trans-activist group The Trevor Project, which works to help “transition” children, making this report emotional blackmail disguised as an objective study on teen suicide. The confident title of the study (“State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA.”) is not supported by the results found, and the methodology of using personal surveys to collect its figures invites imprecision. Plus, as we know, correlation is not causation.
Waters offered no evidence to back up his attack. He closed by sneering that “PBS News won an Excellence in Transgender Coverage Award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists (lucky they didn’t run out of alphabet!).” Thanks, Clay, for proving that you’re clearly more motivated by hate that anything resembling legitimate “media research.”