MRC’s Transgender Hate Rolls On

The Media Research Center’s rage against transgender people has continued unabated.A Feb. 20 post by Clay Waters complained that a news segment on anti-transgender laws didn’t include any transphobes:

NPR’s big story on Monday’s Morning Edition was “Florida bans gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Parents raise concerns,” by Melissa Block. She’s a former morning anchor turned “NPR special correspondent covering gender issues.” Block’s completely one-sided seven-minute story included a portrait of teenager Liz Bostock, “[a]ssigned male at birth.”

With a soft, celebratory focus on activist mothers, happy “trans kids,” and virtually no dissenting voices aired or inconvenient facts raised, it’s a perfect encapsulation of the liberal media’s harmful attitude that children can be born in the wrong body, an error that needs irrevocable surgical and-or chemical fixing that can result in permanent sterilization.

NPR used the bizarre term “gender-affirming care” describe gender denial….five times in seven minutes. The teenager started receiving puberty blockers last August. “It’s been amazing,” said her mother.

A Feb. 24 item by Brad Milmouth weirdly insisted that a CNN host who called out anti-transgender politicians was actually “promot[ing] transgender surgery for underage teens”:

On Tuesday’s The Lead show, CNN host Jake Tapper did his part to promote transgender surgery for underage teens as he devoted a segment to fretting over Idaho’s push for a state ban. Republicans only stood for “cruelty” and “meanness” that is somehow against God.

Teenage transgender activist Eve Debitt and father Michael Debitt were given an extremely sympathetic forum to complain about the Idaho legislature’s actions with no serious consideration of the view that such surgery causes irreversible harm through amputation.

Tim Graham served up his own whine on March 4 that transphobes aren’t getting included enough in stories on anti-transgender legislation:

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and federal funding for TV public-affairs programs, insisted on “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” The CPB and PBS have ignored this language ever since.

On Wednesday, the PBS NewsHour aired an 11-minute segment under the headline “Parents concerned as new state laws restrict rights of transgender children.” They summarized it on Twitter: “Republican legislators are advancing bills restricting doctors and other providers from offering transition-related health care for minors.”

Anchor William Brangham began with a medley of permissive parents who lobbied against Republicans who oppose so-called “gender-affirming care” for kids, from puberty blockers to amputation surgeries. Then he conducted an interview with radical transgender activist Erin Reed, which made it nearly unanimous — on a subject that is clearly “of a controversial nature.” Reed fights dirty, comparing GOP opposition to “genocide.”

The conservative or Republican view was aired for 48 seconds, and then Reed was allowed to shoot it down, with no rebuttal.

We don’t recall Graham ever complaining that Fox News gave short shrift to “the liberal view” then attacked it with no rebuttal.

The MRC’s chief transphobe, Tierin-Rose Mandelburg, raged at a transgender child in a March 6 post:

Two words that should never appear in the same sentence but so often do these days:  “trans” and “kids.”

“Real Housewives” star Heather Dubrow posted on Instagram for International Son’s day in honor of her “son” who was once her daughter. As a result, numerous blue checks praised the “inclusivity” and “celebration” of the child’s deep confusion. 

Dubrow posted a photo of the beach with the word “ACE,” her “son’s” name, etched into the sand for International Son’s Day on March 4th.

[…]

Unironically, most trans kids don’t grow up healthy, happy, confident or independent like Dubrow said. Many of them deal with the life-long side effects of the mutilation they had done. Most can’t have kids naturally, can’t breastfeed, deal with depression and even thoughts of suicide. Last year, 82% of trans-identifying people considered suicide. 

Mandelburg didn’t mention that the study noted that “Interpersonal microaggressions made a unique, statistically significant contribution to lifetime suicide attempts” — meaning that transgender people are being driven to suicide in part because of haters like her.

On a similar note, Waters returned for a March 11 post complaining that one TV host raised the possibilty of “real-world violence” against transgender people as the result of anti-trans legislation: “How do ‘we know’ anything of the kind about how state legislation leads to ‘real-world violence,’ besides from the rhetoric of the most extreme trans-activists?”

A March 13 post by Mandelburg twisted President Biden’s words to bizarrely portray his speaking out against anti-trans laws as an endorsement of child mutilation:

Perhaps it’s opposite day.

On Monday’s segment of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, President Joe Biden spoke with gay man and former White House staff member in the Obama era, Kal Penn, where he admitted that he thought restricting kids from getting their private parts mutilated was “sinful.”

The pair began speaking about gay-marriage and Biden’s efforts to keep it legal. Biden said his stance was “simple” after talking about his “epiphany” with homosexuality when he saw two men locking lips in high school.

Penn also asked about the transgender population, specifically transgender youth who are dealing with, so-called “regressive state laws.”

“Transgender kids is a really harder thing,” he began. “What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful. I mean it’s terrible what they’re doing.”

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is spearheading laws that would prohibit kids from receiving dangerous surgeries and drugs to change their gender. DeSantis recognizes that there are two genders and that children are not mature enough to make such life altering decisions. While his laws are evidence of him looking out for children’s best interests, the left is twisting it into an anti-LGBTQ campaign by the Republican Governor.

Mandelburg pushed the right-wing narrative that a failure to sufficiently hate transgender people is making people transgender:

Obviously Biden is not a fan of such a move. “It’s not like a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘You know, I decided I want to become a man’ or ‘I want to become a woman’ or ‘I want to change.’ What are they thinking about here? They are human beings. They love. They have feelings. They have inclinations that are… It just, to me, is, I don’t know is, it’s cruel,” the president said in the clip.

Well, he was right that kids don’t wake up and just choose to be a different gender. More often than not, they are conditioned or indoctrinated into believing that is their reality. Whether it’s their teachers who shove LGBTQ propaganda to them in schools or parents who agree to let their kids live a delusion, Biden is failing to recognize that kids don’t know better. Kids trust adults and if adults tell them that getting life altering surgery is good, then they’ll do it.

Actually, social contagion is not making people transgender. She didn’t explain why transgender people must be hated.

So upset was the MRC by Biden’s “Daily Show” interview that Alex Christy complained about it the next day.

Christy returned for a March 25 post in which he groused that commentator Jonathan Capehart portray right-wing concern about “parental rights” as all about hating transgender kids (which he didn’t rebut) and tried to lamely tried to respond when Capehart called out “rabble-rousing parents” who are actually just targeting transgender kids: “It is not ‘rabble-rousing’ to say that boys are boys and girls are girls and that teenagers should not be given hormone treatment, but it is rabble-rousing to say that they should.”