At Times I Hate The News Media…

I don’t know if you have been following how the news media has been reporting the law out in California that integrated the schools for trans-students?

They have been reporting the press releases from the far right conservatives without checking the facts. I don’t know why they are doing it, it might because they cut their reporting staff, it might be because they are lazy, it might be because they want controversy to drive up their readership or it might be because of bias; take your pick.

Do they misgender us because lack of knowledge or do they do it out malice? When I was being interviewed when we were at the committee hearing on CT anti-discrimination bill, the woman I was with tried to tell the reporter about the use of pronouns but he didn’t want to hear about it because he said it would bias the article. Once she was able to tell him that she just wanted to tell him to check the AP Stylebook he backed off and listened to what she was asking. In the video he did use the correct pronouns (He did say that, I “was born a man but prefers to live as a woman” but that could be argued that it was relevant to the interview.).

But I can have disastrous results when the news media is biased. In Colorado the news media hounded the trans-student to bring her close to suicide. And it may have driven a trans-woman to suicide,

Transgender People Are Paying The Price For The Media’s Willful Ignorance

The failure to effectively and respectfully cover stories about transgender people has consequences. “A state of emergency.”
BuzzFeed
By Saeed Jones
January 19, 2014

For those who care about the way transgender people are covered in the media — to say nothing of transgender people themselves who bear the brunt of the blow — it has been a difficult few weeks. “A chill ran down my spine” is how Caleb Hannan, a Grantland contributor, describes the moment he realized that the subject of his story was a transwoman. In the article, Hannan doesn’t get a “chill” later when the woman, an inventor and entrepreneur, begs him not to out her, stating “you’re about to commit a hate crime.”

After describing how the subject of his story swallowed pills, put a bag over her head and died on her kitchen floor — a suicide some have suggested came as a result of Hannan’s own reporting, though she did not leave a note so we will likely never know for sure — the writer’s next sentence is about himself: “Writing a eulogy for a person who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience.”

To review, a person was outed as transgender against her will, then referred to as “he” for the rest of the article, pushed to the breaking point and somehow not only a writer but at least one editor decided this was a story that should be published. This is no eulogy.

In another article, this time in Jezebel, Tracy Moore writes that,

Issue two is the reporting on the trans status of the subject. This is much clearer: Don't out someone who doesn't want to be out. The end. Everyone has a right to privacy when it comes to their gender identity or sexual orientation, and beyond this, the trans status is not relevant. Hannan should have treated those pieces of information as distinctly different: It is one thing to not wish to disclose gender identity information or sexual orientation, it is another to lie about your education and work experience. Instead, he mixes in that discovery alongside the others, as if they are all the same kind of cover-up, as if part of the scam involving fudged credentials is the hucksterism of transitioning. It is unclear from the story how he addressed the discovery of Vanderbilt's trans status with her privately, how Vanderbilt responded, or what (if anything) was discussed in terms of whether it would be published or not. This is the question I've put to him (which has not been answered as of this piece's runtime).

Issue three: It appears from the story's tone that there was zero ethical concern whatsoever concerning the trans status. This is the sort of stuff that comes up, by the way, in 101 ethics classes: Say you're called to cover the story of a hero who saved a drowning man from an icy river, and in the course of reporting you determine the hero is also gay, and would prefer to remain anonymous for privacy reasons. Do you report on it? The answer, of course, is no, you don't report that detail, because the hero being gay is irrelevant to the story. But real-life scenarios are not so simple.

The reporting on the inconsistencies of her educational background is legitimate, but her trans-history is not. It is like Ms. Moore said about the hero saving the drowning man, the fact that he was gay was not material to the story, that fact that Ms. V was trans was not relevant to the story.

It appears that the original article has been rewritten, but the damage has been done!