This Fox News report (1/22/21) is one of dozens the network aired on trans issues in a recent two-month period.
First it was bathrooms, now it’s sports. When the GOP’s war against trans people using the restroom appropriate for their gender identity largely failed, it turned to a new focus to rile up its base: trans girls in sports “destroying” girls’ athletics. At least 50 bills have been introduced in 29 states that target transgender people for discrimination, with many barring trans girls from participating in girls’ sports, but also prohibiting or even criminalizing life-saving healthcare for trans youth, and permitting discrimination against trans people on religious grounds. Mississippi just signed into law the first such bill of the year.
While Fox News is giving plenty of gleeful coverage to this latest bigoted GOP campaign, its supposed cable counterweight, MSNBC, has remained almost completely silent.
In the past two months, a FAIR search turned up two references to the GOP anti-trans campaign on MSNBC—neither of which were on prime time, and one of which was essentially accidental. On Meet the Press Daily (2/22/21), Capitol Hill correspondent Kasie Hunt briefly aired the live feed of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s confirmation hearing, tuning out after Garland responded to a question from Republican Sen. John Kennedy (R.–La.) asking whether “biological male” participation in female sports is “unfair to female athletes.”
After Garland’s vague answer about how the question was “difficult,” Hunt returned and explained: “[Garland] and Senator John Kennedy were just talking about questions around Title 9 and transgender women in sports. That has become a conservative focal point.”
It was an explanation MSNBC viewers clearly needed, since they don’t seem to have been informed about this conservative focal point before—though they would have been better served had Hunt called out Kennedy’s transphobic use of the term “biological male” to refer to trans women. And FAIR found only one mention of the issue since then—a segment on Hallie Jackson’s weekday morning show (2/26/21) that, to its credit, interviewed two trans athletes about the anti-trans campaign and the discrimination they have faced, without seeking “balance” from transphobes. (See FAIR.org, 3/3/21.)
Meanwhile, in the same time period, Fox News has aired dozens of segments about the trans issues being legislated around the country—with a particular focus on the supposed outrage of “biological males” competing in girls’ sports, a framing that denies trans girls their identity.
By contrast, the two networks have given the Equality Act—a piece of federal anti-discrimination legislation which, while noteworthy, does nothing to change LGBTQ people’s lives without passing the GOP-obstructed Senate—almost identical amounts of attention, with 55 mentions on Fox and 54 on MSNBC.
As ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio explains, the right-wing argument about trans girls in sports relies on two fundamentally bigoted (and false) assumptions: that men and boys are inherently more athletic than women and girls, and that sex categories are fixed and easily defined. And of course, the first assumption undermines the claim by proponents of these bills that they are acting as champions of women and girls (which is also obviously undermined by their historic lack of interest in women’s sports or women’s rights). Meanwhile, organizations that actually do act as champions of women athletes oppose these bills.
It’s worth pointing out that trans girls have no inherent athletic advantage over cisgender girls, and sponsors of these bill regularly find themselves unable to offer local examples the bills are purported to address (AP, 3/3/21). In Connecticut, where cisgender high school girl runners have sued to block trans girls from participating—a key case for Fox and the right-wing campaign—those plaintiffs “have consistently performed as well as or better than transgender competitors,” the ACLU (4/30/20) notes. Meanwhile, as the civil rights group points out, trans athletes face obstacles that more cisgender athletes do not, such as levels of harassment in schools that are so intense that more than 20% leave school as a result.
As Strangio puts it:
There is nothing close to trans dominance in athletics, but there is a long history of state power being used to control the bodies of all women and weaponize notions of bodily purity and coherence to punish anyone who does not conform to binary norms of sex difference.
The so-called “bathroom bills” failed in part due to public scrutiny, including protests and boycotts. While MSNBC spotlights the almost certainly doomed Equality Act, where is its coverage of the dangerous state-level campaign against trans people?
ACTION ALERT:
Please ask MSNBC to cover the Republican Party’s campaign against trans people.
You can send a message to Rachel Maddow at Rachel@msnbc.com (or via Twitter:@Maddow). Chris Hayes can be reached via Twitter: @ChrisLHayes. Lawrence O’Donnell can be reached via Twitter: @Lawrence. MSNBC‘s Twitter account is @MSNBC. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
A “liberal” dose of ethical lethargy
FAIR is supposed to represent fairness in reporting. This issue is actually an editorial against conservative views re transgender folks. I have seen several video interviews with female athletes who complain that they just cannot compete equally against transgender females in sports, yet you use this to argue that women are just as strong and fast as the biologic but transgender females. There is nothing here about fairness in reporting …..shame
Les,
(These questions are for you to ask yourself)
1. Are you a female athlete?
2. Are you a transgender athlete?
3. Are you a friend or relative of a transgender athlete?
4. If neither question 1 nor condition 2 applies to you, you really need to drop it. If 3 were true it’s highly improbable that you would even be talking this “unfair” trash.
It is not a “conservative” point of view to be sleazily nosy, solipsistically anti-libertarian, up in someone else’s sex and gender choice hating on them for who they are.
You wackos here in the U.S. have gone so far right-wing, you are actually now engaged in textbook solipsism and running around calling it “conservative.”
Just stop already, give it up, you are not going to change who people are. Take it from me, a very old ass person, you will be far more happy in life if you just accept others for who they are, and govern your own behavior from a foundation of love and tolerance.
Peace Les.
So only a person who is a female athlete or a transgender athlete is allowed an opinion? By that logic, only people who have have been murdered are allowed an opinion on murder? Only whites are allowed to have an opinion on white issues? Crazy logic.
Like it or not, we all have an opinion on issues and are allowed to express them. We are allowed to vote on those issues.
There is no denying that the average man outperforms the average woman in sports (the very reason why we have women’s sports). If we just had sports, no woman would be on a team. Take a look at male vs. female track times.
Seems like the way forward to true gender equity is to do away with “separate but equal” women’s sports.
Dave,
We should have choice, the system should not homogenize to destroy the choice. By combining the two (especially as they are currently run), it would eliminate a lot of athletes. It is pretty simple, if our goal is to increase participation, and encourage our kids to compete, combining the two distinct fields erases the diversity of competition.
In reality, there is no such thing as “separate but equal.” A women’s Major League Baseball team doesn’t even exist. The media system revolves around, and favors men sports, and not women’s. Indeed each area of sports is a unique entity or game of competitive play, in and of itself. Destroying the gender distinction does away with diversity….maybe that’s what some people want. Not me.
This whole “why have women’s and men’s sports at all?” schtick that people are trying to reduce the transgender athlete bans to, is nothing but intolerant, misogynistic bigoted dung.
A person’s gender gives them no innate advantage or disadvantage in competition, it is just a sociological and cultural construct. Our sports are also cultural, and time will only tell how these horribly hateful skirmishes that the right-wing are always fomenting, will work out.
For now, we should allow transgender athletes to compete in the sports of their gender choice, because unlike the hyper-phony right-wing news media, reality demonstrates that it is perfectly normal for transgender athletes to compete in the games of their gender. There is not a wave of backlash in women sports when it comes to transgender equality and transgender athletes competing. This silence speaks loud as hell.
Spoken like a person not based in reality. Bolt’s time is a full second faster than Flo-Jos. Both hold the world record. But, I’m using facts. “To Dave” is using the way he’d like the world to be. Why use facts, when you can just dream and post that opinion? When you see a man who is much larger than a woman, it is because of society, not genetics (LOL).
I wonder whether the author of this piece noticed or critically examined the fact that while trying to make the point that we must no longer refer to biological sex, it was necessary to use the following language: “… that men and boys are inherently more athletic than women and girls…”?
Why is the author using terms that are commonly used to describe gender, including trans gender, to refer to cis gendered individuals only, which is who they are referring to?
Quite simply, they and their editor(s) missed this. Not even the author was able to police their own language to remain within their own prescribed parameters on this subject. Not even for the length of this substantially editorial article full of assertions about language that is far from settled.
This helps to illustrate that it is at least quite difficult to fit within the above mentioned linguistic parameters and accurately use language to describe the human situations it is meant to describe.
I don’t understand why it is a problem to retain medical terminology to describe male and female physicality, while reserving the terms “woman”, “women”, “man”, “men” to describe gender-including trans gender.
I can see a number of ways in which it is a problem not to retain language for making biological distinctions.
What comes immediately to mind is medical research about female, as distinct from male, bodies. If we are no longer going to distinguish between bodies which don’t share the same physical characteristics (chemical, structural, etc), how are we going to collect and organize accurate data for, among other things, personal and public health purposes?
Or, if we are to stop using “female” and “male”, what language may we use to make such factual, medical and/or scientific distinctions-distinctions which can be life and death, or affect lifelong quality of life, for some individuals?
Or: is the problem making such distinctions at all? If so, that is both deeply socially problematic, and unrealistic.
Chris,
Your entire post hinges on an out-of-context and chopped up quote. The entire sentence is carefully worded, and includes important grammatical symbols that negate your attempt at making this piece seem incoherent:
“As ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio explains, the right-wing argument about trans girls in sports relies on two fundamentally bigoted (and false) assumptions: that men and boys are inherently more athletic than women and girls, and that sex categories are fixed and easily defined.”
In the passage above, it is implied that everything after the semicolon is false. Therefore your allegation is also false.
Correction,
I got in a hurry and screwed up. I meant that Chris had ignored the colon in the sentence misquoted…hopefully, it was obvious enough what I was trying to point out.
Once the sentence Hollar wrote is read in full context, where the the right-wing falsehoods were delineated with a colon, almost every point Chris brought up, melts away.
Chris,
You wrote:
“I can see a number of ways in which it is a problem not to retain language for making biological distinctions.”
Can you cite a single one where it applies to the Equality Act and transgender people in sports? Or is your point a straw man?
I can go down the line with every point you made, and all of them, are nothing but straw-man arguments covered in common bigotry.
This article is about MSNBC’s failure to mention the right-wing’s latest transphobic attack, and how the network has hardly mentioned the Equality Act.
All of the points you make seem to clearly beg the question of your own bigotry, since you too didn’t mention transgender athletes in sports or the Equality Act at all.
MSNBC won’t touch it because outside trans activist groups and the usual twitter brigade, it’s not a popular or widely held view. And promotion of trans athletic participation doesn’t correlate with traditional political distinctions. The right-wing may hate it, but that doesn’t mean the left loves it.
Common sense may be wrong, but common sense is pretty clear: men and women don’t compete against each other for a reason, any more than a 225 pound boxer fights a welter-weight.
If you expect to win over the public, you’ll need more than social justice arguments.
I am all for freedom of choice when it comes to doing what you want with your body. I am totally against invasion of privacy etc however some statements made here are just plainly absurd. This is a difficult topic to tackle. You are highlighting an important issue and pushing back on some stupid notions. This however is ridiculous. You’re going to lose people who really do support transgender rights when you come out and label them as bigots.