The MRC Just Can't Stop Freaking Out About Transgenders

The Media Research Center loathes transgender people, and it is quite unafraid to let its hate flag fly.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 2/5/2020

The MRC's loathing of transgenders, however, seemed to really ramp up over the past year. Let's count the ways it has done so, beginning with a quick list of atrocities.

Lindsey Kornick complained that a superhero character on the TV show "Supergirl" is transgender and comes from a planet that is "so progressive that they even quickly and readily except gender dysphoria as normal." She later groused: "Anyone who really cares about a family member or an 'authentic self' should realize that most children who go through gender dysphoria eventually outgrow it by the time they become adults. If anything, transitioning Nia at a young age is probably the opposite of affirming her authentic self."

Gabriel Hays -- a name you'll see a lot here, as he appears to be the MRC's designated trans-basher -- ranted that "Hollywood movie database IMDb.com has become the latest casualty in the trans war on reality, having been bullied by the LGBTQ community into refraining from posting trans people’s birth names on their site without 'consent.' Apparently publishing trans movie industry workers’ original names is just another arrow in the quiver of patriarchal oppression." Hays went on to call transgender folks "make-believe people" and blamed the "gay police" for all this hullabaloo.

Karen Townsend was hate-watching Freefom's "Good Trouble" when she came across a transgender Hispanic character named Jazmin being given a quinceanera-type ceremony:

The episode is a vehicle for the LGBTQ activists in Hollywood to promote their social agenda. Jazmin’s family is having difficulty dealing with her transition and the father is cast in a poor light. The far left still doesn’t get it – transgenderism is not normal behavior. Most Americans feel as the Martinez family does – it is a struggle to come to grips with this situation from a loved one.

The storyline is also a chance to virtue-shame over the ban on transsexuals in the military. Many Americans disagree with transsexuals serving openly in the military, including President Trump. Jazmin tells the party-goers that her quinceañera is an opportunity to fundraise for The Center for Transgender Veterans. She says there are 134,000 trans military veterans, including 15,000 currently serving. The fundraiser raises $10,000 for the fight to end the military ban. And the young people watching this show are further indoctrinated.

As if Townsend isn't attempting anti-transgender indoctrination here.

Nicholas Fondacaro screeched about a "Raging Black Trans Woman" who took part in a CNN-sponsored town hall on LGBT issues: "The already bonkers LGBT town hall went wild Thursday night when a black trans woman named Blossom C. Brown rushed a questioner from the audience, stole the mic, accused CNN of erasing black trans women, demanded people 'Google' her, and almost climbed on stage." One gets the feeling that Fondacaro would have mocked the woman just as savagely even if she wasn't "raging."

Hays spewed hate at a video game that includes a playable transgender character: "And really, in a video game world filled with Star Wars and World War II shooters, who can’t appreciate verisimilitude in the thrill-a-minute world of the sexually confused? ... No, there’s no agenda here, just a special interest group with a rainbow axe to grind in whatever industry will let it in."

Lindsay Kornick complained that the show "Empire" "somehow managed to also squeeze in a transgender storyline to boot. I guess there’s always room for a little more liberal pandering." She further complained: "The only shocking part of this is how totally unoriginal this whole routine has become. We’ve already seen the story of the transgender character wanting to “live her truth” against haters, transphobes, and medical science. We’ve already heard all the constant assertions that this is “beautiful” and somehow natural despite only affecting a tiny percent of the population."

Clay Waters declared that a New York Times story about eroding transgender rights "is the latest overheated, un-journalistic genuflection to the aggressive side of the transgender movement, while conveniently conflating “gender identity” with post-surgery transgender people." Waters then pushed the right-wing talking point that transgenders don't deserve media coverage because there are so few of them: "If transgenders are less than 1% of the population (true), why does the Times cover them so obsessively?"

Hays claimed that one transgender woman -- or, in his mean-spirited interpretation, an "indignant biological male" who is "particularly obnoxious" -- had a "vendetta against biology" because a gynecologist refused to examine her and "complained that, since she identifies as a woman, people have to treat her like one, even medical doctors who are intimately aware that this type of rationalization is insane," asserting that "vast majority" of gynecologists "probably didn’t sign on to play make-believe with the mentally ill. Hays declared that this person "is not to be trusted considering her penchant for playing the victim and passion for accusing incredulous bystanders of discrimination." But isn't playing the victim and accusing others of discrimination what conservative like to do as well?

Hays melted down in another post:

Disney and Marvel are marching lockstep with trans propaganda in its most nefarious form: its advocacy for transgender children. Disney’s new streaming platform Disney+ showcased the story of one little trans girl as "she" fights to live “as herself,” or rather, mask over the reality of her being born as a boy with pink tennis shoes, long hair, and giving speeches at pride marches.

[...]

“Mighty Rebekah,” as this Hero Project episode was titled, follows “a transgender girl from New Jersey who transitioned at the age of eight,” as she tells viewers about fighting for her trans rights while her mother beams with pride. Of course, Disney and Marvel showcase this as a celebration of mother and child fighting for simple childhood expression, but as we all know, for many a happy mother and her trans child, there’s probably a weeping father who lost custody and is begging for the opportunity to show his son that throwing a football isn’t as toxic as mommy says it is.

Elise Ehrhard groused that the writers for the reboot of the series "The L Word" "are trying to keep up with the woke crowd by hiring real female-to-male trans actors for supporting roles and portraying them in line with transgender public relations," then attacked one transgender actor in the show for being insufficiently grateful to her Chinese-refugee parents: "A mother secretly saved her baby girl from the cruelty of the Chinese government only to have that little girl one day reject her own femaleness because of radical trans ideology." What ideology is making Ehrhard say such ridiculous and hateful things?

Hays returned to highlight how "Harry Potter" series author J.K. Rowling "angered radical LGBTQ folks on social media for tweeting a defense of a person fired for believing that there are only two genders. adding: "Yes, the left has completely sold out to this lunacy and the fact that someone as previously woke as Rowling is getting heat for this speaks volumes."

Mocking transgenders is cool

In a Nov. 13 post, the Media Research Center's Alexa Moutevelis gushed over how the TV show "South Park" mocked transgenders by how it "illustrated the absurdity of allowing men who identify as women into female athletic competitions, in a way only South Park can, in the episode titled 'Strong Woman,'" which featured "a trans athlete in the mold of former WWF wrestler Macho Man" entering a female strong-woman competition, and the women in the competition are told not to complain about because "you'll upset the PC babies." Moutevelis served up her own mocking at the end: "I can only imagine how the PC Babies will howl at this episode. You know how they are."

Moutevelis followed up that with a Nov. 21 post mocking one writer who claimed the episode descended into "the same tired old transphobic, homophobic, intentionally offensive gobbledygook":

Last week, South Park aired a classic episode that skewered the trans athlete phenomenon. But IndieWire author Jude Dry, whose pronouns are listed on Twitter as “they/them/theirs,” was not amused.

Dry's IndieWire article this Wednesday hilariously claimed the episode “provoked an immediate and universal backlash,” (only if backlash means laughter). The subtitle said, “Last week's episode provoked outcry by taking aim at transgender athletes, but the Comedy Central show has a long history of transphobia.” The definition of transphobia apparently means to not immediately celebrate and accept anything a trans person says.

[...]

It’s more that this author is humorless when it comes to certain hot button topics than that South Park is alienating viewers and yet Dry implies that creator Trey Parker is a bigot: “Parker’s pandering plea that his viewers not see him as a bigot for writing such a lazy, charged, and dangerous script is so ridiculous it’s almost laughable.”

And this IndieWire article is so ridiculous it is absolutely laughable.

Apparently, transphobic, homophobic and intentionally offensive gobbledygook is what trips Moutevelis' humor trigger, so this particular brand of hate is OK with her.

By contrast, Moutevelis is not so supportive of "South Park" when when it mocks her favorite president. In September, she and Sadi Martin complained that "The new season of South Park got back to its libertarian roots in ways many conservatives might not appreciate" when it focused on "illegal immigrant children being placed in detention centers" and engaged in "heavy-handed comparisons of the Jewish Holocaust to the current immigration crisis America faces today." Moutevelis and Martin concluded by lamenting, "South Park has always been at its best when it's subversively skewering the sacred cows of the left. Let's hope the rest of the season brings more of that and doesn't keep hitting us over the head with the same liberal talking points we hear everywhere else."

So, in Moutevelis' eyes, "South Park" is hilarious when it makes jokes about liberal causes, but painfully unfunny when it mocks conservative causes. Maybe she's the real "PC baby" here.

Defending unfunny anti-trans jokes

In a July 11 post, Clay Waters bashed New York Times critic Jason Zinoman for criticizing comedian Dave Chappelle for makng "lukewarm jokes" about transgenders, claiming that Chappelle committed the offense of "telling jokes about people that Zinoman doesn’t think he should be telling jokes about." Waters chortled later in the post that "Zinoman was getting his own 'comedy roast' on Twitter for being such a censorious scold and advising comedian Chappelle what he can and cannot joke about."

Needless to say, the MRC loves to tell people who they can and cannot joke about. Indeed, the very next day, MRC leaders Tim Graham and Brent Bozell attacked a cartoon -- the Showtime series "Our Cartoon President" -- for making jokes about President Trump, taking the show's description of itself as "truish" way too literally.

Hays, meanwhile, defended Chappelle's transphobic jokes as him merely deciding to "refuse to kiss the ring of every insane progressive cause on the market," declaring that "It’s more that the left has a 'basic misunderstanding' of humor, or in other words, liberals can’t take a freaking joke."

Similarly, despite spending years hating the humor of comedian Ricky Gervais, the MRC started coming around to him when he started telling jokes about transgenders. Hays declared that one such joke "showed he was "demonstrating himself as a celebrity that isn’t completely devoid of common sense (a real showbiz unicorn, these days)."

In November, Hays upgraded the MRC's view of Gervais from "vulgar" and "brutal " to merely a "politically incorrect mischief maker" because he once again, yes, made more transgender jokes, proudly crowing, "Despite the left’s best efforts, cancel culture has not yet ousted Ricky Gervais." He didn't mention that his employer had been trying to work cancel culture against Gervais for years.

MRC Latino's transgender freakout

The MRC's transphobia even spilled over to MRC Latino, the operation that looks at Hispanic media.

An Oct. 28 post by Kathleen Krumhansl denounced Univision for the offense of doing a story on a medical clinic that caters to transgenders because there are too few transgenders to deserve news coverage:

In their scramble to help secure votes for the Democrats and fulfill their leftist policy vision, Univision News continues to expand its “Latino Agenda”. The network is now openly advocating for the political platforms of leftist Democratic presidential hopefuls, and pushing for issues and policies that are completely out of tune with the reality of the Latino population to which they cater.

[...]

According to a Pew Research Center survey, 5% of LGBT respondents identify primarily as transgender; as the study states, “this is roughly consistent with other estimates of the proportion of the LGBT population that is transgender. Although there is limited data on the size of the transgender population, it is estimated that 0.3% of all American adults are transgender. This begs the question: of that 0.3% of the population, how many are Hispanics to whom this issue can be of any interest?

[...]

From their excitement about the non-existent word “Latinx”, to this recent example of the network´s liberal rhetoric, there is no doubt about the political motivations of the nation's leading Spanish-speaking news network, and they have nothing to do with the audience they represent.

We're sorry that Krumhansl thinks so little of transgenders that she thinks their existence in media must be eradicated.

MRC Latino director Jorge Bonilla had a similar freakout in a Dec. 2 post:

It is known that immigration advocacy is the cornerstone of Univision’s “Agenda Latina,” the first issue among many others for which the network advocates. Transgenderism is also one such issue, and the network is not above inserting its agenda into its coverage by any means necessary.

Watch below as Univision’s English-language broadcast, UNews, used National Adoption Month as a means with which to highlight a transgender teen:

[...]

As the report mentions, “Ariella” is still in foster care. Present tense, which means that “Ariella” is still a CHILD. How does this particular showcasing help “Ariella” overcome what appears to be a long, painful history of trauma?

Given the network’s extensive history with Planned Parenthood, both in partnerships and favorable coverage, it reasonable to infer that Univision doesn’t actually care about adoption. The very odd mention of National Adoption Month here is merely a fig leaf with which to justify its shameful exploitation of a vulnerable teen.

None of that matters, and nothing else matters to Univision, a liberal PAC with a broadcast license, except its agenda- even if it means aiding and abetting the exploitation of an abused and vulnerable child. Indeed, a new cynical low.

Looks like Bonilla won't be opening up his judgmental heart to this child anytime soon.