The Media Research Center finished out June by spewing more anti-transgender hate -- and then kept it up for the rest of the summer.
By Terry Krepel Posted 12/6/2023
Tierin-Rose Mandelburg
When we last checked in, the Media Research Center was ringing in Pride Month with lots of nasty hatred of transgender people, and as the month continued, so did the hate.
Kevin Tober returned for a June 15 post whining that an actual medical professional criticized right-wing anti-transgender laws:
On Thursday’s edition of CBS Evening News, anchor Norah O’Donnell had a sitdown interview with Doctor Jesse Ehrenfeld, the president of the American Medical Association who grumbled that doctors and other medical professionals were struggling in their professions due to states banning chemical castration and other transgender surgeries.
After introducing Ehrenfeld, O’Donnell asked him what he thinks was “the top issue facing physicians today.” Ehrenfeld responded that the United States has a “twin-endemic, a pandemic of the disease, plus a pandemic of misinformation and bad information.”
Narrating to the audience, O’Donnell bemoaned that “Dr. Ehrenfeld is taking over at a difficult time. Doctors are facing burnout, soaring medical costs, medicare payment issues, and new legislation targeting the LGBTQ community and reproductive rights.”
“We have a healthcare system in crisis,” Ehrenfeld proclaimed. When asked to clarify, he said, “In at least six states now, if I practice evidence-based care, I can go to jail. It's frightening. When a patient shows up in my office, if I do the right thing from a scientific, from an ethical perspective, to know that that care is no longer legal, criminalized, and could wind me in prison.”
There was no scientific evidence to support chopping off the healthy body parts of a young boy or girl in order to make them look like the opposite sex. Yet, O’Donnell never corrected him or challenged him in any way.
Even worse, she accepted his anti-scientific narrative by referring to it as “criminalizing of doctor care.”
Tober didn't explain why a doctor's care must be criminalized to satisfy a political agenda.
Tim Graham spent a June 18 post huffing about a story on a pregnant transgender man:
On Saturday, NPR exploited Father's Day to push "pregnant dads" with our taxpayer subsidies. The headline was "Americans celebrate dads this weekend. Three tell us about being a father in 2023." They pushed the "he was pregnant" pronoun inanity hard in their celebration:
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The only tiny hint of interesting opposition allowed in this propaganda is that allegedly a lot of people wanted this woman to abort. Then we had to be told "what people get wrong" with their opposition to upside-down gender-denying madness:
Graham didn't explain how adding right-wing anti-transgender hate to this story improved it any, given that we are all quite aware that right-wingers like him passionately despise the mere existence of transgender people.
A June 18 post by Tober assumed without evidence that minors receiving gender-affirming care are being "abused" and, thus, create the need for right-wing transphobes to interfere in and override the opinion of parents, whom conservatives otherwise claim to believe know best for their children:
On CBS Sunday Morning, correspondent Susan Spencer was once again wearing her leftist bias on her sleeve when she began arguing with American Principles Project president Terry Schilling over sex change procedures for children. The interview came during a segment on the growing fight between conservatives and leftists on whether children should be allowed to receive puberty blocking and cross sex hormones if they believe they’re the opposite sex.
Spencer kicked her biased questioning into high gear when she wailed at Schilling: "the parents of some of these children would look at you and say if you want to protect kids, leave us alone." This of course is absurd even for Spencer. Why would conservatives who believe children are being abused simply look the other way?
Schilling responded to her asinine question by noting "We are leaving your kids alone. We are the ones that are protecting them from getting sex change procedures and puberty blocking and cross sex hormones."
"I would tell them they don't," Schilling added. To which Spencer interrupted again: "who are you to say that?"
Schilling retorted by educating the Democrat CBS News activist: "I am an American citizen that gets to vote and organize people in politics. When we both disagree, then we go to the American people and make our cases to them and we see who can pass the most laws and right now we’re starting to win."
Tober then huffed, "Spencer would never grill a Democrat like this." It's telling that he has chosen to portray asking reasonable questions of a right-wing activist as "hostile" and an example of "leftist bias."
Alex Christy spent a June 21 post being angry at a documentary film that aired on PBS for highlighting conservative Christians who stopped hating LGBTQ people:
Not long after condemning Christian pastors for not wanting drag queens at their Christmas parade, PBS has managed to outdo themselves on Tuesday by claiming that the Bible teaches that there is nothing wrong with transitioning four-year olds.
A summary for the Independent Lens: Mama Bears documentary states, “ Mama Bears is anchored by three intrepid women who found their relationship to the LGBTQ+ community at direct odds with their Christian upbringing. The protagonists are all members of the eponymous group Mama Bears. What started as an online network of conservative Christian mothers seeking guidance for their queer children turned into a boots-on-the-ground organization.”
One of those women is Kimberly Shappley who declared that “When Kai was about four years old, she prayed and said she would like to go home and be with Jesus and never come back. All of the things I had learned about transgender children having a 41 percent risk of attempting suicide came flooding back.”
A series of news clips from 2014 covering the suicide of 17-year old Leelah Alcorn was then shown, the last of which featured ABC’s Lindsey Davis reading from Alcorn’s suicide note, “Alcorn wrote she felt like a girl trapped in a boy's body but that her family ‘Wanted me to be their perfect little straight Christian boy.’ ‘The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was.’”
Shappley would continue to use this emotional manipulation to justify her actions and shame anyone who objects, “I read about Leelah Alcorn and what she wrote. ‘Christian parents don't do this to your kids.’ And I realized I had a four-year-old who would rather go be with Jesus forever than stay here and have to live as a boy one more day.”
Yes, Christy thinks it's "emotional manipulation" to point out that some transgender children are driven to suicide due to rejection by their rigid right-wing parents. Christy ranted again when Shappley argued that her child being transgender is God's will:
Trying to justify herself, Shappley continued, “The Bible tells us not to call unclean what He has made clean. So if science says that my daughter was born transgender, that means that the Lord knit her together in my womb that way. And whether religious people disagree with me or not, I have to hold firm in the truth. And that is that she was fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God, and she was born transgender. I knew that I was choosing life for my kid.”
Of course, Shappley is treating her son’s body as unclean—hence the transition to something else—, but the real point of this documentary wasn’t to try to win a theological argument, but rather to shame other people by tying opposition to gender ideology and transitioning minors to suicides while mangling the definition of "Christian" and "conservative" beyond recognition.
Well, yeah, Christy wouldn't recognize not hating LGBTQ people -- even your own child -- as a Christian value.
Speaking of twisting things beyond recognition, a June 27 post by Bethany Kawalec bizarrely framed a right-wing website's hatred of a transgender actor as "compassion":
YouTube once again silenced opposition to the "transgender" movement, this time suspending BlazeTV.
BlazeTV podcaster and political commentator Lauren Chen discussed actor Elliot Page, formerly known as Ellen Page, and some of the disturbing stories detailed in the actor’s new book Pageboy: A Memoir. YouTube removed the video over so-called “hate speech” and suspended Blaze TV’s channel for one week. Chen explained in a tweet: “.@YouTube has SUSPENDED @BlazeTV over my recent video covering Ellen Page's mental illness, specifically her admitted experiences with self-harm & her ‘trans’ identity.”
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It remains unclear exactly which specific section of Chen’s video violated YouTube’s so-called hate speech policy. However, the policy identifies “Gender Identity and Expression” as a protected group and gives as an example of hate speech, “‘[Attribute noted above] is just a form of mental illness that needs to be cured.’”
Chen, however, did not ignore the obvious signs of mental illness described in Page’s memoir. She noted Page’s allegations of facing sexual abuse and the actor’s struggles with self-harm prior to transitioning. “It’s no wonder that Page, when we look at her now, has all of these different mental health struggles,” Chen said. She later added that “as an individual, I feel sorry for her. This is clearly someone who has been through, I think, a lot. She was also a child actor and growing up in Hollywood I think it is hard to escape unharmed, and in the same memoir that she’s written it seems she has serious psychological problems.”
Nowhere in the video does Chen encourage hatred or violence against Page or any other people claiming a “transgender” identity. Instead, Chen actually expresses great compassion for Page. “I do think there is an actual person, under all these labels, who is hurt, who is scarred, and who needs someone who genuinely has her best interests at heart,” Chen said.
Given that Chen has shown that she rejects Page's transgender identity through misgendering him and putting "trans" in scare quotes, it's highly unlikely that she has Page's "best interests at heart," unless those "best interests" involve fording him to stop being who he is. There's also the fact that Kawalec described Chen's video as an example of "opposition to the 'transgender' movement" (there's those scare quotes again).
Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth joined the crew of CBS Mornings on Wednesday to discuss the fallout to Dylan Mulvaney marketing campaign. It would prove to be a segment full of corporatespeak, Republican bashing, and covering up of just how badly the campaign backfired.
While talking about the Mulvaney campaign, co-host Gayle King illustrated, “How and why did it -- did it go so off the rails? Because that certainly wasn't your intention when you did one can to one person.”
For his part, Whitworth conceded it has “been a challenging few weeks,” but lamented “I think the conversation surrounding Bud Light has moved away from beer, and the conversation has become divisive. And Bud Light really doesn't belong there.”
Christy failed to justify the right-wing war against Bud Light over Mulvaney.
Chief transphobe Tierin-Rose Mandelburg raged at the Washington Post in another June 28 post for not irrationally hating a pair of transgender teenagers the way she does:
The "Washington Post" released a gross profile last week on two transgender teenagers. The piece was woven with pro-trans propaganda.
The piece by author Caitlin Gibson and photographer Emily Monforte supposedly took a few months to prepare as Monforte, who had a strange affixation for photographing queer youth, followed the lives of two “trans” children living in Los Angeles. One goes by Evan and is a 15-year-old boy who thinks he’s a girl and the other, with the same type of confusion, is Natasha who is 17.
WaPo first highlighted Evan who claimed to want to be like Barbies as a child. He also claimed to frequently watch “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which is a series featuring men in fishnets dancing and acting in some of the most hypersexualized ways. It’s safe to say that a show of the sort is not appropriate for children.
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Honestly, I could make fun of the delusion young Evan is experiencing but quite frankly, the situation is heartbreaking. In the piece, he explained how he dances ballet at school and stares at his male body all day with dysphoria.
Mandelburg doesn't have to be coy -- we already know she's so lacking in basic humanity that making fun of transgender people is second nature to her. But as usual, she's too busy raging at the mere existence of transgender people, and the refusal of others not to share her unhinged hate for them, to remember to do that:
The authors emphasized the need for a piece to push what “trans life is like” at this specific moment. “At a time when transgender youths have been targeted by state legislatures across the country, when headlines often highlight the effects of laws that would restrict trans kids from accessing medical care or playing sports or using certain bathrooms, the rest of their lives — the nuanced entirety of their childhoods — can be overshadowed.”
Overall, it’s incredibly obvious that by WaPo has a pro-trans agenda. By giving these two young men the opportunity to share their stories, the outlet is enabling and encouraging a delusion. It’s clear that both Natasha and Evan have mental health struggles and issues that are not solved by identifying as something they’re not.
But the WaPo and the leftist media still wants you to affirm and believe their delusion.
Yes, Mandelburg thinks allowing transgender people to be who they are is somehow a sinister "pro-trans agenda." She has to pretend her hate is logical in order to affirm and believe her delusion that what other people do with their lives is any of her business.
Meanwhile -- despite claiming that it's a "media research" organization -- the MRC did not tell its readers that Fox News got caught injecting biased anti-transgender language into the Associated Press and Reuters wire stories it reprints, at one point altering a quote from a state politician that referenced "gender-affirming care" to instead state "sex reassignment care." One wonders if any of the numerous former MRC employees who now work for Fox News had a hand in doing any of that.
Summer of hate
the anti-transgender hate the MRC spewed during Pride Month continued through the rest of the summer. That hate, though, occasionally has to be supplemented by other misinformation; A July 2 post by Tober complained that MSNBC host Jen Psaki "concocted a bizarre conspiracy theory that the Republican Party is rehashing the so-called 'southern strategy' (which itself is a debunked conspiracy theory) to 'recruit' Muslim Americans to 'go after' transgender people." Tober's evidence that the Southern strategy is a "debunked conspiracy theory" is a link to an article by noted fabricator Dinesh D'Souza, so that didn't exactly age well. Tim Graham melted down over a transgender politician in a July 6 post:
Liberal media outlets are forever congratulating Democrats for "trailblazer" candidates. On Wednesday's The Lead with Jake Tapper, CNN turned its focus on Delaware, where Sen. Tom Carper is retiring. That means black Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester will run for Senate, leaving an open House seat for fellow Democrat Sarah McBride, a former Beau Biden aide who is transgender. They not only congratulated McBride for her "historic" possibility, but for open that "lifelong Catholic" Joe Biden's mind to "transgender rights."
Graham further complained that in another CNN segment, the correspondent "explained it was a 'perilous time' for transgenders 'given the way transgender rights have been so politicized by members of the Republican Party.'" Graham didn't disprove the claim.
A July 14 post by Cassandra DeVries complained that Republicans who tried to impose their transphobia on the defense budget were called out:
CNN This Morning bashed Republicans for a military spending bill that excluded payments for abortion, diversity promotion, and transgender care to military personnel on Friday. Its reporters exaggerated the past bipartisanism of the bill, claimed Republicans were throwing a fit and using the military as a political pawn, and seemingly compared the cut benefits to rolling back racial integration.
Anchor Phil Mattingly introduced the bill as “the cornerstone of U.S. defense policy” and “a pillar of bipartisan agreement,” and CNN congressional correspondent Lauren Fox referred to more than 60 years of bipartisan support this bill previously received.
[...]
Once again, CNN disparaged Republicans. This time painting them as malicious, anti-military “hardliners” for refusing to pay for transition surgeries, hormone treatments, and abortions for military personnel. CNN did not mention the negative mental health affects accompanying each of the aforementioned procedures or money Republicans saved tax payers.
Instead of objectively laying the facts before viewers, CNN censored the conservative point of view and sought to villainize Republicans with a distorted presentation of the news.
Mandelburg complained in a July 21 post that a a British bank reportedly denied an account to a British anti-transgender group: "It’s become increasingly common for establishments like banks to not only dip their toes into areas of bias, but dive in head-first. These establishments are choosing to push a narrative rather than merely perform their jobs." Funny, we remember that the MRC was totally cool with people refusing to do business for ideological reasons when it came to web designers who didn't want to design websites for LGBT people, even portraying that hate as "free speech."
A July 25 post by Curtis Houck groused that the media pointed out the anti-transgender school policies of Virginia's Republican governor:
In reaction to Governor Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) new policy unveiled last week for schools regarding transgenderism, local media in the D.C. market (including an NPR affiliate) and across the Potomac in Virginia again twisted themselves into nervous knots over how on Earth voters in the Commonwealth could have elected someone in a platform of parental involvement in education.
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Washington-area NBC affiliate WRC published an article that sympathized with transgender students being unable to be openly celebrated in schools versus parents having the right to know what their child may (or may not) be doing in school.
In “Youngkin’s new policies will affect transgender students. Here’s what may change,” Julie Carey and Maggie More fretted that the “controversial new education policy...affecting the way transgender students are treated...runs counter to the plans some school districts have put in place in recent years.”’
After bashing Youngkin for focusing on “what he calls ‘parents rights’” that “were ignored and disregarded by his predecessor Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration,” it took until the fifth paragraph to actually explain what Youngkin announced that a child’s identity rests with parents, not a child or teacher’s personal whims[.]
Of course, by that same logic, the parents are operating on "whims" as well. Later, Houck effectively admitted the transphobic intent of the policy by noting another news segment featuring a parent with a transgender child who opposes the policy, adding that "the policy doesn’t even affect families ... who wholly endorse their child permanently altering their bodies, chemically, physically, and metaphorically."
Alex Christy spent a July 29 post being mad that PolitiFact explained what "chestfeeding" was in response to attacks by Republican transphobes:
Grace Abels, “a staff writer focused on LGBTQ issues,” for PolitiFact came out with an explainer piece on Friday that sought to defend the practice of “chestfeeding” for “people who identify as men or as nonbinary.” Seriously, this is a fact-checking outlet.
Naturally, the piece originated due to the fact that “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has frequently faced political criticism. But a new wave hit in early July over breastfeeding — or ‘chestfeeding,’ as the agency described it on a website.”
After referencing a couple of tweets, Abels also mentioned “U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., a former OB-GYN, condemned the CDC’s language and expressed concern over medications that may be taken to induce lactation.”
Abels then stepped in to attempt to save the day, “Some of the claims misrepresented what chestfeeding is, how the term is used and raised fears over medications involved in induced lactation.”
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Not only did PolitiFact go to bat for the absurdist notion that men can get pregnant and that “breastfeeding” can be a problematic word, but its entire premise that “chestfeeding” is just as good as breastfeeding required that the reader not click on the link to see that Republican senator was correct to be worried.
Mandelburg returned for another meltdown in an Aug. 7 post over a razor company featuring a transgender person in an ad:
Harry’s Razors is a men's razor company. Recently it partnered with a transgender man, aka a biological woman, to promote its products.
Over the weekend, the Twitter account called End Wokeness shared a video of a “man” named Luke Pearson. “He’s” a transgender male, so a female, and was promoting one of Harry’s “Face & Body Shave Sets.” The set included a Harry’s razor for a man's face and a razor from Harry's women's company, Flamingo, for customers to shave their bodies.
"My cringe radar is currently off the charts," Mandelburg sneered, going out to tout how "numerous conservative or just level-headed people tweeted their distaste with the company's move and Pearson in general." She went on to state that "Some even called for a boycott of the brand like people did for Budlight and Target when they prioritized agenda pushing over basically everything else," oblivious to the irony that she -- a person who gets paid to push agendas -- is accusing someone else of "agenda pushing."
Clay Waters raged that a transgender person was on his TV in an Aug. 22 post:
In the latest example of a tax-funded media outlet blurring obvious biological lines for ideological purposes, PBS News Weekend’s Saturday edition celebrated a Montana teen, “assigned female at birth,” who started taking puberty blockers at 14 and “feels a connection to masculinity.”
Host John Yang introduced the segment on Montana “banning certain medical treatments for minors with gender dysphoria.”
The segment opened in the Beardslee home in Helena, Montana, with a teenager making fried rice for the family. Then came a blizzard of head-scratching language from both the teenager and reporter Joe Lesar of the tax-supported journalistic enterprise Montana PBS.
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Is this journalism or therapy? Stories on children with gender dysphoria typically advocate for them and their feelings, and suggest opposition is heartless.
Waters also whined that the segment quoted state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, "a biological man who identifies as transgender"; the MRC hates Zephyr for standing up for transgender rights. He also complained that the segment "said opponents 'consider' this a "'fad' without exploring the statistics," but the statistics he cites showing that more younger people identify as transgender prove nothing.
An anonymously written Aug. 27 post, credited only to "MRC Latino Staff," lashed out at Telemundo for not hating transgender people and, thus, promoting a "trans agenda":
Comcast-NBC affiliate Telemundo does whatever they can to preserve the mothership’s perfect Corporate Equality Index score. This includes blatantly promoting the trans agenda, such as is the case in this report from the network’s weekend newscast.
Watch as correspondent Solangie Sosa unquestioningly parrots trans activist language while profiling a transgender student (born female) who opposes a new Florida rule that would compel college students to use the bathroom corresponding to their actual biological anatomy:
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The report ran for 2 minutes and 12 seconds, but only provided 17 seconds to a supporter of the rule. The rest of the interviews were with opponents of the rule, and as you can see from the clip above, the report veered off of actual journalism and into outright trans advocacy.
The most unintentionally funny moment of the report is the moment, towards the end of the featured clip, where the correspondent flushes a toilet as filler video. This very neatly encapsulated the seriousness this report should be accorded.
The unhinged anti-transgender hate by the MRC neatly encapsulates the seriousness its rantings should be accorded.
