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.
This post was originally published on FAIR.