How Media Propagates Gender Ideology

Gender ideology is the nail in the coffin of the Fourth Estate

Example A: Judge reverses ban on banning transgender athletes from sports

I went to journalism school and actually showed up for class. Bragging aside, the monumental fail of nearly every media outlet in this country feels personal. If not for lazy, corporate, cowardly, ideologically captured mainstream media which long ago gave up on journalism, gender ideology would not have lasted two minutes in any sector of our society. Instead, through universal, active and purposeful misinformation, and active and purposeful suppression of facts, the media has not only misled the public and nurtured a dangerous ideology, but, ironically, through their dogged fealty to a lie, has destroyed trust in their own business. It’s in spite of the media that 70% of Americans now think men should participate in sports according to their birth sex. Let’s look at just one recent eyeball-searing, hair-tearing example of the mindless propaganda that has failed a generation of people.

In the days following the decision by a Kentucky judge to erase the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX, overwriting sex with gender identity, every single media outlet framed that event incorrectly.

NBC, Associated Press, the Washington Post, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, heck, even Fox ran the headline: “Judge scraps Biden's Title IX rules, reversing expansion of protections for LGBTQ+ students.” The New York Times ran a similar version: “Judge Rejects Biden’s Title IX Rules, Scrapping Protections for Trans Students.” I could not find evidence that NPR had covered the story at all. That ubiquitous headline makes it sound like an attack on students who identify as trans. That their civil rights have been removed, and now it’s A-okay to abuse trans-identified kids. It sounds like this story is, in fact, about trans-identified kids.

Uhhhh no. None of that is true. That false, biased headline and reporting that doesn’t even pretend to be accurate or objective misled millions of people. The judge’s decision restored women's Title IX rights. The whole story is about women, and women’s rights but you would not know that because women are never mentioned. Not once. Because of biased, ideologically driven reporting, most people never understood that Biden's changes, proposed in 2022 and pencilled in without authority in 2024, destroyed girls' and women's rights by redefining sex as gender identity. It was never explained by craven people who identified as journalists that the lovely sounding “inclusion” was actually inclusion of males in female sports. Which makes them no longer female sports but rather mixed sex sports. Since every trans-identifying student has a sex, and they very much know what it is or they couldn’t claim to be trans in the first place, they too have always been protected from discrimination and sexual harassment based on their sex. But it has never been a civil right for males to declare themselves eligible for women’s sports and spaces. This is not a "loss of protection" for trans-identified students, but a restoration of women's rights, rights which are under attack by trans activists.

Big fist bump to journalist and author Gerald Posner who tweeted: “The legacy media will report this as a setback for LGBTQ+ students. It is not. It is a setback only for trans activists and those who want to eliminate the protections of Title IX for women's sports and single sex spaces.”

On the daily, I read outrageously biased, erroneous headlines. Lots of them. MSN spewed, “Republicans push new federal ban on trans athletes.” It sounds, again, like an attack on students with trans identities who want to do sports. Unfair. Anti-trans. That headline is misleading and patently false. Any journalist worthy of the title knows that no student athlete has ever been banned from sports for having a trans identity. NO ONE IS BANNED. EVER. If headlines were clear about that, and every day we read that Republicans push for bill that protects women’s sports, which is factual, attitudes toward “inclusion” of males in female sports would be decidedly different. It would be quite hard to advocate for males in female sports. The incorrect framing of this as an attack on transgender athletes has misled the public and allowed women’s rights to be both invisible and erased. Every student, regardless of their identity, has always been welcome to compete in their sex category. This is so very tiresome to have to repeat. Most girls who identify as male or nonbinary elect to stay in the girls’ category. In fact, because they’re female, girls who identify as boys or nonbinary need a female category to be able to do sports fairly. I’ve never seen that addressed by the media. But of course, trans activists don’t give a flying whatev about girls, even if you call them trans boys.

Wisconsin Public Radio ran the same dead wrong, inexcusable headline: “Ron Johnson reintroduces bill to ban transgender student athletes in school sports.” If MSN or WPR or any of the organizations who purport to inform was doing journalism instead of acting as the propaganda arm of gender ideology, they would write, Republicans push new federal law to ban males from female sports. Readers would know what’s actually going on, and from this factual information, could decide for themselves how they felt about males in female sports. And if journalists wrote factually correct headlines, people—I’m thinking specifically of the 206 House Democrats who voted against protection of women and girls’ sports—would need to be honest that they were, in fact, supporting males in female sports. No one could pretend they were protecting trans athletes because accurate journalism would consistently and repeatedly explain that TRANS-IDENTIFYING ATHLETES ARE NOT BANNED.

Another example of the now-normalized abuse of language, the Wall Street Journal splashed: “House Passes GOP’s Transgender Sports Bill.” Aaaughh, hang me with a modifier—it’s a WOMEN’S SPORTS BILL. Why is it always framed as a trans story? It’s not! It’s about women’s sports, women’s rights. Focus on women, ffs. May I suggest: House Passes GOP’s Women’s Sports Bill?

There’s no getting around it, gender ideology is a hard sell when you use accurate language. Imagine if you read this: Girls feel betrayed when a completely intact, hormonally unadulterated boy who believes he’s a girl won a girls’ state championship. Or this: Children may identify as transgender when they internally feel female even though they were born with a body that has a penis and testicles. Or: Man who raped woman subsequently identifies as a woman and is housed in the female estate. Imagine if all news stories were written this clearly. How do you think this would have affected knowledge and acceptance of gender ideology?

Language is the primary tool of journalism, and not coincidentally, also the primary tool of gender ideology. Since 1846, the Associated Press has set the standard for journalism. Advancing the power of facts is their tagline. Starting in 1953, AP published guidance in Stylebooks to achieve the goals of journalism—unbiased accuracy and easily understood information. But the AP Stylebook began issuing some disturbing guidelines in 2017 around transgender issues. That could be because they outsourced guidelines in their Transgender Coverage Topical Guide to WPATH, a self-declared expert advocacy group that has a casual relationship with science and facts. After updates in 2022 and 2023, here are some of the AP Transgender Coverage guidance for journalists:

• Use preferred pronouns:

  Always use the pronouns a transgender person uses, regardless of their sex assigned at birth.

• Avoid "biological sex":

  When discussing gender, use "sex assigned at birth" instead of "biological sex".

• Don't "deadname":

  Never use a transgender person's former name (before transition) unless absolutely necessary and with their consent.

• Identify as transgender only when relevant:

  Don't automatically mention someone's transgender status unless it's pertinent to the story.

It’s been said whoever controls the language controls the culture. Never was this more true than with regard to transgenderism. It’s impossible to use the language of gender ideology, as above, to write a factual unbiased article. This “guidance” advises journalists to lie and omit relevant facts—antithetical to journalism. Pronouns convey facts of a person’s sex. Wrong sex pronouns are of course factually incorrect and mislead rather than inform readers. I admit, “biological sex” is redundant; sex is accurate and sufficient. “Assigned at birth”is factually incorrect. As to “deadnaming,” it’s important to know a person’s birth name. It’s relevant that Camden (Sadie) Schreiner never placed higher than 19th while racing as Camden, but broke school records when he raced as Sadie on the women’s team. If a person who has attempted to change the fundamental facts of their personhood is in the news for whatever reason, it’s relevant that this person has affected this radical change.

Dictating that a journalist use ideological terms rather than factually correct terms is counter to the basic precepts of journalism—fact finding, observing, questioning, informing. Being told to use a title like CEO or Assistant Secretary is an easily verifiable matter of accurate reporting. Being told to call a man a woman for the sake of “sensitivity” is authoritarian overreach—it’s being told to lie, to misinform. Following these guidelines, wrong-sex pronouns for example, assumes acceptance of gender ideology as fact, that a trans woman is a woman. It normalizes the lie that a man who believes he is a woman, is a woman. Facts are not outdated, nor can they be slurs. Using nigger to describe a black person has always been a slur. Man is a biological fact, and has never been a slur, regardless if that man identifies as a woman.

Fully a third of the reading public do not know the sex of a person described as a transgender woman. Here’s a headline in the Los Angeles Times today: “Republican bill would ban transgender girls from high school sports in California. Setting aside the fact that this is incorrect, are transgender girls girls who identify as boys? Boys who identify as girls? Did someone change sex? This ideological language is meant to obfuscate rather than clarify, indoctrinate rather than inform. It’s incompatible with journalism in the same way sports participation according to gender identity is incompatible with sex categories. They cannot coexist.

Longtime journalist Uri Berliner came to realize this incompatibility, journalism vs ideology, which ultimately led to his resignation after 25 years at NPR. He wrote: “The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to ‘keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups’ and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee. In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.”

Berliner continued: “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line. The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.)”

The National Review took a look at the Associated Press 2022 Transgender Coverage Topical Guide and found “the guidance appears to explicitly embrace the language and claims of transgender activists, a move likely to steer newsrooms away from objectively framing the issue.” This guidance has been adopted almost universally by U.S. media, which for at least seven years, has acted as the propaganda arm of transgenderism.

One shocking example, “The guide explains that the word ‘identify’ can be useful, but alternative phrasing ‘like ‘is a woman’ is more to the point than ‘identifies as a woman.’”

Wha?! As anyone can see “is a woman” is not more to the point than “identifies as a woman”— “is a woman” is the opposite of “identifies as a woman.” A person who identifies as a woman is a man. It’s not hard to see the disastrous effect this guidance has on accuracy, on truth, on (mis)informing readers, especially when enacted on a near-universal scale.

Realizing that sports, more than any other news segment, would require a stronger brand of “guidance,” the AP Transgender Coverage Guide expanded from just terminology to pushing trans activist talking points on men in women’s sports. It provided journalists this background: “more than a dozen states passed laws banning transgender athletes from certain sports teams. Opponents say that the measures unfairly target an already marginalized community, and that rules and monitoring in individual leagues and conferences render such legislation unnecessary” and “proponents of such restrictions assert that transgender women have an athletic advantage over cisgender women. Transgender athletes’ backers argue, among other things, that individuals are different, that sweeping restrictions overblow the prevalence of the issue, and that it’s not possible to know with certainty what gives any particular athlete, transgender or cisgender, a competitive edge.”

The Transgender Guide downplays the mountains of legitimate science (science should be avoided, recall) that prove male physical advantage over females as mere assertions by people who want to restrict transgender athletes’ access to sports, while listing off a handful of utterly false or meaningless activist talking points. Those talking points show up, without citation, parroted as fact, in almost every story on “transgender” (male) athletes in women’s sports.

For any number of reasons—they’re lazy, they’re ideologically captured, they’re not paid enough to do their own research, they don’t have the time to talk to other sources, they’re following their editors’ instructions and may be reprimanded or fired if they don’t—U.S. sports journalists rarely cite Emma Hilton, Tommy Lundberg, Cathy Devine, Greg Brown, Michael Joyner, and others who’ve published widely on male advantage in sports. And for those same reasons/excuses, I read about the unfairly targeted marginalized community of “transgender athletes” with numbing regularity. That would be the profoundly marginalized men who declared they were women and demanded to compete in the women’s category, and the International Olympic Committee and the NCAA and virtually every major sports organization said, “Right this way ma’am.” If women could be so marginalized. It’s beyond infuriating how frequently I read in formerly respected news sources that men should be allowed in women’s sports because some truly elite women can beat some very unathletic men. People are different. It’s painful that anyone would expose their ignorance in this way. That there are only a few men in women’s sports. So a little bit of nut in a nut-free product is okay, right? That suddenly, in 2025, we can no longer even discern whether an athlete is male or female. These “arguments” and ideological language are an embarrassment to any type of synaptic activity, and yet they have been repeated so often, so widely, they’ve shaped our society. For the worse.

I’m reminded of why I got into this dogfight in the first place. It was watching 18-year-old Caster Semenya jog to a 1:55 gold medal in the women’s 800 meter at the 2009 Track & Field World Championships. I thought something was off, lots of observers thought something was off, and as it turned out South African Sport and IAAF, track’s governing body, both knew something was off. Both organizations conducted sex verification tests that we now know revealed Semenya is male with a Disorder of Sexual Development that results in internal testes and undeveloped external genitalia. Nonetheless to “protect” Semenya, they kept this information secret, and allowed Semenya to continue to race in the women’s category. Apparently, the fact that they were allowing a male to compete in the female category, and allowing obvious unfairness to women at the very top of the sport did not figure into that decision. The media were quick to paint Semenya as a victim, and demonized anyone who questioned his sex. They eagerly accepted and repeated preferred pronouns and talking points—she’s a woman with naturally high testosterone. Stop policing women’s bodies. She’s just a fast woman. She’s a marginalized person just doing the sport she loves. Questioning her is racist, sexist. Sound familiar? Even after it was revealed in his own Court of Arbitration for Sport case that Semenya is male with 46 XY 5-ARD, a DSD that only affects males, the media continues to call Semenya a woman to this day. It was always about Semenya, never a word about the women he unfairly beat, the careers he ruined. Journalists failed to do journalism and promoted, and continue to promote, a lie that harms women. Due to media misinformation and suppression of facts, the vast majority of the public believe Semenya is a woman.

Though Semenya is just one person with a DSD, the media’s role has been the same with regard to gender ideology, on an exponentially larger scale. Whoever controls the language controls culture. Media uses the language of ideology, and it has allowed that ideology to infect our culture to the detriment of everyone.