There have been quite a number of media essays published recently by those who are concerned about misinformation, the collapse of trust in the fourth estate, and the increasing power of alternative or conspiracy narratives. Not one of these essays – and not one of the media critics writing about this issue – appear willing to address one of the fundamental issues eroding trust in the press: the media’s relentless promotion of gender ideology. The media wants people’s trust, while constantly offering them a challenge: “Who are you going to believe – us or your lying eyes?”
Let’s take a much-mocked recent headline from the San Francisco Chronicle, published (not coincidentally) on June 1: “Sex and gender are binaries? Sorry, that’s a scientific falsehood.” The column, by one Ash Zemenick, begins thusly: “Ask many Americans these days and they will insist upon the scientific validity of a binary definition of sex. This line of thinking holds that there are only two sexes available for humans to inhabit: male or female. As a doctorate-carrying scientist, however, I attest that this is false.”
Americans haven’t suddenly come to the realization that there are two genders “these days” – people have recognized the gender binary for all of recorded history, a handful of cherry-picked anomalies notwithstanding. The author, of course, has a rainbow, a trans flag, and pronouns in his Twitter bio. He frequently cosplays as a woman, and identifies as “non-binary.” But don’t worry – he is a “doctorate-carrying scientist.” That, of course, simply undermines trust in both the press and scientists.
It’s not just newspapers, either. The entire press has gotten with the game. The latest cover of the Sports Illustrated’s 2023 swimsuit edition – which was always a disgrace – now features Grammy award-winning pop star Kim Petras wearing a bikini and prominently featuring fake breasts. Petras is not a woman – Petras is a man who underwent a sex change surgery as a teen. Responses to the announcement on Twitter were almost universally people noting that Petras is, in fact, a male. Readers are expected to play along. Increasingly, they are refusing to.
The press is so bent on promoting transgenderism that Andrea Long Chu, a biological man who identifies as “transgender” and once went by “Andrew,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism this year. The Pulitzer Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, and it was awarded to a man who constantly writes about his passion for pornography, once writing bluntly that “sissy porn made me trans.”
Chu admits to being “hopelessly addicted” to pornography and writes about it constantly, stating at one point that: “Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness.” As Joan Smith put it at Unherd: “Andrea Long Chu’s Pulitzer win is an insult to women.”
But the most egregious recent example of press gaslighting is the June cover of British GLAMOUR magazine, which features a photograph of Logan Brown, a “pregnant man,” wearing a suit jacket with a pregnant belly protruding from underneath it. Brown is a woman attempting to “transition” to man who has become pregnant; this, says Brown, is evidence that “men can get pregnant”:
