I would bet a whole night at the bar that this language is derived from a repository operated by the Trans Journalist Association and/or its sister organization Open News, and that every reporter you cited (or his or her editor) is a member of one or both of those organization, OR that a later work plagiarized an earlier example.
I'm still struggling to understand why so many people in so many places in the US have bought into this "gender ideology." I've seen some discussion about its *source* in "follow the money" type articles (and the birth of gender studies disciplines), but it's one thing to sell the ideology and another thing to buy it and a whole other thing to defend it emotionally and to demand it be followed.
It's so illogical, so un-obvious--and yet it seems so many are buying it hook, line and sinker. How did that happen?
This is exactly the kind of using your obsessive and pedantic focus to reveal weird journalism failures stuff I subscribe for. Great find and great summary!
The phrase "sex assigned at birth" is misleading too since no one assigns one's sex at birth anymore than one assign's a person's hair color or height. These traits are what they are.
All they have to do is add "supporters contend" or "supporters argue", at the beginning of the sentence and it would be fine. I mean, the reporters aren't scientists. I feel like that sort of attribution is almost always used when reporting on a disputed thing?
It has been years since I have paid any attention to the Crank News Network. This cut-and-paste stuff is really appalling. Journalism has been shredded in this country. It lies on the cutting room floor. It has been ripped up by ideologues, by the desire of journos to play on Team Blue, certainly by social media, by elevating pc narratives over facts.
I want my country back, I want my journalism back. I want elite illiberals who are falsely referred to as liberals to keep their authoritarian mitts off our institutions. I want the demented wokeness that is tearing apart activist groups and philanthropies and media outlets to go away.
Regarding the crazy gender ideology afoot, almost no one adhered to Andrea Long Chu-type nonsense until like fifteen minutes ago. Just say no people, say no to all the nonsense, the power-grubbing. the performative social media activity. Join me and just say no.
For me, it started maybe in 2015 with bathroom bills that I understood would help keep people from harassing people clearly trying to pass as women and minding their business. I could understand they would be afraid of assault in the men’s bathroom. And the counter argument of “those pedos might rape girls or women!” seemed weird since it seemed far more likely that a man might assault little boys in the men’s room. So what, we need 4 bathroom? One each for adults and one each for children?
Anyway. Then it was a matter of figuring out insurance for people needing sex change operations. I felt sympathy for this but figured the doctors would help sort it out. I believed we were basically a rational people in the end, no matter the culture war vultures on either side.
Next thing I know it’s a raging storm and I’ve been trying to sort fact from fiction ever since. I want to support people who need it, but it’s a damn mess.
Take it a step further; don't tale them seriously on *any* remotely political issue, as they're clearly untrustworthy.
On a semi related note, I have a long running pet theory that noticing this type of thing and then being gas-lit about it is part of what makes the US right wing so susceptible to conspiracy theories, they seem much more plausible when you have so many blatant examples of the media lying to you (and all your normie friends trying to cover for them).
"Many outlets dug themselves into a deep hole on this issue by simply acting as stenographers and megaphones for activist groups rather than doing their jobs." Such a statement would apply to a lot of issues of which trans medicine is only one.
Google doesn't show any prior instances of the phrases "medically necessary, evidence-based care," "multidisciplinary approach," and "assigned gender" in the same sentence, but there are more than 2,000 since then that copy this wording. So it looks like CNN's Jen Christensen, a longtime member of the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, is patient zero.
I had explained to friends that major publications had been largely court stenographers for trans/gender activist. And so have the most prestigious universities, government, NGOs, glitterati, and so on.
So, how do you save face and climb off the sycophancy choo-choo? I don't see how and they will get deeper and deeper into the hole.
The situation parallels the Catholic Church's hierarchy vis a vis child abuse. Not so much the abuse itself, but the endless cover-up and lying.
When I wrote to Tawna Sachez, my representative in the Oregon House of Representatives, last June to protest proposed legislation that protected gender-affirming care for minors, I found clear signs that trans activists had already coached her office on how to respond to what they likely view as "anti trans" correspondence.
The staffer responded in part:
"Thank you also for taking the time to detail to your opposition to the portion of HB 2002 that protects gender-affirming care for minors, and for sharing these resources. HB 2002 only expands gender-affirming care without parental consent to youth over the age of 15, and does so to protect youth whose parents may not support their decision to seek such care. While I hear your concerns regarding puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, I think it is worth noting that every leading medical association in the United States supports such care, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatry Association, and the Endocrine Society. This study from the Journal of Adolescent health, along with several other studies, supports a relationship between access to gender-affirming care and lower rates of depression and suicidality among transgender and nonbinary youth."
I'm one of many centrist Democrats in Oregon who despairs of ever breaking progressives' stranglehold on the legislature.
Still, I couldn't let those canned trans talking points go unanswered. I responded as follows:
Thank you for replying to my note. In your reply, you said: "While I hear your concerns regarding puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, I think it is worth noting that every leading medical association in the United States supports such care . . ." To counter that, I would like to offer facts about the very different status of gender medicine in Europe:
A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe
Doubts have now come to the Netherlands, where the most-contested interventions for children and adolescents were developed.
Europe, where governments and medical authorities in at least fivencountries that once led the way on gender-affirming treatments for childrennand adolescents are now reversing course, arguing that the science undergirding these treatments is unproven, and their benefits unclear.
The about-face by these countries concerns the so-called Dutch protocol, which has for at least a decade been viewed by many clinicians as the gold standardmapproach to care for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria.
Kids on the protocol are given medical and mental-health assessments; somemgo on to take medicines that block their natural puberty and, when they’re older, receive cross-sex hormones and eventually surgery. But in Finland, Sweden, France, Norway, and the U.K., scientists and public-health officials are warning that, for some young people, these interventions may do more harm than good.
European health authorities are not reversing themselves on broader issues of trans rights, particularly for adults. But this turn against the Dutch protocol has inflamed activists and politicians in the United States. Republicans who have worked to ban its recommended treatments claim that the shifts in Europe prove they’re right. Their opponents argue that any doubts at all about the protocol, raised in any country whatsoever, are simply out of step with settled science: They point to broad endorsements by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, among other groups; and they assert that when it comes to the lifesaving nature of gender-affirming care, “doctors agree.”
But doctors do not agree, particularly in Europe, where no treatments have been banned but a genuine debate is unfurling in this field. In Finland, for example, new treatment guidelines put out in 2020 advised against the use of puberty-blocking drugs and other medical interventions as a first line of care for teens with adolescent-onset dysphoria. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare followed suit in 2022, announcing that such treatments should be given only under exceptional circumstances or in a research context.
Shortly after that, the National Academy of Medicine in France recommended "la plus grande réserve" in the use of puberty blockers. Just last month, a national investigatory board in Norway expressed concerns about the treatment. And the U.K.’s only national gender clinic for children, the Tavistock, has been ordered to close its doors after a government-commissioned report found, among other problems, that its Dutch-protocol-based approach to treatment lacked sufficient evidence.
There has been at least one noteworthy development since the Atlantic piece was published:
England Limits Use of Puberty-Blocking Drugs to Research Only
The National Health Service of England announced on Friday that it would limit the use of puberty-suppressing drugs to children enrolled in clinical trials. The change comes as the agency’s pediatric gender services have struggled to keep up with soaring demand.
A document explaining the agency’s reasoning stated that “there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment.”
Needless to say, I received no reply to this information from the staffer or his boss. There's no daylight between trans rights activists and the progressives in the Oregon legislature.
The only party of the article that felt (adorably) naive was when Jesse said it would be awkward for news outlets to climb out of this hole they've dug when the culture comes back to its senses about trans issues. We've how they (and other public figures) handle the shifting political attitudes when their views become untrendy: just pretend you never said that.
And if you get an email from Jesse saying, "but didn't you say that last year?" you just ignore the email.
Politicians have done this as long as I can remember, and editorial boards are these days political organizations.
I think the phrase should be "news spam". These unending boilerplates are a reason why AI's - trained with news sources - tend to statistically overstate these phrases, poisoned. It is news spam.
While CNN has not really been researching and conveying news for years inside the US, versus CNN international, all "web based" news reporting is an echo system for any statement which is fed into it - "X Bombs Hospital killing thousands" suddenly is news of the hour when it's a hoax, and erupts on hundreds of sites with tiny variations.
If on websites you could use an ad blocker to (a) block articles with false statements and.notify the source of "spam" the circulation would become bad enough news sources would start to alter stock phrases. Or (b) rewrite false statements before displaying, hilighting or listing false statements and transmitting "spam" notifications.
Take "Illegal Alien", "Undocumented" and other terms as a good example. A non-citizen without an unexpired visa is the core concept, whether visitor, residence, or work visa. Not illegal, not "Undocumented". Millions of people enter the US without "documents" under "visa waiver". The terminology should be cleaned up and made accurate. Non-residents overstaying visits.
Another is LGBTQ+ - I am gay, not LGBTQ+ and statements made about gay men and, for instance "conversion theapy" apply primarily to gays, a much lesser degree lesbians, and that's it. "Anti-LGBTQ+" legiation has nothing to do with gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and statements are factually incorrect.
Virtually all statements relative to trans are false or prevaricating - "affirmation" is "experimental treatment." "Alleviate" distress is "provoke" distress, "trans"children is "gay or lesbian" children. "Assigned" at birth is "identified", and "spectrum" is "binary".
I'm convinced the only strategy to fight such mechanically reproduced nonsense is armies of AI bots publishing at such a volume that it statistically overwhelms filtering systems.
This is why I don't trust media -- either side, left or right. The desire to be on the "right side of history" and pursue an activist agenda has turned journalists into stenographers who regurgitate whatever bias they prefer. Trying to find to the "truth" or showing curiosity are just so boring.
I would bet a whole night at the bar that this language is derived from a repository operated by the Trans Journalist Association and/or its sister organization Open News, and that every reporter you cited (or his or her editor) is a member of one or both of those organization, OR that a later work plagiarized an earlier example.
I'm still struggling to understand why so many people in so many places in the US have bought into this "gender ideology." I've seen some discussion about its *source* in "follow the money" type articles (and the birth of gender studies disciplines), but it's one thing to sell the ideology and another thing to buy it and a whole other thing to defend it emotionally and to demand it be followed.
It's so illogical, so un-obvious--and yet it seems so many are buying it hook, line and sinker. How did that happen?
The phrases "medically necessary" and "evidence-based" are key for ensuring insurance coverage of a treatment.
This is exactly the kind of using your obsessive and pedantic focus to reveal weird journalism failures stuff I subscribe for. Great find and great summary!
The phrase "sex assigned at birth" is misleading too since no one assigns one's sex at birth anymore than one assign's a person's hair color or height. These traits are what they are.
All they have to do is add "supporters contend" or "supporters argue", at the beginning of the sentence and it would be fine. I mean, the reporters aren't scientists. I feel like that sort of attribution is almost always used when reporting on a disputed thing?
It has been years since I have paid any attention to the Crank News Network. This cut-and-paste stuff is really appalling. Journalism has been shredded in this country. It lies on the cutting room floor. It has been ripped up by ideologues, by the desire of journos to play on Team Blue, certainly by social media, by elevating pc narratives over facts.
I want my country back, I want my journalism back. I want elite illiberals who are falsely referred to as liberals to keep their authoritarian mitts off our institutions. I want the demented wokeness that is tearing apart activist groups and philanthropies and media outlets to go away.
Regarding the crazy gender ideology afoot, almost no one adhered to Andrea Long Chu-type nonsense until like fifteen minutes ago. Just say no people, say no to all the nonsense, the power-grubbing. the performative social media activity. Join me and just say no.
For me, it started maybe in 2015 with bathroom bills that I understood would help keep people from harassing people clearly trying to pass as women and minding their business. I could understand they would be afraid of assault in the men’s bathroom. And the counter argument of “those pedos might rape girls or women!” seemed weird since it seemed far more likely that a man might assault little boys in the men’s room. So what, we need 4 bathroom? One each for adults and one each for children?
Anyway. Then it was a matter of figuring out insurance for people needing sex change operations. I felt sympathy for this but figured the doctors would help sort it out. I believed we were basically a rational people in the end, no matter the culture war vultures on either side.
Next thing I know it’s a raging storm and I’ve been trying to sort fact from fiction ever since. I want to support people who need it, but it’s a damn mess.
Take it a step further; don't tale them seriously on *any* remotely political issue, as they're clearly untrustworthy.
On a semi related note, I have a long running pet theory that noticing this type of thing and then being gas-lit about it is part of what makes the US right wing so susceptible to conspiracy theories, they seem much more plausible when you have so many blatant examples of the media lying to you (and all your normie friends trying to cover for them).
"Many outlets dug themselves into a deep hole on this issue by simply acting as stenographers and megaphones for activist groups rather than doing their jobs." Such a statement would apply to a lot of issues of which trans medicine is only one.
It looks like the first CNN article actually appeared in April 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20220421123042/https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/21/health/gender-affirming-care/index.html
Google doesn't show any prior instances of the phrases "medically necessary, evidence-based care," "multidisciplinary approach," and "assigned gender" in the same sentence, but there are more than 2,000 since then that copy this wording. So it looks like CNN's Jen Christensen, a longtime member of the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, is patient zero.
I had explained to friends that major publications had been largely court stenographers for trans/gender activist. And so have the most prestigious universities, government, NGOs, glitterati, and so on.
So, how do you save face and climb off the sycophancy choo-choo? I don't see how and they will get deeper and deeper into the hole.
The situation parallels the Catholic Church's hierarchy vis a vis child abuse. Not so much the abuse itself, but the endless cover-up and lying.
When I wrote to Tawna Sachez, my representative in the Oregon House of Representatives, last June to protest proposed legislation that protected gender-affirming care for minors, I found clear signs that trans activists had already coached her office on how to respond to what they likely view as "anti trans" correspondence.
The staffer responded in part:
"Thank you also for taking the time to detail to your opposition to the portion of HB 2002 that protects gender-affirming care for minors, and for sharing these resources. HB 2002 only expands gender-affirming care without parental consent to youth over the age of 15, and does so to protect youth whose parents may not support their decision to seek such care. While I hear your concerns regarding puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, I think it is worth noting that every leading medical association in the United States supports such care, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatry Association, and the Endocrine Society. This study from the Journal of Adolescent health, along with several other studies, supports a relationship between access to gender-affirming care and lower rates of depression and suicidality among transgender and nonbinary youth."
I'm one of many centrist Democrats in Oregon who despairs of ever breaking progressives' stranglehold on the legislature.
Still, I couldn't let those canned trans talking points go unanswered. I responded as follows:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for replying to my note. In your reply, you said: "While I hear your concerns regarding puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, I think it is worth noting that every leading medical association in the United States supports such care . . ." To counter that, I would like to offer facts about the very different status of gender medicine in Europe:
A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe
Doubts have now come to the Netherlands, where the most-contested interventions for children and adolescents were developed.
Europe, where governments and medical authorities in at least fivencountries that once led the way on gender-affirming treatments for childrennand adolescents are now reversing course, arguing that the science undergirding these treatments is unproven, and their benefits unclear.
The about-face by these countries concerns the so-called Dutch protocol, which has for at least a decade been viewed by many clinicians as the gold standardmapproach to care for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria.
Kids on the protocol are given medical and mental-health assessments; somemgo on to take medicines that block their natural puberty and, when they’re older, receive cross-sex hormones and eventually surgery. But in Finland, Sweden, France, Norway, and the U.K., scientists and public-health officials are warning that, for some young people, these interventions may do more harm than good.
European health authorities are not reversing themselves on broader issues of trans rights, particularly for adults. But this turn against the Dutch protocol has inflamed activists and politicians in the United States. Republicans who have worked to ban its recommended treatments claim that the shifts in Europe prove they’re right. Their opponents argue that any doubts at all about the protocol, raised in any country whatsoever, are simply out of step with settled science: They point to broad endorsements by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, among other groups; and they assert that when it comes to the lifesaving nature of gender-affirming care, “doctors agree.”
But doctors do not agree, particularly in Europe, where no treatments have been banned but a genuine debate is unfurling in this field. In Finland, for example, new treatment guidelines put out in 2020 advised against the use of puberty-blocking drugs and other medical interventions as a first line of care for teens with adolescent-onset dysphoria. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare followed suit in 2022, announcing that such treatments should be given only under exceptional circumstances or in a research context.
Shortly after that, the National Academy of Medicine in France recommended "la plus grande réserve" in the use of puberty blockers. Just last month, a national investigatory board in Norway expressed concerns about the treatment. And the U.K.’s only national gender clinic for children, the Tavistock, has been ordered to close its doors after a government-commissioned report found, among other problems, that its Dutch-protocol-based approach to treatment lacked sufficient evidence.
The rest of this April 28, 2023, article in The Atlantic magazine can be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/04/gender-affirming-care-debate-europe-dutch-protocol/673890/
There has been at least one noteworthy development since the Atlantic piece was published:
England Limits Use of Puberty-Blocking Drugs to Research Only
The National Health Service of England announced on Friday that it would limit the use of puberty-suppressing drugs to children enrolled in clinical trials. The change comes as the agency’s pediatric gender services have struggled to keep up with soaring demand.
A document explaining the agency’s reasoning stated that “there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment.”
The New York Times. 9 June 2023, updated 12 June. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/health/puberty-blockers-transgender-children-britain-nhs.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Needless to say, I received no reply to this information from the staffer or his boss. There's no daylight between trans rights activists and the progressives in the Oregon legislature.
The only party of the article that felt (adorably) naive was when Jesse said it would be awkward for news outlets to climb out of this hole they've dug when the culture comes back to its senses about trans issues. We've how they (and other public figures) handle the shifting political attitudes when their views become untrendy: just pretend you never said that.
And if you get an email from Jesse saying, "but didn't you say that last year?" you just ignore the email.
Politicians have done this as long as I can remember, and editorial boards are these days political organizations.
I think the phrase should be "news spam". These unending boilerplates are a reason why AI's - trained with news sources - tend to statistically overstate these phrases, poisoned. It is news spam.
While CNN has not really been researching and conveying news for years inside the US, versus CNN international, all "web based" news reporting is an echo system for any statement which is fed into it - "X Bombs Hospital killing thousands" suddenly is news of the hour when it's a hoax, and erupts on hundreds of sites with tiny variations.
If on websites you could use an ad blocker to (a) block articles with false statements and.notify the source of "spam" the circulation would become bad enough news sources would start to alter stock phrases. Or (b) rewrite false statements before displaying, hilighting or listing false statements and transmitting "spam" notifications.
Take "Illegal Alien", "Undocumented" and other terms as a good example. A non-citizen without an unexpired visa is the core concept, whether visitor, residence, or work visa. Not illegal, not "Undocumented". Millions of people enter the US without "documents" under "visa waiver". The terminology should be cleaned up and made accurate. Non-residents overstaying visits.
Another is LGBTQ+ - I am gay, not LGBTQ+ and statements made about gay men and, for instance "conversion theapy" apply primarily to gays, a much lesser degree lesbians, and that's it. "Anti-LGBTQ+" legiation has nothing to do with gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and statements are factually incorrect.
Virtually all statements relative to trans are false or prevaricating - "affirmation" is "experimental treatment." "Alleviate" distress is "provoke" distress, "trans"children is "gay or lesbian" children. "Assigned" at birth is "identified", and "spectrum" is "binary".
I'm convinced the only strategy to fight such mechanically reproduced nonsense is armies of AI bots publishing at such a volume that it statistically overwhelms filtering systems.
This is why I don't trust media -- either side, left or right. The desire to be on the "right side of history" and pursue an activist agenda has turned journalists into stenographers who regurgitate whatever bias they prefer. Trying to find to the "truth" or showing curiosity are just so boring.
And people wonder why Americans hate the media...