My good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter William Teach noted this morning how some on the left are claiming that, by allowing contrarian views to be presented, the media are hurting the fight against global warming climate change.

“The devastating heat wave in Europe this week is a reminder that we need to take urgent action to slow human-caused warming, but the media is still giving air to the opinions of people who do not believe there is cause for alarm, which makes the problem seem less dire than it actually is,” said David Rapp, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) who coauthored the research.

The argument that climate change is not man made has been incontrovertibly disproven by science again and again, yet many Americans believe that the global crisis is either not real, not of our making, or both, in part because the news media has given climate change deniers a platform in the name of balanced reporting, according to the researchers.

The left, who used to be so very strongly for freedom of speech and of the press, sure aren’t for it anymore, and want to push the credentialed media into restricting language, so they can shape the debate in ways in which they see an advantage. We have previously noted how The New York Times has given OpEd space to Andrew Marantz, a writer for The New Yorker, to claim that “Free Speech Is Killing Us: Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?” Twitter now bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something the Times gave Chad Malloy^[1]Chad Malloy is a male who believes he is actually a woman, and who goes by the faux name “Parker” Malloy. OpEd space to claim that such censorship actually promotes freedom of speech. We have pointed out how National Public Radio’s Laurel Wamsley gave space for Alex Schmider, associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD — yeah, a real unbiased source there! — to compare “using someone’s correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – ‘a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.'”

Mr Schmider did tell the truth in one important way. Using a ‘transgendered persons’ preferred pronouns and sexual identity terms is meant to be “respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.” Miss Wamsley put it as “a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.” At bottom, it is an attempt to coerce “acceptance” by claiming it is only courtesy.

The unasked question is — and the author never added anything into her article which would have paid any attention to those who disagree — what if someone does not accept the idea that Bruce Jenner is really now a woman, or that anyone can somehow change his sex?

It begins with a falsehood. “Sex,” Miss Wamsley wrote, “refers to a person’s biological status and is typically assigned at birth, usually on the basis of external anatomy. Sex is typically categorized as male, female or intersex.” This is wholly untrue. While we might forgive His Majesty King Henry VIII for believing that Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn were somehow responsible for his first two surviving children being daughters, the role of the X and Y chromosomes in determining the sex of mammals, including humans, has been known for over a century. Sex is not somehow “assigned” at birth; sex is determined at conception, depending upon whether the sperm which fertilized the egg carries the X or Y chromosome. We recognize the sex of a newborn child by visual examination of the child, but the characteristics which indicate sex developed long before birth, during gestation, as programmed in by the developing child’s DNA.

It’s kind of amusing that some couples have “gender reveal parties” is sex isn’t “assigned” until birth. 🙂

When you read or hear someone talking about sex being assigned at birth, you know automatically the pure bovine feces is about to follow.

From National Review:

AP Stylebook Issues Guide for Transgender Coverage

by Abigail Anthony | Friday, July 22, 2022 | 7:23 PM EDT

The Associated Press Stylebook, which for decades has served as the default style manual for most news organizations, has issued a “Topical Guide” for transgender coverage that encourages writers to use “unbiased language” and to “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”

There it is again: the AP does not want the media to present the view that people cannot really change their sex.

Yet 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.

The AP Stylebook has issued prior guidance related to gender and sexuality, and some of that is repackaged in the Topical Guide. But it does include some updates, together providing an extensive reference for journalists.

The Transgender Coverage Topical Guide explains: “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.” The guide encourages writers to refer to subjects according to their preferred gender identity. The guide condemns “deadnaming,” or referring to a transgender person’s previous name, because that “can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.”

Of course, sex cannot change, and sex is recognized at birth, not assigned at birth.

The guide describes the term “sex” by explaining “a person’s sex is usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants, sometimes inaccurately” and further advises writers to “avoid terms like ‘biological male,’ which opponents of transgender rights sometimes use to oversimplify sex and gender, is often misleading shorthand for ‘assigned male at birth,’ and is redundant because sex is inherently biological.”

It is certainly true that “biological male” or “biological female” are redundant, but the formulation has been pushed by the fact that there are those in the world who claim to be the sex they are not. That the Topical Guide claims that “biological male . . . is often misleading shorthand for ‘assigned male at birth,’” is inherently stupid, because it assumes that sex is ‘assigned’ at birth.

There’s more at the original. There are those who claim that referring to a ‘transgendered’ person by the names, pronouns, and honorifics they claim, rather than those which represent what they actually are, is a simple matter of courtesy, and courtesy is important.

But is it courteous to ask someone to lie, especially to lie to himself? That is what the Associated Press, what the ‘transgendered,’ are asking; they are asking people who know that Bruce Jenner isn’t really “Caitlin,” that Ellen Page isn’t really “Elliot,” that Will Thomas isn’t really “Lia,” to lie to the public and to themselves, to perpetuate, through language, something they do not believe.

Well, I refuse. At The First Street Journal we have our own Stylebook, a Stylebook used by almost no one else,^[2]Unlike the Associated Press Stylebook, for which subscribers must pay, and which is why I have been unable to provide the hyperlink to the original, our Stylebook is free and open to anyone who … Continue reading but here we do not lie.

To be “courteous,” to use the terms the ‘transgender’ activists and the Associated Press and the credentialed media want you to use is to concede the argument, is to surrender on what you know to be true.

Don’t concede, don’t surrender. Be true to what you know to be true.
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Cross-posted on American Free News Network.