Reuters is an American media organization. Their coverage of trans and gender diverse people has been generally fair and accurate.
Two notable exceptions came in 2022, when they presented the ex-trans movement and “detransitioners.” which they claim “have long been untouchable subjects” in a poorly framed investigation. The same authors had previously written on gender-affirming care for minors in a highly skeptical tone. Both pieces have been frequently cited by opponents of this care, including The Heritage Foundation, America First Policy Institute, and in a hearing on “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Children.”
Al Jazeera is a Qatari media organization. Its coverage of trans topics is neutral to negative.
Background
“Homosexual acts” are illegal in Qatar, with punishment of up to three years in prison. Human Rights Watch reported in 2022:
“Security forces arrested people in public places based solely on their gender expression and unlawfully searched their phones. As a requirement for their release, security forces mandated that transgender women detainees attend conversion therapy sessions at a government-sponsored âbehavioral healthcareâ center.
A Qatari transgender woman, arrested by Preventive Security in public in Doha, said: âThey [Preventive Security] are a mafia. They detained me twice, once for two months in a solitary cell underground, and once for six weeks. They beat me every day and shaved my hair. They also made me take off my shirt and took a picture of my breasts. I suffered from depression because of my detention. I still have nightmares to this day, and Iâm terrified of being in public.â”
The original Al Jazeera Satellite Channel (then called JSC or Jazeera Satellite Channel) was launched in November 1996. Al Jazeera English was launched in November 2006.
Al Jazeera has produced videos that are more balanced, allowing trans people to speak for themselves.
The Times is a British daily national newspaper based in London. The Times and sibling publication The Sunday Times are considered newspapers of record in the UK. Both publications produce consistently anti-transgender content.
Media critic Jane Fae of Trans Media Watch described The Times‘ trans coverage as part of “a concerted campaign of disinformation” in a 2020 submission to the UK government.
Background
The newspaper began in 1785 as The Daily Universal Register. In 1788, the name was changed to The Times. An American edition of The Times began in June 2006. In 1981, The Times and The Sunday Times were bought by Rupert Murdoch.
Notable incidents
On November 11, 2017, anti-trans extremist Janice Turner wrote a piece titled “Children sacrificed to appease trans lobby.”
On April 8, 2019, The Times published four anti-trans articles in one issue:
a front-page piece by Lucy Bannerman titled “Calls to end transgender ‘experiment on children.'”
another piece by Lucy Bannerman titled “It feels like conversion therapy for gay children, say clinicians”
a third piece by Lucy Bannerman titled “Families âexploited by gender lobby groups pushing for treatmentâ”
a piece by Carl Heneghan titled “Doubts over evidence for using drugs on the young.”
References
Owen, L. (2022). âParasitically Occupying Bodiesâ: Exploring Toxifying Securitization in Anti-Trans and Genocidal Ideologies. Peace Review, 34(4), 481â494. https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2022.2129000
TurnbullâDugarte, S. J., & McMillan, F. (2022). âProtect the women!â Transâexclusionary feminist issue framing and support for transgender rights. Policy Studies Journal, 51(3), 629â666. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12484
Armitage, L. (2020). Explaining backlash to trans and non-binary genders in the context of UK Gender Recognition Act reform. Journal of the International Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics (Internet), 8, 11-35. https://doi.org/10.3224/insep.si2020.02
Stokoe, Ash; Gwenffrewi, Gina; Galpin, Charlotte (October 28, 2022). Hunting Mermaids: Exploring media representation of the trans+ community. University of Birmingham https://blog.bham.ac.uk/socialsciencesbirmingham/2022/10/28/hunting-mermaids-exploring-media-representation-of-the-trans-community/
Milton, Josh (8 April 2019). Trans people slam The Times for calling trans kids therapy an âexperimentâ: The four articles were published in today’s issue of The Times in the UK. https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/the-times-four-transphobic-articles/ [archive]
note: see the Lucy Bannerman profile for a list of hundreds of anti-trans pieces.
Turner, Janice (November 11, 2017). Children sacrificed to appease trans lobby. The Times https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/children-sacrificed-to-appease-trans-lobby-bq0m2mm95
BuzzFeed is an American media organization that consistently posts fair and accurate reporting about trans and gender diverse people.
Background
BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 as a news aggregator focusing on viral content. It soon became one of the primary clickbait sites, known for quizzes, listicles, and effectively strip mining the internet for content.
In 2011, they founded BuzzFeed News, which continued until 2023. During that time, anti-trans activists Virginia Hughes and Azeen Ghorayshi worked there together before moving to the New York Times.
The Guardian is a British media organization. Their transgender coverage has been criticized for anti-trans bias.
Background
The Guardian published an anti-trans piece by Julie Bindel in 2004. Over the following years, the paper became increasingly anti-trans in its stance. A 2018 letter to the editor by anti-trans activist Kathleen Stock and others led to complaints and protests. In 2020, anti-trans contributor Suzanne Moore left following an incendiary piece attacking social constructionist views about sex. More than 200 politicians, journalists, and activists signed a letter denouncing the piece. Moore later said many other comments had been removed because of “denial of female biology.” In 2021, The Guardian censored a comment by Judith Butler:
The Terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and the so-called gender critical writers have also rejected the important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact (such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, EM Hammonds or Anne Fausto-Sterling) in favor of a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism. So they will not be part of the coalition that seeks to fight the anti-gender movement. The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.
The anti-gender movement circulates a spectre of âgenderâ as a force of destruction, but they never actually read any works in gender studies. Quick and fearful conclusions take the place of considered judgments. Yes, some work on gender is difficult and not everyone can read it, so we have to do better in reaching a broader public. As important as it is, however, to make complex concepts available to a popular audience, it is equally important to encourage intellectual inquiry as part of public life. Unfortunately, we are living in anti-intellectual times, and neo-fascism is becoming more normalized.
2018 open letter
In 2018 an open letter by critics of the Gender Recognition Act included many key anti-transgender extremists. They are reordered alphabetically by surname below.
Sophie Allen, Lecturer in Philosophy, Keele University
Rosalind Barber, English & Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London
Chetan Bhatt, Professor of Human Rights, Sociology, London School of Economics
Michael Biggs, Associate Professor in Sociology and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford
Diane Brewster (Retired. ex University of Sussex and Open University)
Catherine Butler, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Bath
Richard Byng, Professor in Primary Care Research, University of Plymouth
Alex Byrne, Head of Linguistics and Philosophy Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
W Burlette Carter, Professor of Law Emeritus, The George Washington University Law School, Washington, DC
Jackie Cassell, Head of the Department of Primary Care and Public Health, Brighton and Sussex Medical School
Clare Chambers, Reader in Philosophy, University of Cambridge
John Collins, Philosophy, University of East Anglia
Sophia Connell, Philosophy, Birkbeck College London
Stephen Cowden, Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Coventry University
Rosie Dias, Associate Professor, History of Art, University of Warwick
Debbie Epstein, Professor of Cultural Studies in Education, School of Education, University of Roehampton, London
Rosa Freedman PhD, LLM, LLB, Professor of Law Conflict and Global Development, Director Global Development Division, Co-Director United Nations and Global Order Research Programme, University of Reading
John Gardner FBA, Professor of Law and Philosophy, All Souls College, Oxford
Richard Garside, Director, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Open University
Leslie Green, Philosophy of Law, Balliol College, Oxford
Liz Guy, School of Computing, Engineering & Mathematics, University of Brighton
Mike Hannis, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities (Ethics and Sustainability), Bath Spa University
PM Higgins, Honorary Research Fellow, Royal Holloway University of London; former Professor of Music, University of Nottingham; former KĂ€the-Leichter Visiting Professor of Womenâs and Gender Studies, University of Vienna
Akrivos D (2022). Transgender reporting in the British press: editorial standards and discursive harms in the post-Leveson era. Journal of Media Law Volume 14, 2022 – Issue 2 https://doi.org/10.1080/17577632.2022.2153216
Stone, Gemma (June 7, 2021). The Guardian is Transphobic.Medium https://medium.com/@notCursedE/the-guardian-is-transphobic-eebd0d5ea63a
The Daily Mail is a British media organization that publishes a steady stream of sensationalized anti-transgender content.
Background
The Daily Mail was founded in 1896 and is published in London. It was an immediate hit and has enjoyed high circulation for most of its run.
Because of its sensationalized and inaccurate reporting, Wikipedia declared it an unreliable source in 2017. Its current editor is Ted Verity.
They have mentored, nurtured, and published many of the UK’s most anti-transgender activists, including Helen Lewis, Julie Burchill, Peter Hitchens, Katie Hopkins, Richard Littlejohn, Suzanne Moore, and Piers Morgan.
Transgender Tapestry is an American media organization for the transgender community. It was published as a printed news source from 1979 to 2008. It is an important historical document of the trans community. Before the proliferation of online resources, it was an important source of information and connection for the transgender community.
Founded by Merissa Sherrill Lynn and published as a newsletter by the Tiffany Club as The TV-TS Tapestry, it was later called Tapestry and The Tapestry Journal before becoming Transgender Tapestry, a quarterly magazine published by the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE).
Its favorable coverage of J. Michael Bailey under editor Robert VerBruggen included actionable libel published about me, later retracted.
Founded in the spring of 1992, The Chronicle was “derecognized” in 1998 by the student government. It later won the right to publish.
VerBruggen editorship
In 2005, VerBruggen allowed Bailey to publish an article about himself and various controversies, claiming he is a victim of “academic McCarthyism.” Bailey included several related items, including one by transgender troll Willow Arune. Arune’s incompetent cyberstalking of me led Arune to claim that I had filed bankruptcy and lied about having a master’s degree. Arune had made these false claims on USENET, but VerBruggen was the first to let Arune make them in an edited publication. After a lot of correspondence, I finally got VerBruggen to retract all the actionable libel about me in the publication he edited.
After VerBruggen
Bailey and VerBruggen were removed from the masthead in 2007. Its last print edition was in 2011. It was dormant for several years before returning at a new domain in 2016 to 2017.
