How the Media Got the Trans Kid Story So Wrong

Activism, meet journalism

Photo by Kyle on Unsplash

In April and May, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies offered a two-part workshop for journalists. “Transgender Coverage: Avoiding rhetoric to deliver meaningful journalism,” was hosted by a white-haired Poynter faculty member of gentlemanly manner, and featured a clinician, a lawyer, and a variety of gender-creative journalists. The aim of these webinars was to “remove ourselves from the politics of outrage to explore the facts.”

Unfortunately, they outrageously flouted the facts. And they’re not the only venerable journalism program to train reporters to misunderstand this complex issue and explore only one side of it. From the AP to the National Press Club, journalism institutions have ceded to advocacy groups and activists, in the process abandoning journalistic principles they claim to champion.

Let’s start with Poynter, a “global nonprofit that strengthens democracy by improving the relevance, ethical practice and value of journalism,” founded in 1975. Here are some of the “facts” they offered:

Dr. Meredithe McNamara, assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale University, told attendees: “most trans people remain trans.” Jo Yurcaba, a reporter with NBC Out, which focuses on “LGBTQ-centric news,” asserted that desistance was a “myth” originating in a 2013 study.

Actually, we don’t have great data for those assertions. Several studies of childhood-onset gender dysphoria suggest that somewhere between 60 and 90 percent stopped experiencing dysphoria during puberty; those “desisters” had not socially transitioned, and never medically transitioned. The bulk of them (especially the boys) grew up to be gay.

The only real interruption to that assertion is a recent paper, which showed that most kids in the study who were socially transitioned continued to identify as trans five years later. That could be an indication of the power of social transition, rather than proof that “trans kids know who they are”—though that’s how most of the media reported it.

Elana Redfield, federal policy director at Williams Institute, UCLA’s gender think tank, asserted: “It’s a real piece of spin that minors are suddenly getting lots of hormones without counseling.” And McNamara said that “surgery is rare, especially among minors.” 

Again, we don’t have enough data to make these cases. What have accounts by detransitioners, like Isabelle Ayala or Luca Hein, of being rushed along the medical path, their other mental health conditions ignored—just as we have accounts of happily and carefully transitioned youth. We don’t know the number of surgeries, but how many dozens of mastectomies need to be performed on for 13- to 16-year-olds before journalists will admit that they have even happened once, and that it’s not hateful to wrestle with the ethics of it, especially with so little follow-up? “They’re rare” translates into “don’t talk about them.”

The best research, Redfield said, stems from the 2015 US Transgender Survey.

This assertion reveals either a complete misunderstanding about what constitutes good research or a deliberate attempt to mislead people. That survey culled responses from anonymous people who could enter it as many times as they liked—and who still identified as trans; few detransitioners, who regretted what they’d done, would have filled it out. The research is so biased and methodologically unsound that systematic evidence reviews have marked it as low-quality—meaning that no matter how much participants claimed that medical transition made them better, the findings can’t be mapped onto the larger population. By many accounts, this is actually some of the worst research.        

Yurcaba spoke of “robust standards of care,” referring to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s self-titled “Standards of Care.” 

WPATH, a combination of activists and clinicians, has appointed itself the leader in gender medicine. But in their latest publication, SOC8, they wrote that “a systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.”

Recently unveiled documents reveal that WPATH contracted Johns Hopkins to conduct an evidence review, and then refused to let them publish it after they “found little to no evidence about children and adolescents.” Meanwhile, a 388-page comprehensive report on youth gender medicine in England, known as the “Cass Review” and released before the first Poynter webinar, found SOC8 to “lack developmental rigor.” 

The Cass Review was household news in much of Europe—and covered in the US slightly more broadly than other interruptions to advocacy-generated talking points—in part because it found “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.” It spurred Germany, Scotland, and even The Netherlands—where the medical proocol of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for “juvenile transsexuals” originated—to consider changing course, in some cases limiting puberty blockers only to clinical trials.

What did Poynter panelists have to say about those changes? Not one word about the Cass Review. But plenty about Europe generally.

“Transition-related care is highly politicized in Europe in the same way as in the US,” said Yurcaba, who spoke of “partisan research” and “right-wing influence.”

This simply isn’t the case. The slow walkback of the American affirmative model over the last few years resulted from findings of low-quality evidence for highly-invasive treatments; higher rates of detransition than expected; and a cohort of young people unlike those who’d been studied—meaning that even that low-quality evidence didn’t apply to them. 

Poynter’s far from alone in veering off course when it comes to this topic. The Columbia Journalism Review and NBCU Academy embrace this same kind of censorship and bias, portraying them as best practices. The National Press Club’s Journalism Institute offered its own one-day webinar, “Covering trans and LGBTQ+ issues during 2024,” which repeated many of these same falsehoods as Poynter’s did, and added a few of its own. For instance, they postulated that youth trans care is held to a higher standard than other forms of medicine, but Cass noted that it’s actually held to a lower standard. They ignored Cass, too.

Poynter said in a statement that because the Cass Review was only published a week before its first webinar, there wasn’t enough time to include it in the curriculum (but what about the second?), and described it as “still being assessed on this side of the Atlantic.” So many battlers in the youth gender culture war worked hard to dismiss the report as partisan and flawed, spewing so many falsehoods that Hilary Cass herself, the pediatrician who headed the report, condemned those who “deliberately spread misinformation.”

How did the media become a purveyor of that misinformation? One hint came from Poynter panelist Grace Abels, an LGBTQ+ reporter at PolitiFact—Poynter’s fact-checking entity. Abels told journalists to consult the The Trans Journalists Association’s style guide (and to make sure to “celebrate trans joy.”) The National Press club’s event was held with the support of the TJA.

The TJA, supported by Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program, formed in 2020, and created a style guide for “covering trans issues with accuracy and nuance.”

But the guide prioritizes the theory of gender identity over the reality of biological sex, rendering accuracy impossible. TJA suggests that “instead of simply writing ‘men’ or ‘women,’” journalists use “people with ovaries, people with prostates, people who can get pregnant.” Major journalism institutions have followed their lead. The AP style guide—journalism’s bible—now decrees that a trans woman “is a woman” and not someone who “identifies as a woman.” 

Science publication The Lancet recently published its own new style guide, which advises: “Authors should use the term ‘sex assigned at birth’ rather than ‘biological sex’, ‘birth sex’ or ‘natal sex’ as it is more accurate and inclusive.” Every word is so politicized that each reporter is forced to take a political stand, rendering any attempt at objectivity impossible. The result is the skewed reporting of important publications like Scientific American, which has repeatedly claimed that “gender-affirming care is evidence-based and medically necessary.” Nature, the leading scientific journal, now suggests that scientists prioritize “do no harm” to trans people over the facts.

Meanwhile, “fact-checking” is left to those who twist the facts. A Substacker named Erin Reed publishes “fact checks” of gender dysphoria research, marking them “debunked,” as opposed to “objected to.” Reed argued that the Cass Review was both politically motivated and scientifically unsound, lying about studies being omitted from the systematic reviews that informed it. Another trans journalist, Evan Urquhart, dismissed the Cass Review as biased, and derides any mention of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” or the new cohort of young people coming out as trans. Urquhart’s site, Assigned Media, includes a “library” of anyone who chooses nuance over activism, from detransitioners to scientists to parents and LGBT groups; it is, essentially, a way to discredit anyone investigating other sides of this story.

These two journalists regularly distort or misrepresent science, but The Nation recently described both Reed and Urquhart as “the most reliable sources for information on the exploding campaign against trans rights.” Urquhart was awarded the prestigious Knight Science Journalism Fellowship. Erin Reed won a GLAAD award.

Once upon a time, belonging to a group you reported on was considered a conflict of interest; now it’s a requirement. The fertile combination of postmodernism and social justice led to the idea that since true objectivity is a myth—or a tool of oppressive forces—lived experience trumps expertise. Everyone is biased, so the correct bias must be embedded. This leads to journalists scrutinizing the things they should accept, and accepting the things they should be scrutinizing. 

The Nation decried “mainstream media’s failures to report fairly on trans issues”—a statement I couldn’t agree with more, even if I couldn’t disagree more on whom they categorize as reliable and fair. The most important journalism institutions in America have chosen to uphold one-sided narratives instead of multifaceted investigations, training journalists in bias and untruth, and leaving much of the country misinformed.

If you’ve been to journalism school and had trainings like these, I’d like to hear about them. Please reach out.