The Media Has Gender Derangement Syndrome

Help me WNYC. You're my only hope!

Like so many liberals, I grew up with NPR as my soundtrack: BJ Leiderman’s thumping theme songs in the background, or the soothing voice of the late great Susan Stamberg. I loved NPR.

It became difficult to listen to starting in 2016, as the mission changed from reporting to making sure that we all had the same opinion. Then, once Katie Herzog mentioned a game in which you turn NPR on at random times and see if they’re talking about race, NPR started to seem like a joke. But also: it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny when they reported on gender—because they often reported activist talking points about the medical interventions as facts, and labeled truths as disinformation.

We’ve seen shifts in other mainstream media outlets, even a kind of two-steps-forward, one-step-back movement in The New York Times’ reporting on gender. But NPR is more dug in than ever. I assume this is in reaction to the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To admit that they were so biased that they didn’t deserve public funding was to retire their pitch for more funding from listeners—although what they should have done was pivot, to do a better job and argue that they deserved the funding.

All this is background for what happened yesterday on WNYC, the most-listened-to public radio station in the country. Journalist Brian Lehrer has hosted a weekday news call-in show for some 35 years, and was widely admired as one of the best out there—fair-minded and willing to engage with different voices. Like many others in the media, he changed. That’s most apparent in the segments on transgender issues and pediatric gender medicine, in which guests such as Chase Strangio and Jack Turban have spread their falsehoods about the evidence base, while people like me wait on hold for 45 minutes and never break through. Once, when John McWhorter was on, I called in to ask about the controversies over the word “woman.” The screener hung up on me.

Yesterday, Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, was on to discuss his new book Truth—which has nothing to do with the trans issue specifically, except, well, it’s been very hard to tell the truth about it. I was waiting on hold (as usual!) to ask him about how we communicate the complexities of the science of gender medicine in this polarized society when, amazingly, a caller’s voice came through the speaker: Mabel from Trenton.

Mabel likely didn’t tell the screener what she really wanted to say, because it started with how America is becoming a third-world country and complaints about the lack of affordable housing. But then she said “The Democratic Party has let me down,” because they’ve also been untruthful. “Now they’re saying that men can become women and I feel that you are just discounting women as a species,” she said. Dems were “trying to make us believe that you can turn a male into a female.” She added that women were more than their anatomy; they were also shaped by their experiences.

That last part allowed Lehrer to make his case that “trans women would say they had their experience of being a woman before they had any hormone replacement therapy or surgery.” Amazingly, he added: “Maybe you’re just biased against a segment of society who you don’t like.”

This was absolutely shocking—to hear Brian Lehrer, the former Voice of Reason, tell a caller that because she feels lied to about this issue she’s hateful was astonishing, and just incredibly unprofessional.

Shermer, on the other hand, handled it like a champ. He went into the difference between subjective truths—I feel like I was born in the wrong body—and objective ones: we cannot change sex, which is binary and based on gametes. Shermer said he worried about the future of the Democratic Party because it cannot distinguish between objective and subjective truths.

Lehrer himself seemed to be in shock, having hermetically sealed his studio to protect against any facts that interrupted the narrative he’d constructed. “This is what the right wing says, that it’s gender ideology,” he retorted. WNYC has worked hard to exclude liberal dissident voices, which has allowed them to maintain that left/right framing.

But Shermer pushed on. He explained the difference between the vanishingly rare occurrence of childhood-onset gender dysphoria and rapid-onset, the theory of social contagion, the poor evidence base, the shift in several European countries. “The facts matter,” he said.

Lehrer: “It sounds like you’re being very dismissive.” He said doctors would disagree that you can’t change sex, or that sex is binary. And finally, when Shermer came back with reasonable answers, Lehrer said: “You’re here supposedly representing science.” That is: Lehrer believed Shermer had lost all credibility by applying the same lens to youth gender medicine that he applied to everything else.

Most shocking about this whole exchange was what happened after it ended. Lehrer invited people who were offended to call in. After Shermer was gone! “Equal time,” he said—as if they’d ever given a minute to any of us wanting to share another side of the story.

And so, the parents and grandparents and uncles of trans kids rang up. Megan in Maplewood, “a parent of a trans child who has fully transitioned to the person that they want to be,” said “I really wish people who don’t have trans children would stop talking about this.” She decried “pseudoscientists telling us what trans kids need,” and explained how difficult it was to watch her child suffer.

“The book was supposed to be in support of science,” Lehrer said. “The topic wasn’t even in the book, but that’s where he went,” forgetting that in fact Mabel from Trenton went there.

Then an uncle of a trans kid called in to rant about the “list of falsehoods and ridiculous statements that this guy who’s supposedly talking about being a logical skeptic and then just to say a bunch of false nonsense.” Shermer was “implying that transgender kids are somehow psychologically having problems.” He was an “idiotic pseudoscientist.”

To his credit—almost—Lehrer read two comments that critiqued his handling of the segment. “I was offended by Brian. It sounds very much like you have a vested interest in promoting sex change,” he read, in the snarkiest voice I have ever heard him use in 30 years of listening. And another: “Sorry, Brian, but the Skeptic guy was reasonable.”

He was. He was very reasonable. What’s unreasonable is allowing people to call in to diss him after he left, and treating listeners who disagree as if they are bad people. What’s unreasonable is being closed off to a more complex narrative than the simple left/right one that WNYC and all of NPR has embraced.

I urge people to write to the producers and demand a segment about the controversies over trans kids and youth gender medicine, and to include dissident liberals and scientists in it. This was deeply unprofessional conduct by Brian Lehrer and a disservice to the many listeners.

Producers: Mary Croke (mcroke@nypublicradio.org); Lisa Allison (lallison@wnyc.org); Amina Srna (asrna@wnyc.org)