Style and substance
Trans journalist group tells us what we can say about trans people:
A trans journalist group which advises media on how to cover trans-related topics has published a style guide encouraging media outlets to “kill” stories on trans criminals, censor detransitioners, and erase all references to biological sex.
Next up: rapist journalist group publishes a style guide encouraging media outlets to call rapists “heroes” or “rapscallions.”
And by “accurately” they mean…not accurately.
In one section, titled “guidance on covering anti-trans hate and disinformation,” the TJA encourages media to avoid coverage of certain topics, including detransitioning – wherein a person ceases a gender transition – which the TJA states have been “overemphasized” as well as “sensationalized and given a disproportionate amount of weight in the media.”
In sharp contrast to trans activism, which doesn’t get any weight in the media at all, right?
The association also encourages media to “avoid giving a platform to TERFs or so-called “gender critical feminists,” going on to state that “when reporting on fringe groups and hate groups, instead of calling them TERFs or gender critical feminists, use language like transphobic, anti-trans, etc. Avoid referring to anyone as a feminist when they are spreading anti-trans hate.”
Silence feminists; lie about trans people. Sterling advice for purported journalists.
More egregiously, the TJA encourages writers to avoid any negative press directed at criminals who are transgender. In the section titled “guidance on respectful coverage,” the TJA states that journalists should note the consequences for a trans person to have their criminal history disclosed, writing “publishing such information is rarely in the public interest,” and that journalists should “Consider killing a story if [they] have no alternatives.”
Well we wouldn’t want people to know that some men who identify as women are rapists, would we.
Despite rejecting the concept of biological sex, the TJA also discourages writers from marking transgender people as ‘identifying as’ whatever gender they do, stating: “This language questions a trans person’s gender by calling it an “identity” instead of just stating someone is non-binary or a man/woman.” In all cases, the guide seems to steer journalists towards simply never identifying a person as being trans save for instances it is overtly positive coverage.
Awesome Trans Woman Breaks Glass Ceiling type of thing.
In March, Open University Philosophy of Sport Senior Lecturer Jon Pike had one of his articles on trans-identified males in women’s sports edited without his consent to abide by the TJA style guide.
Without his consent or knowledge.
It’s a massively important distinction.
It doesn’t seem the least bit trivial.
Why any honest journalist would adhere to a “guide” that’s so much trans PR is beyond me, but I guess journalism has changed.
There they go again. Denying the existence of detransitioners. Disgusting.
It’s not actually clear from this if journalists in general do pay any attention to this deranged truth-concealing “guidance,” but the existence of the guidance is grotesque enough, and the use of it to change the meaning of Jon Pike’s article without his knowledge (much less consent) is even worse.
It reads like helpful guidance on how to deal with rape or trauma victims. Don’t ask what they were wearing, don’t write about their checkered sex life. But it goes even farther: don’t write about false accusations.
Re #4
… and assume all allegations are false.
Hmm. I note this in the description of the guidelines:
and I think about some woke-ish speaker talking about, paraphrased, “people who identify as women”, when the real target was “women”, but she couldn’t talk about women, or people who ARE women, she was so conditioned to talk about people who “identify as”. The TJA contradicts that conditioning, or perhaps only allows “identify as” in reference to someone who is NOT trans, it’s unclear.
Sackbut, this is of a piece with the broader TRA push. Gender is self-knowledge, where the assertion of personal conviction is considered equivalent to certainty of accuracy; after all, who could possibly know that person’s inner landscape better than that person? The obvious sources of error – that people can be muddled, or that they can change their minds – are disregarded. And so if a person detransitions, then the person can’t have been certain of their identity and so must not have been trans in the first place. Explicit and intentional No True Scotsman fallacy, as a direct result of the supposed infallibility of self-knowledge.
But when the subject moves from gender identity to sex, the treatment of error is exactly reversed: grossly exaggerated as opposed to ignored. The slim possibility of anomalous anatomical development or genetic error is taken to be a fatal flaw in any conclusion as to someone’s sex, hence ‘assigned’ and other qualifiers.
Hence the flip-flop you note. When there is some matter of discrimination or harm or similar to women as a sex, the basis on sex is intentionally diminished. ‘Women’ is treated as a vague concept, with perhaps the implication that women could have identified their way out of the bad thing. Elsewhere, where it would benefit trans people and especially trans women, ‘women’ becomes a dead certainty. Trans women need to be let into women’s prisons and sports and etc. because they’re women, dammit!
These positions, despite being 180 degree reversals of the other, often come from the same person.
4W has published a story revealing that a member of the TransJA is none other than Philip Wythe (no apology for the deadname,) the odious man who had posted the infamous fantasy of spitroasting TERFs in the future.
https://4w.pub/trans-rape-fantasist-at-tja/
Oh good god. What a sewer.
I’m beginning to suspect that journalistic ethics are not in their mission statement at all