Leverage shmeverage
The NY Times muddies the waters in the approved fashion.
The headline is muddy:
Democrats Block Bill to Bar Transgender Girls From Female Sports Teams
“Transgender girls” are not girls. No doubt most NYT readers know that, but all the same, the word “girls” does its work. When we see the word “girls” we don’t correct it to “boys” automatically; it takes extra time and attention to remember that the subject here is boys in girls’ sports. Mostly we don’t read that slowly. Referring to boys as transgender girls is conditioning, and journalism really ought to stop doing it.
Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican-written bill aimed at barring transgender women and girls from school sports teams designated for female students, thwarting consideration in the Senate of the G.O.P.’s latest move to use transgender people as leverage at the dawn of President Trump’s second term.
So the reporter, Annie Karni, makes the story a matter of Republicans “using” trans people as opposed to a matter of not grotesquely cheating women in their own sports. Never mind about move and use and leverage and dawn and even Trump – focus on the unfairness to women, god damn it. But of course she doesn’t.
With Democrats opposed, the measure stalled on a vote of 51 to 45, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and be brought up for consideration. The bill, which passed the House in January on a largely party-line vote, would prohibit federal funding from going to K-12 schools that include transgender students in women’s and girls’ athletic programs.
Male students, you quisling. The issue is not that they’re trans, it’s that they’re male.
Senate Republicans argued it was essential to protecting girls from predatory men encroaching on their private spaces and seeking to gain an unfair athletic advantage on the basis of sex, even as they hinted that the measure was intended to lay a political trap for Democrats.
But what about the unfair advantage? Don’t just hop over it as if it were a fake issue; it’s a very real issue.
But hopping over it is the done thing.
I really wish we could get reporting that just, ya know, reported facts rather than interpretations. To say, “the G.O.P.’s latest move to use transgender people as leverage,” is to give an interpretation of the facts. Worsening matters is the reluctance to provide the bare facts at all. We often just get the interpretation, which is like skipping over an argument’s premises right to its conclusion.