USA Today seems to have something of an intellectual mess on its hands, as it published a letter from high-schooler Chelsea Mitchell concerning running against transgender athletes – and then edited it to ideological, rather than editorial, requirements. It’s unfortunately behind an expensive paywall, so I can’t verify Limbaugh-replacement Erick Erickson’s statement of facts in the matter:
Last week, Chelsea Mitchell wrote an op-ed in USA Today about the impact to her, as the fastest girl in Connecticut, when biological males were allowed to compete as girls.
One of the things Mitchell wrote was this:
The CIAC allows biological males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. As a result, two males began racing in girls’ track in 2017. In the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons alone, these males took 15 women’s state track championship titles (titles held in 2016 by nine different girls) and more than 85 opportunities to participate in higher level competitions that belonged to female track athletes.
That’s because males have massive physical advantages. Their bodies are simply bigger and stronger on average than female bodies. It’s obvious to every single girl on the track.
…
USA Today has now edited Mitchell’s piece to remove the word “male” with an editor’s note that the use of the word is “hurtful language.”
Mitchell, of course, was talking about biology and the biological differences between the sexes.
And more than just that, according to Erickson.
A quick survey of the web shows this is mostly a conservative issue, but progressive (or at least so I’d think) site Outsports has coverage:
In a fashion befitting the sponsor of the lawsuit — the Alliance Defending Freedom — Mitchell proceeded to mix in the “transphobe’s playbook” I described in a previous Outsports article. In the race Mitchell cited, she lost to two other high school girls, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood. Both Miller and Yearwood are transgender. Mitchell is cisgender. Mitchell beat both of them to win the state title at 55 meters in 2020.
Throughout the opinion piece she referred to transgender girls and women as “males,” “a male body,” “male runners” and “biological males.” Weaponized misgendering is the first play in the playbook: Immediately sell the point that transgender women are not women.
In every filing by the ADF on this particular case, they engaged in consistent misgendering. They went as far as to try to have the judge in the lawsuit removed because he would not allow the ADF’s lawyers to misgender Miller and Yearwood in court.
Also consider this sentence in Mitchell’s piece: “I am unlikely to succeed, because I’m a woman.” That’s the underlying, and comically false, idea that anti-trans groups also sell: The concept that cisgender women are too inept to compete successfully in sport.
The sport of victimhood is alive and well in the United States. There may be articles that properly address the real and serious questions of cis- vs trans- competition out there, but at least Outsports thinks the question is already settled – and they’re into full cultural warfare mode.
But regardless of whether the word “male” is a hurtful word or just a statement of fact, USA Today should have a commitment to faithfully transmitting the opinions of op-ed writers when they choose to publish them. Words are the primary mode of communications for a newspaper, followed by pictures; one hopes that the authors choose their words with care, hoping to convey the subtle nuances of their thoughts, and thus their precise positions, on the issue at hand. Changing them retroactively, unilaterally or even with permission, distorts those positions and betrays the author.
And the ruination of the code of ethics of editorial publishing.
