Media Matters busts WaPo for adding 'jet fuel' to GOP anti-trans hate

10 May 2023

A newly released poll taken by The Washington Post and KFF (formerly Kaiser Family Foundation) supports the GOP's recent aggressive attempts to pass anti-trans legislation across the country, Media Matters for America reports.

Per MMFA, the poll does not contain particularly new information, as it was conducted in November 2022, "six months ago and well before this year's legislative onslaught of over 450 bills targeting LGBTQ people."

Furthermore, the publication adds the survey serves as "political jet fuel for Republicans in state legislatures and Congress who are pushing measures restricting curriculum, sports participation and medical care."

Regarding the potential negative impact of such reporting, MMFA reports:

While the inclusion of trans people in public life has become a matter of fierce debate in the last couple years, history shows thedanger of framing like that adopted by the Post. As pointed out by The American Independent writer Oliver Willis, a 1961 Gallup poll found that what the Post would call 'most Americans' believed that the sit-in protests against racial segregation would 'hurt' the integration movement.

At a time when the position of much of the right is that 'transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,' The Washington Post's poll analysis presenting attacks on trans people as politically popular is, in fact, adding “jet fuel” to the fire being stoked by the GOP.

For example, MMFA points out "the misleading framing of the Post's story" has already "lent itself to coverage by Fox News, which used it to attack former college trans athlete Lia Thomas — who last competed 14 months ago and whose record in the 1,650-yard freestyle has since been broken by a cisgender swimmer — and to claim that Republicans are fighting for women's sex-based rights instead of working to criminalize abortion."

Fox News used the survey, according to MMFA "to defend a Texas bill that would criminalize gender-affirming care for minors and to argue that trans equality is being pushed by 'marginal extremist individuals who are left-wing activists."

Watch the video below or at this link.

Media Matters for America's full report is available at this link.

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