The Washington Times on Monday published an ignorant and downright offensive editorial criticizing transgender people as “messed-up,” “mixed-up,” and suggested they are insane, in response to a recent discrimination lawsuit filed against the New York City Health Department.
Questioning the validity of the terms transgender and transition by placing the words in quotes, The Washington Times’ piece, “The latest birth certificate scandal,” went on to state transgender individuals are part of a “radical agenda,” while referring to the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association as “confused medical circles.” The Times, an ultra-right wing D.C.-based broadsheet with an immovable national readership, identified members of the latter group as “shrinks” who offer “scientific (or pseudo-scientific) mumbo-jumbo.”
“The claimants want the bureaucracy to make it easier to change the sex that was recorded at birth, noting that parents fixing mistakes (typos) in listing a child’s sex only have to provide a letter from the birth hospital,” the Times editorial states, adding, “Knowing that it was a mistake in the first place, and having that fixed, is pretty important to me,†said Joann Prinzivalli, who was born Paul yet lives as a woman.
“Calling the accurate sex recorded at a birth ‘a mistake’ is the misleading yet predictable result of a creeping activist agenda quietly transforming the country.”
I decided to reach out to Joann Prinzivalli, the person The Times pointed to as someone who evidently, somehow, some way, is responsible for “a creeping activist agenda quietly transforming the country.”
Joann, a lawyer, was very generous in sharing a treasure trove of information related to transgender issues, and offered this response to me (via email) about the Times editorial. She writes,
“I wonder why the Washington TImes editors never bothered to take the time to look at the scientific studies that show that transgender people have brain structures that are the same as those of the sex not assigned, or the scientific studies that show genes that code for enzymes that explain why it is possible for an embryo’s brain to follow one sexed developmental path, while the genital tract follows the other path. My birth certificate should never have said ‘male’ in the first place. It is a scientific fact that my birth certificate is in error on that point. I have made it clear that I am asking for a correction, not a change. At the time I was born, neither the doctor nor my parents knew about the error. Based on the medical knowledge of the time, it was impossible for them to know. Now we know better.”
Indeed!
More offensive stereotypical snark from the Times editorial. “The old saying about giving an inch and losing a mile comes to mind. As Sam Berkley, born Samantha, complained in a press conference about the lawsuit, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with the government deciding whether I’m a man or not,'” state the editors, adding, “[s]trike ‘man’ and replace with ‘human’ or ‘sane’ and there’s not much of a difference.”
Really?
The piece goes on to ignorantly and falsely warn, “we’re accommodating mental illness in the name of misplaced sensitivity, inclusiveness or political correctness.”
“Misplaced sensitivity,” “inclusiveness,” and “political correctness,” all being right-wing key words for “we don’t like you.”
Not satisfied with taking a bigoted and ignorant swipe at the entire transgender community by calling them a “conflicted group,” and thus, the LGBT community at large as well, the Times editorial goes on to take a birther swipe at President Obama too, claiming the “continuing furor over President Obama’s birth certificate underscores the importance these pieces of history have for recording the truth.”
It should be noted that the only “continuing furor over President Obama’s birth certificate” comes from people who are generally ignorant — or wanting the votes of those who are.
Is this a relevant place to mention that The Washington Times reportedly is the newspaper Ronald Reagan read every day when he was president?
Michael Silverman, Executive Director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund — the group that filed the NYC discrimination lawsuit that so bothered the editors at The Washington Times — told me via an email that there is “nothing radical about an agenda for equal rights and equal treatment.” He rightly calls a birth certificate “a fundamental form of identification,” and says by “refusing to give transgender people accurate birth certificates that reflect who they are, the government subjects transgender people to harassment and discrimination in areas like employment where ID is essential to proving eligibility to work.”
Silverman says that “[p]roper ID is essential for full participation in society,” adding, that “as long as the government discriminates against transgender people by denying them accurate ID, transgender people will continue to be pushed to the margins of society.”
The Washington Times, for those unfamiliar with the ultra-right-wing rag, is extremely homophobic and transphobic. Founded and funded by Unification Church founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Times has recently published editorials like, “Obama’s homosexual-Muslim conflict,” and “Obama’s homosexual America.”
(If anyone has seen Obama’s homosexual America, I’d like to know where it is. I’ve been looking everywhere! I won’t call it MIA, after he signed the bill for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal and decided to not defend DOMA in court, but, come on. “Obama’s homosexual America?” Really? I’d be married by now!)
Reverend Moon, just so you know, is most-famous for holding thousands of “mass weddings” over the past 50 years, during which he the matches tens of thousands of men and women who have never before met and marries them in a “blessing ceremony.” The largest of these was in 2009, during which Moon “married” 80,000 men and women, creating 40,000 couples.
Moon, who has spent at least a reported two billion dollars keeping the paper running since 1982, once professed, “The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God” and “The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world.”
When you spend two billion dollars on an instrument spreading the “truth” of God, perhaps it would be best to actually know what truth is before you print it?