CNN Just Doesn't Get It
Two CNN reporters cozy with the Florida GOP obscure the truth behind one of the more horrific anti-trans policies to be implemented in the country.
Hello, dear readers. Strap in, because today’s edition of the newsletter is going to be a doozy!
First up, let’s talk about a really scary policy and a really, really terrible headline, courtesy of CNN:
“Florida residents can no longer elect to change their gender on their driver’s license. Critics say the policy targets transgender people.” Yeah? “Critics say?” Is that so? *Sigh*
But first, real quick: here’s the part of the newsletter where I ask you to consider signing up for the free version if you’re new here and ask existing free subscribers to consider upgrading to the paid version.
Let’s start with the policy, which you can read all about at
:The tl;dr is that the state of Florida is pointing to anti-trans state laws enacted in 2022 and 2023 to straight-up say that trans people are no longer allowed to update their gender marker on their driver’s licenses. Additionally, the state is saying that “misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license constitutes. fraud … and subjects an offender to criminal and civil penalties, including cancellation, suspension, or revocation of his or her drivers ’s license.”
In short, trans people in Florida who haven’t yet updated their driver’s licenses won’t be able to, and trans people who have already updated them are guilty of “fraud” and are liable to have their licenses revoked, among other civil and criminal penalties.
It’s very, very, very scary. If you don’t understand how having documents that out you as trans (yes, if you look like a woman but your driver’s license has a gigantic M on it, that outs you as trans) can upend a life, I want to share a story originally published by the ACLU in 2018 [bolded emphasis mine]:
Stacie Ray knows firsthand how dangerous it can be to have ID documents that don’t reflect who she is, especially when they out you as transgender to other people.
For instance, in 2016 Stacie attended a new job orientation along with 10 other new employees, and they were all required to present their birth certificates. When a human resources staffer called Stacie up in front of all the other new employees and examined her documents, the staffer said, “Why doesn’t your gender match?” That’s because while Stacie is a woman, she was assigned male at birth, and her Ohio birth certificate still says she’s male. Ohio is one of just three states, plus Puerto Rico, that refuse to update the gender marker on birth certificates, at any time, for any reason.
The consequences for Stacie were severe: She was outed to her co-workers as transgender and they started calling her “the freak of the company.” Another female co-worker told Stacie that if she ever encountered Stacie in the women’s room, she would “beat [her] ass.” The intense shunning and harassment led Stacie to quit that job just two weeks later.
The following year, Stacie was working as a truck driver and sought a higher paying job that required a hazardous materials endorsement for her commercial driver’s license. That endorsement in turn required a background check from the Transportation Safety Administration. At the first appointment for getting the background check, Stacie gave the TSA both her Ohio driver’s license, which correctly showed her as female, and her Ohio birth certificate, which still said male. The TSA not only told her it wouldn’t do the background check because of the discrepancy in the gender markers on her Ohio documents, but it also outed her as transgender to others in the waiting area.
Humiliated and in tears, Stacie drove directly to the Ohio Board of Health, Office of Vital Statistics, which handles birth certificates, explained what she had just been through, and asked for a corrected birth certificate. They said, “We will never change it.”
Three years later, Stacie was finally able to update her documents, which is great. Complete and total strangers, acquaintances, and even friends don’t have a “right” to know if someone is trans any more than they have a “right” to know if someone has an “innie” bellybutton or an “outie” bellybutton, whether they have webbed feet, or whether they’re circumcised. These are personal matters that can be shared on a need-to-know basis. Are there situations where someone probably should tell another person that they’re trans? Absolutely. I can think of several. But “you happen to work in the same office” is not one of them.
As someone who has gone through the process of updating these documents in what is generally considered a very trans-friendly state (Illinois), I can tell you that it involves a lot of time, money, energy, and doctors’ appointments. For Florida, which didn’t have a particularly easy process, as you’d imagine in the first place, to basically just go, Not only are we going to make it impossible for future tr*nnies to update their documents, but we’re going to turn the ones who already have into actual criminals, well… I think that’s pretty screwed up.
And that brings me back to that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad CNN headline.
Florida residents can no longer elect to change their gender on their driver’s license. Critics say the policy targets transgender people.
If you read the document from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, it explicitly talks about transgender people, going into detail about who this is targeting: people who feel that their “internal sense of his or her gender role or identification” doesn’t match their sex at birth. It’s specifically about trans people. The department isn’t refusing to fix clerical errors. This is specifically about trans people.
Why would CNN write “critics say” here? “Critics” are not saying that this is targeting transgender people; the Florida state government is saying it.
I noticed that Denise Royal, one of the co-authors of the article, followed me on Twitter. So I DMed her, saying that I had a quick but important question for her. After she responded with “?” I asked about the “critics say” line, asking, “What group of people, if not transgender people, could this possibly be targeting?” She never again responded.
The article itself is a mess, too, taking the state’s official position — that existing policy was too broad and not in line with state law, failing to accurately note that it was because the law was specifically rewritten for this very anti-trans purpose.
Previous policies mirrored the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s recommendations and allowed a transgender person to take a certified doctor’s note to the DMV and update their license.
However, a 2023 state statute does not list a doctor’s note as an approved document for a driver’s license application and only mentions gender once without providing a definition.
In the memo, Kynoch wrote that a driver’s license is an identification document that assists public and private entities in establishing the identity of the person presenting the license.
“Permitting an individual to alter his or her license to reflect an internal sense of gender role or identity, which is neither immutable nor objectively verifiable, undermines the purpose of an identification record and can frustrate the state’s ability to enforce its laws,” Kynoch wrote.
The document also says, “the term ‘gender’… does not refer to a person’s internal sense of his or her gender role or identification, but has historically and commonly been understood as a synonym for ‘sex.’” The memo also defines one’s sex as being determined by “innate and immutable biological and genetic characteristics.”
Does CNN believe that it’s just a coincidence that the “2023 state statute does not list a doctor’s note as an approved document for a driver’s license application and only mentions gender once without providing a definition”? Because it’s not a coincidence.
Without any pushback, CNN quotes the DHSMV as correcting an erroneous expansion of its authority:
Molly Best, a spokesperson for the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, said Dave Kerner, the department’s executive director, was tasked with ensuring policies and advisories conformed with the law and the department’s authority.
“Expanding the Department’s authority to issue replacement licenses dependent on one’s internal sense of gender or sex identification is violative of the law and does not serve to enhance the security and reliability of Florida issued licenses and identification cards. The security, reliability, and accuracy of government issued credentials is paramount,” she said.
But that’s not what is happening. The existing policy had been in place for years. What is happening now, trying to argue that it fits within the anti-trans laws DeSantis and the Florida GOP have enacted, is new. So much of the anti-trans argument is built upon them trying to fool the public into thinking that they are simply trying to stop some new expansion of trans rights that simply is not happening. This gives lawmakers the ability to avoid having to justify the changes they are making and sidestep explaining what “problem” they are “solving.”
The faux-neutrality here is disgusting, and this is not at all how any other group would be written about. Imagine literally any other group of people having their driver’s licenses invalidated and being made criminals and then having CNN, of all places, not even able to outright say that the group was being targeted.
This has happened in history before1. It’s happening again right now.
One of my worst recurring nightmares is having my passport revoked, being added to a list, and so on. The Trump administration was very anti-trans in its first term and clearly started to dip its toe into the waters of messing with trans people’s passports. I have no doubt in my mind that during a second Trump administration, this would happen on a mass scale (or, at the very least, a policy preventing trans people from renewing passports).
And it makes me sick to my stomach just thinking that CNN might not even be able to bring itself to say that trans people would be the ones being targeted by this Nazi tactic. Accurately reporting what is happening is the absolute least news outlets can do.
Apparently, Carlos Suarez and Denise Royal are on the Florida-beats-on-trans-people beat at CNN.
In November, for some reason, they reported on a hyperlocal story out of Coconut Creek, Florida, that almost certainly didn’t rise to the level of national news about whether or not a trans girl *gasp* played for a school’s volleyball team.
After 20 paragraphs of anti-trans propaganda, CNN tacked on four paragraph boilerplate to the bottom of the piece in a sad attempt to make it seem balanced:
LGBTQ advocates have vehemently opposed policies in Florida and other states that they argue are targeting young transgender people.
By April of this year, a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills had already been introduced in state legislatures across the United States, according to American Civil Liberties Union data.
The organization says it’s currently tracking 506 anti-LGBTQ bills.
Hundreds of those bills are focused on education. A Florida bill restricting in-school discussions about sexual orientation or gender identity with younger students, which opponents labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” law, served as a model for other states.
And then followed the story up weeks later. Aside from this single line buried five paragraphs in (“DeSantis has signed a number of laws targeting transgender youth and adults, including restrictions on gender-affirming care.”) and boilerplate in the final paragraph (“Across the nation, the American Civil Liberties Union says it is tracking more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills, including restrictions on access to public bathrooms and certain forms of healthcare.”), the article doesn’t even hint that this law may be unjust or unfair.
In both pieces, they might as well have been writing stories about a student who was caught burning down the school for how matter-of-factly the well, this is illegal tone read throughout. Zero sense that these were unjust policies, zero mention that these policies are still being fought in court. Nothing.
We’re backsliding in a big way.
CNN does not have a single paid on-air trans contributor, and given that these anti-trans articles with anti-trans headlines keep getting churned out, I’m guessing there aren’t exactly a whole bunch of trans people working in the digital newsroom as editors. For how often trans issues come up, this is journalistic malpractice.
Just as a measure of having basic proportionality, you would expect that at least one out of every 200 (0.5%) writers, editors, anchors, reporters, producers, and on-air contributors at CNN would be trans. And given that trans people are being disproportionately made the subject of political discussion, you’d expect that number to be significantly higher.
I am disappointed and upset. CNN has been made aware that its “critics say…” headline is offensive, but has done nothing to correct it. I can only imagine that when Trump mimics this Florida-by-way-of-Nazi-Germany policy in a second term should he be elected, they’ll once again find themselves unable to even say that it’s a policy targeting trans people. That makes them worse than bad journalists; it makes them accomplices.
That’s it for me today. I hope everyone’s weekend is better than this week has been.
Parker
Do not even try to tell me that this is “different.” It’s not. The goal of the Nazi’s policy was to make it so they could easily identify Jews for targeting with antisemitic laws. That’s precisely what the goal is here, too: to make it so DeSantis can easily enforce anti-trans laws about bathroom use and whatnot. Iowa, in fact, is trying to take it a step further and permanently mark trans IDs as distinct from those of people who aren’t trans. This is meant to serve the same exact purpose as the Nazi policy.
Just had to sub. They are absolute bastards. And lol at that reporter who initially engaged and then slinked back into their hole when met with their own garbage. This crap must be hard to report on but you do it so well. Much love. ❤️
I hope the fact that we have this recent history to compare GOP policy to means we won’t ultimately suffer the same fate as all those the nazis went after
We have long since reached a point where republicans holding any amount of power is a threat to our existence and our country as a whole