When All You Have Is An Unhealthy Obsession With Trans People (And A Newspaper Column)...

Judy Blume, like Margaret Atwood, got ambushed by an interviewer with a wild anti-trans agenda.

Hello, dear readers.

There’s a tweet that lives in the back of my mind (okay, to be fair, there are hundreds of tweets that live in the back of my mind, which I can only imagine have crowded out important bits of knowledge that I actually need, oh well). It goes like this:

“Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of ‘Boss Baby’ vibes from this...,” reads the tweet.

The joke here is a 21st-century update to Maslow's hammer (“If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail”). It’s a form of bias that must be understood and accounted for before taking a specific action. In the world of media and journalism, you can see what happens when writers don’t bother asking whether something reflects reality or just confirms their existing beliefs. For instance, if all you have in your journalistic toolbox is the claim that "left-wing cancel culture is out of control on college campuses!" you'll probably miss reports of actual attacks on free speech by members of the political right.

There’s a certain kind of journalist who has made ranting and raving about transgender people the sole tool in their box, and over the weekend we got to see another example of the type of deranged, dishonest work that results from this.