USA Today Stealth Edits Female Athlete’s Op-Ed Because She Called Transgender Women ‘Males’
In a piece on the unfair advantage men who identify as women have in women’s sports, USA Today changed the wording and added an editor’s note that read, “This column has been updated to reflect USA TODAY’s standards and style guidelines. We regret that hurtful language was used.”
Last month, USA Today got caught allowing failed 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams to stealth edit a piece it had published.
Editors allowed Abrams to sound more anti-boycott than she initially did after Major League Baseball announced they were pulling the All-Star Game over Georgia’s new voting law, which Abrams had referred to as “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Here we are a month later, and we’re learning that, unsurprisingly, the newspaper did not learn its lesson from that embarrassing revelation.
Christiana Holcomb, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) legal organization, claimed USA Today did the same thing with their client and former Connecticut high school track star Chelsea Mitchell’s opinion piece.
Mitchell argued that biological males competing as women have an unfair advantage. However, editors changed it three days after USA Today published it because it contained the word “male” throughout the piece when referring to transgender women athletes.
In addition, the publication did not notify Mitchell about the changes.
.@USATODAY published our client Chelsea Mitchell’s opinion about the unfairness she experienced being forced to compete against male athletes. But after backlash from the woke mob, editors unilaterally changed Chelsea’s words & called them “hurtful language.” 1/3 pic.twitter.com/tAtzrZgPzt
— Christiana Holcomb (@ChristianaADF) May 26, 2021
What was the “hurtful language” that editors deleted from Chelsea’s opinion piece three days after publication? The word “male.” 2/3
— Christiana Holcomb (@ChristianaADF) May 26, 2021
USA Today violated its principles to appease the mob. This blatant censorship violates the trust we place in media to be honest brokers of public debate.
Chelsea’s experience & viewpoint matters. That’s why we’re posting her original piece here https://t.co/bs6lRIxJq0. 3/3
— Christiana Holcomb (@ChristianaADF) May 26, 2021
The editor’s note attached to the latest update (May 26th at 8:47 a.m.) states that the “column has been updated to reflect USA TODAY’s standards and style guidelines. We regret that hurtful language was used.”
As Holcomb noted, Mitchell’s crime was that she used the word “males” in place of “transgender” in her piece, which hurt the feelings of leftist outrage mobs on Twitter.
Here are some examples:
In the original piece published May 22nd, Mitchell wrote that during a February 2020 competition, all she could think about was how “all my training, everything I’ve done to maximize my performance, might not be enough, simply because there’s a runner on the line with an enormous physical advantage: a male body.”
In the updated version, “a male body” has been removed.
In the second paragraph in the original piece, Mitchell stated that “I was bumped to third place in the 55-meter dash in 2019, behind two male runners.”
In the updated one, it says, “I was bumped to third place in the 55-meter dash in 2019, behind two transgender runners.”
In another paragraph, Mitchell wrote that the “CIAC allows biological males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.”
“Biological males” was changed to “transgender athletes” in the newest version.
It went on like that throughout the entire piece.
The USA Today’s editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll is on Twitter, but she has yet to respond publicly on social media to any inquiries about the unauthorized changes.
Ironically, in making the changes to her piece without her consent, USA Today proved Mitchell’s point in a way about the unfairness biological women face when competing against men who identify as women, whether it be on an actual track or field or in an op/ed. Unfortunately, like tennis legend Martina Navratilova, other female sports figures have found this out the hard way as well.
I would say that in the context of what has happened to Mitchell and other female athletes and the lack of support they’ve received from most so-called “feminist” groups, the below tweet sums up the sad state of modern feminism pretty well. These feminists and other “woke” radical leftists will bear the full responsibility when we see women’s rights canceled:
How far we’ve come… pic.twitter.com/aCs1MVWEvM
— Juanito (@johnnyyrebb) May 27, 2021
Mitchell and three other women have sued the Connecticut Association of Schools, alleging that an “inclusive” policy adopted by the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference violates Title IX. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last month on procedural grounds, but the ADF filed a notice of appeal last week.
You can read more on the lawsuit here.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Yes, the wokeism is still out of control.
I’ve been seeing an ad recently for a tablet that claims to help prevent being infected by AIDS. It uses woke language that I find particularly circumlocutory: “This product is not for persons assigned female at birth.”
Assigned?
If they insist on not uttering the word “women,” they still certainly could have come up with more straightforward language. For example: “This product is not for persons with factory-installed vaginas.”
The hope and dream of plausible in modern science. Woke and [morally] broke.
They’ve been saying that “gender is assigned” for quite a while now. The idea is that these “assignments” are arbitrary and unrelated to “reality.”
Don’t try to follow the logic. It’s just propaganda.
You will find “gender assigned at birth” checkboxes on the patient intake forms used by many major health organizations now. Somehow you’d think an organization that claims to offer science-based services would be immune to this, but they’re not.
Presumably the physicians who work there know enough to distinguish male bodies from female bodies as appropriate. Yet somehow I’d not be surprised if they keep this to themselves, lest they be censored for revealing the terrible truth that, yes, we are a sexed species.
Massage the fact then wonder why no one trusts you.
Progressive confusion. Progressive corruption.
Trans a state or process of divergence.
Gender is sex-correlated physical and mental (e.g. sexual orientation) attributes.
Trans/pseudo-female (sex) or trans/quasi-feminine (gender).
The average male has certain physiological differences (e.g. musculature, lung capacity, bone density) over the average female that engender disparate advantages in certain contexts.
I am reminded of the Mark Twain story (or at least attributed to him): “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does he have? Answer: Four, because merely calling it a leg does not make it one.”
It makes it five, because it redefines the set. I could never figure out the story.
I understand where you’re coming from, and if this were mathematics or computer programming you’d be right, but the point of the story is that “leg” has a well-settled definition that we are not free to change. If we call a tail a leg we are not redefining “leg”, we are merely lying; the definition remains the same, and so an anatomically normal dog has four.
This is like playing the Sesame Street game “One of these things doesn’t belong,” and always arguing that they all belong because they’re all part of the quiz question.
I’d like USA Today to explain how it’s OK for a
biological maletransgender athlete to consistently crush female competition? English isn’t on the starting block. Feelings aren’t. A larger, muscular human being is.And how come feelings are only one-sided? Every real female who loses to an alleged female, how are they supposed to feel?
I’m old enough to remember the East German Swim Team. That was back in the rational days when everyone understood that doing such things were “cheating,” including the country doing the cheating. (Some accounts state that the actual swimmers themselves were never informed what they were being given by their trainers.)
I’m old enough to remember reading Joe Weider’s Muscle & Fitness magazine, and how trainers knew that normal women simply cannot develop muscle mass like men, until after menopause. Estrogen, it seems, keeps the female body, which might be able to lift an impressive amount of weight, from developing really large muscles.
So, female athletes competing against male athletes in a sport where muscle mass is an advantage, will generally lose. A fantasy female in the form of a trans female, has had the advantage of years of training with a hormone mix that the women are forbidden to use.
It’s a fraud and a cheat, and we all know it. Sports organizations that allow this nonsense get the derision they rightly deserve.
I’m old enough to remember when doping was for swim teams to help them swim better. Now doping is for presidents who have dementia to help them string two sentences together.
That is funny.
I’ll just leave this here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHBbInxJ4Is
So… How will the woke-dopes adjust things when the choice-girls (vs. the real-girls) get identified, and the real-girls start getting credit for their accomplishments, the general public disregarding the medals and ribbons held by the pretenders?
I also wonder about how the trans competitors gin up any self-respect when down inside they know that they are taking advantage of a flawed system….
It is a problem. How about they give the 1st place to the transgender in the transgender category and award the 1st place to the biological girl:in the girls category. The trans people have to compete somewhere and they would not be winning against the boys.
Hey! Like the Special Olympics!
Perhaps female athletes should simply refuse to participate when a trans female is involved. You know, get set at the starting blocks and then when the starting gun fires simply stand up and walk off the field. Simply don’t participate. Don’t validate trans females or try and compete against trans females. It’ll only turn out poorly for the biologic woman that does. And then when asked why they didn’t participate they should remain silent and refuse to answer any such questions. Don’t compete and don’t make any statements.
Personally, I think that they should use the oppertunity to tell them why, hopefully on live TV.
In local running races we get medals by gender and age. It’s not a problem and we play the national anthem before the race. If you kneel you might get trampled. Best to be upright at the start.
Guinness world record recognizes fastest marathon in a costume, fastest marathon wearing a suit. Maybe trans could get recognized as fastest boy pretending to be a girl.
Well, if I was at a bar and some shehe got next to me, I would probably “stealth edit” himher
that is He-She-It
Lola by the Kinks?
IAAF and WADA letting Caster Semenya win a bunch of Olympic and World Championship gold medals is no different from this case. Caster won’t even have to give up the medals after being banned, even though rescinding race results and medals is standard procedure after bans for failing biological testing.
Wonder how well Jenner would do in Women’s decaf once he got back into training swing of things.
In order to be factually correct, she could have changed “a male body” to “a body that received a flood of male hormones prior to transitioning”.
Would this correction prevent the woke mob from cancelling her? Nope. That would happen no matter what she said.
“a male body …” So if you can’t say “a male body” then how, exactly, is one to express the concept?
If one ignores whether anyone actually believes human bodies are not sexed (and whether those who claim to believe this also believe other species that reproduce sexually are similarly unsexed), is this an attempt to impose a Newspeak in which it’s become impossible to express certaub disfavored concepts because the words to do so no longer exist?
(Somehow this reminds me of the apocryphal story that some robo-editor changed the phrase “back in the black” (referring to a profit-and-loss accounting) to “back in the African-American.”)
I do think that bodies are sexed to the same degree. While rare, there are people do not develop normal hardware.
That’s interesting, but it seems that now the color of your hardware is the determining factor that will help you will get ahead in life. And if you are opposed to this you will be required to attend Critical Reparation-hardware Theory classes.
alleging that an “inclusive” policy adopted by the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference violates Title IX
The only purpose of Title IX was to force institutions to direct money away from sports people wanted to watch and would donate money to, to sports nobody wanted to watch or donate money to. Women demanded redress at the point of a gun for “rights” violations, and now they’re upset that tactic has come back to bite them on the ass.
Let them fight.
This whole thing is so stupid. How we have allowed it to even gain a fraction of the traction it has really says a lot about our passivity.
Hopefully, this will backfire, and girls of America will see just how stupid this is, and blow it out of the water.
This crap is so stupid reporters have to attend special classes on how to talk a about it with a straight face.
It’s fascinating how the vile Dhimmi-crats will gleefully and zealously upend and undermine their erstwhile, staunchly-held beliefs (in this case, women’s rights) at the drop of a hat, in favor of their latest, faddish “social justice” cause du jour, no matter how hypocritical the end result.
Besides this “transgender” narcissism/totalitarianism totally undermining women’s rights, we also witness the Dhimmi-crats’ romanticizing, ignoring and whitewashing of Islam’s intrinsic and innumerable pathologies (e.g., supremacism, totalitarianism, misogyny, persecution of non-Muslims), while simultaneously embracing a pro-homosexual agenda. Never mind that Islam is the most staunchly anti-homosexual ideology on the planet, condemning homosexuals to death.
The sickness never ends. I don’t know who is more mentally ill, the ones who can’t figure out their sex or the ones who enable them.
Where and when did the decision get made?
I imagine in some faculty room in a French university, the alpha perv declared that gender was a costume to be donned or changed on the whim. And from there it spread to Oxford, Harvard, U Michigan, until their graduates took on editorship roles in the media.
All I know is that there was never a real debate whether there is such a thing as a “transgender.”