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.
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:
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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