How to Craft an Anti-Trans Narrative with Deniability

Dissecting the New York Post’s Gross Article

At the beginning of December, the New York Post published an article titled “50-year-old trans swimmer shared locker room while competing against teens: ‘The girls were terrified’”. Normally, I would ignore this type of news that is outrage bait, but the reporting and writing within was particularly egregious and, to me, a clear anti-trans narrative disguised as objective journalism.

The more I dug into this, the sicker I felt at how this “story” was framed and what details the Post decided to include and exclude. Drawing on my graduate education in communications and mass media, I knew I had to break down how this narrative was made with deniability as it’s something I see happening more and more. News outlets that lean towards transphobia report this way because it allows them to push their ideas while claiming deniability.

Unfortunately for these news outlets, these storytelling devices have long been studied and scholarly research can easily explain what’s happening. Through this, and a healthy dose of proper journalism, I will break down these techniques and show how they subtly construct their anti-trans narrative.

Priming, Framing & Word Choice

The New York Post’s article begins with the following paragraphs:

“A 50-year-old transgender swimmer was allowed to compete against teenage girls at an event in Canada — with horrified parents building a makeshift tent out of towels to shield girls as young as 8 in the locker room.

Melody Wiseheart, who once competed under [her dead name], sparked outrage while competing during the Trojan Cup in Barrie, Ontario.”

In writing, but particularly news reporting, word choice is extremely important. Certain verbs have different connotations and can drastically change the meaning of a sentence.

Notice how in the first sentence, the writer of this article chooses “allowed to compete”. This term suggests that this might not have been allowed previously, or Wiseheart racing was a novel occurrence. What follows is that this “sparked outrage” and then the reader gets two negative quotes from parents about the girls being “confused” and “terrified”.

This is an excellent example of what’s called media-priming theory in communications literature. Introduced in 1987 by Iyengar and Kinder, this theory explains that certain words or visuals can activate associations one has with a certain topic or idea and then influence how one interprets something.

Since transgender athletes and whether they should be allowed to compete with cisgender ones is a hotly debated topic, most readers likely have vague opinions on it. The term “allowed” brings forth this idea by reminding them that it is something to be debated and that in some states many trans athletes are barred from competing as their identified gender.

Some of these readers may associate this with men “pretending to be women” to win at sports, or others may just associate trans athletes as a societal taboo. Regardless, in a single sentence, the New York Post has primed its audience to see this through a controversial lens.

What next occurs is another communications concept called framing. This idea was described in 1993 by media researcher Robert Entman as “select[ing] some aspects of a perceived reality and mak[ing] them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described”

Words, phrases, or metaphors can all be used to frame an issue and emphasize what is important about it. Framing isn’t necessarily a negative thing, it can be helpful to streamline information for journalists, but in this case, it is used to highlight a false, disgusting narrative.

With the audience primed to think about this trans athlete as controversial, it’s easy to then frame this story as something negative and unusual. By including the phrase “horrified parents” in the introduction and then proceeding with strongly worded quotes, the New York Post frames Wiseheart’s competing as something allegedly morally corrupt or, at least, something to be concerned about.

The order of the paragraphs also plays a role in this. It isn’t until the seventh paragraph that the New York Post explains (incorrectly as I’ll show later) that Wiseheart has been competing with girls since 2019. By the time readers swim through this stream of primed novelty and strong, negative framing, this detail, which contradicts this frame, becomes less noticeable.

Even within this detail, the New York Post selectively uses the word “against girls” to frame her swimming as antagonistic. They could have said “competed with girls” or simply “swam in the girl’s division”, but that wouldn’t suggest an anti-trans narrative with a little escape hatch attached.

This pattern continues throughout the piece to dampen any reporting that might suggest these events aren’t as outrageous. After some more quotes from “concerned parents”, the closing paragraphs provide a statement from Swim Canada saying that:

“Swimming Canada and Swim Ontario believe swimming is for everyone … people of all shapes, sizes, genders, beliefs, and backgrounds should have the opportunity to swim to the best of their ability”

What comes after is a parent saying “This is crazy”. What should be a definitive statement that the swimming authorities of Canada aren’t against this, and therefore, this issue isn’t a big deal, gets sandwiched between a cycle of negative priming and framing.

By using certain words, priming the audience, and framing the “issue” in a certain light, the New York Post can claim to be “just reporting the facts” while subtly pushing a viewpoint into the writing. They hope that their readers will fill in the blanks so they can avoid accountability.

It gets even worse when one looks into the details that they chose to exclude or deemphasize.

Omitting Details & Strategic Ignorance

The New York Post describes the event only as “The Trojan Cup” and then later an interviewed parent says “Some of [the girls] are hoping for scholarship”. These two decisions lead the reader to believe this is an important competition, one with an awe-inspiring name and possible financial implications.

In reality, the Trojan Cup is a community event hosted by the Barrie Trojan Swim Club. They are a private club that once operated out of a YMCA. Though some of the individual competitors may have been showing off for college recruiters, the event itself does not offer scholarships.

The event also hosts an open-age category where any person who is a member of a swim club could race. The New York Post doesn’t include any of this detail because it would force them to address details that dull the teeth of their narrative.

Along a similar vein, the Post also states:

“World Aquatics, the international governing body of the sport, effectively banned male-to-female transgender athletes from competing in women’s events last year after updating its policy to allow for only swimmers who transitioned before age 12 or in the early stages of puberty.”

What they fail to mention is that World Aquatics only governs over Olympic and World competitions, not private YMCA/Community Swim meets

Both of these are excellent examples of a communications concept called strategic ignorance.

In a recent study done by Knudson and Kishik in Social Epistemology, they examined how Danish Agricultural agencies craftily maintained ignorance to avoid taking action during a disease outbreak among the country’s pig farms. Gaining knowledge on which farms had infected pigs and crafting a plan to address it would put the department in a difficult situation, so kept muddling the process by claiming they couldn’t proceed because of unknown variables or moving the goalpost on what the objectives of these investigations.

The New York Post likely was aware of the nature of this competition, for their original and only source, The Toronto Sun, wrote in their coverage:

“Parents confirmed that the person in question changed in and out of a swimsuit in the women’s locker room at the East Bayfield Community Centre during the Dec. 1 Trojan Cup.”

But, they likely didn’t seek out clarifying information because they didn’t want to and used strategic ignorance to avoid addressing it.

Knudson and Kishik use this case study to explain how “strategic ignorance is about avoiding, hiding, or rendering existing knowledge unreliable” and how carefully selecting how and what topics one communicates can produce and maintain ignorance.

Along with the Trojan Cup’s background, the New York Post fails to find out other details that could clarify this story like how long Wiseheart has been swimming, how long she’s been out as transgender, or her relationship with her community.

Googling her name, I found these answers quite easily. This leads me to believe that the New York Post didn’t look into these things to be strategically ignorant.

So, let’s answer some of these questions:

In regards to her swimming, it seems that Wiseheart has been swimming in the girl’s division since at least 2017 (her first recorded time is ironically a Trojan Cup), not 2019 like the Post claimed.

In 2012, her wife started a blog detailing their journey from being a heterosexual couple to a lesbian one. This suggests Wiseheart has been out for over 10 years, possibly more.

Wiseheart has been employed as a professor at York University for 18 years. Since professors tend to be involved in their communities and public figures, to a degree, it could be safely assumed she wasn’t a stranger.

Was this information hard to track down?

No.

As of publication, her wife’s blog can be found in the fifth result, and her Swimming Canada profile in the seventh when you google her name. She also has a public LinkedIn profile.

I can only assume the New York Post purposefully avoided this information like the Danish agricultural agencies for similar reasons: it would make this story a less effective anti-trans narrative, so they avoided looking it up.

It gets even more damning when one finds out where this story originally came from.

Avoiding Troubling Associations

This article includes a lot of quotes from unnamed parents making it seem like this outrage was a majority opinion, but that may not be the case. This may be another notch in a chain of fixation from conservative talking heads.

Though the New York Post credits the Toronto Sun as the original news source, this story originally broke in October from Rebel News, a website notorious for spreading misinformation and having reporters with ties to far-right and neo-fascist groups according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Other conservative news outlets such as Louder with Crowder and The Blaze quickly latched onto this “story”, misgendering Wiseheart and placing her name in quotations.

Rebel News claims to have gotten a tip from “concerned parents” about Wiseheart competing and allegedly were met with a lot of resistance when they went to investigate.

“First, organizers actually denied that [Wiseheart] swam at the meet, even though we provided them with a copy of the Friday schedule that indicated otherwise. Eventually, the organizers relented and admitted that [Wiseheart] did take part, but they didn’t want to get into a debate about gender and age.”

However, their video coverage, which the article is based on and is placed at the top of the page, paints a different picture. What they show is confused, contradictory, and frankly unprofessional reporting of this supposed travesty.

The event organizer they interviewed didn’t “relent” after pushing, but merely was mistaken about Wiseheart being registered for that race and admitted so. He also didn’t try to avoid a debate like Rebel News framed but explained that the standards on age and gender are governed by Swimming Canada and registration for races is based on that.

In the same video, they also claim that the meets were “segregated by sex and age”, but are later contradicted by one of their interviewees. The same interviewee explains that the meet is open-age and anyone can compete.

As a final nail in the coffin of this already unprofessional reporting, the site also claims that they couldn’t get any parents to speak to them because they were too afraid to be canceled but provided zero evidence; not even an anonymous source is quoted. Also, people give statements anonymously all the time, so this seems farfetched.

Since neither the New York Post nor the Toronto Sun credited Rebel News, it’s only speculation, but some signs point towards the Post, at minimum, trying to distance themselves and remain strategically ignorant.

The Toronto Sun has higher quality reporting than Rebel News and mostly sticks to facts, but the writer, Joe Warmington, can’t help but insert their opinion and be barefaced about their message.

“The whole thing is gross.”

“As difficult as the Lia Thomas situation was in the United States where a transgender female was competing against biological females, this one is even stranger in that it’s an adult pulling this stunt against kids.”

After a little digging, I also found that Warmington once headlined an event sponsored by Rebel Media, the parent company of Rebel News, and shared their posts on Twitter as recently as November 2023. In my opinion, it’s highly likely that Warmington found out about Wiseheart’s racing through them and then pursued this “story”.

With all of that said, Warmington didn’t cite Rebel News’ coverage. Assumedly, it wouldn’t look good for the Sun, which has a high credibility rating, to base an article on a source with questionable journalistic ethics. Warmington’s article gives the Post a cushion of deniability by not being directly from the allegedly fascist news site.

This information was not hard to find, so I can only assume that the New York Post (which I must reiterate, used the Toronto Sun article as their only source with little to no additional information added) strategically avoided further information to maintain ignorance.

Through a kind of disgusting version of the telephone game, this story has gone from bluntly transphobic “news” by bigoted outlets to the now slyly written, and more digestible, article by the New York Post, but with the same conclusion: trans people shouldn’t be competing in sports.

Conclusion

So, why did I just write over 2300 words (and counting) on a 500-word article?

It’s because this “story” got to the New York Post, one of the biggest circulating papers in the country. Had these events remained in the pits of conservative news hell, with their highly biased and often inaccurate reporting, I would have ignored this. Debunking them would have been easy and done little.

But, the Post’s name carries a 200-year-old legacy and is considered highly respectable by many. Their sphere of influence is much greater, making these sneakily-made anti-trans narratives extremely concerning.

Over 500 anti-transgender bills were introduced in 2023 and violence against the community is on the rise. Most of these bills are introduced under the guise of “protecting children” or “being against medical malpractice” because most politicians know it is not acceptable to flatly say “I want to outlaw transgender people”.

Likewise, the New York Post knows they can’t be upfront about their opinion. They hide it behind particular word choices and organization of information in attempts to prime their audience and frame the issue under a certain light, while also selectively pursuing certain details to claim ignorance and benevolence.

Further transgender hate won’t propagate through blatant calls for violence, but through words like these which quietly push an agenda. If the trans community, and more importantly allies, can learn to see these in news reporting, they can better defend themselves and their loved ones.

In other words, f^&* off New York Post.