NPR Story on Choosing Your Own Gender Pronouns? 'Most of Your Comments Were Positive'

July 19th, 2013 10:32 AM

NPR announced to its listeners on Thursday night's All Things Considered that their audience is chock full of "tolerant" lefties. Dipping into letters from the audience, anchor Melissa Block said there were "a lot of strong reactions" to Tuesday's ludicrous one-sided story by Margot Adler on young people demanding to be whimsical about gender pronouns and redefining the "gender binary."  Some letters were negative, "but most of your comments were positive," Block insisted.

"Anndal Nurayan of Chapel Hill, North Carolina writes this: 'I wanted to thank you and her for this thoughtful coverage. There is so much nastiness about trans people in public discourse. As Adler rightly said, that they are one of the most vulnerable groups in our society.'”

BLOCK: Amy Lawton of Statesville, North Carolina disagrees with that last line. She writes, “What about abused and neglected children? They certainly do not have the luxury of sitting at Oberlin College defining themselves as tractors, or determining what gender pronoun they’re going to use at any given moment.”

Lawton goes on, “While I believe that these people have the right to choose whatever pronoun they’d like to refer to themselves, by no means are they the most marginalized people in society. Finally, it seems there are more vital issues around here than rewriting the gender binary.”

A third letter writer came down the middle, and insisted “genders do exist, but don’t define who people are at their core.”

None of these suggested that the Adler story suggested NPR was supportive of waging a war not only on the "gender binary," but on science and the accuracy of pronouns.