Have you, dear reader, ever wondered what it’s like to write for The Washington Post? I don’t mean swimming in the power currents of K Street, lunching on the musty glory of Woodward and Bernstein or having intimate access to the rest of the Democrat party. I mean the job’s requirements and compensations day in and day out. 
An August 25 piece from education reporter Moriah Balingit offers some clues. In it, Balingit tells the story of a 13 year-old Fischer Wells who is banned from playing on a Lexington Kentucky school girls field hockey team because he’s really a boy.
When you write for the Post, credulity and a subscription to groupthink are required. Balingit is onboard with trans ideology, writing with all the proper assumptions, using the preferred “she” pronoun and coloring the kid’s world as a happy dream crushed by some evil Republicans. (Fischers teammates “could not believe she had been ousted for being herself.” Sigh – the wisdom of the children …)
When you write for the Post, you get to pretend that the latest thing is entirely reasonable and consulting 5,000 years of human behavior isn’t. So Balingit states that the Kentucky High School Athletic Association “had set extraordinarily high hurdles for transgender athletes to play on teams that matched their gender identity.” Imagine requiring members of a girls team to be girls. The state’s reaction is, an activist tells Balingit, “a really vicious attack on one trans child in Kentucky.”
When you write for the Post, you don’t let details trip up the narrative. Balingit tells readers the athletic association “required that transgender athletes undergo ‘sex reassignment’ before puberty — though it was unclear what that meant. For transgender athletes who underwent sex reassignment after puberty, the association required that “surgical anatomical changes have been completed, including external genitalia changes and gonadectomy.” Sounds terribly convoluted. But readers never learn where Fischer is in relation to the rules, or in relation to his actual sex. We only know he’s “a middle-schooler with boundless enthusiasm, a bookworm and a novice field hockey player.” (Also, the state is playing catch-up. If its reactions are too narrow or unclear, well, this is the left’s brave new world. Define “woman.”)
When you write for the Post, numbers and statistics only mean what you say they mean. Balingit asserts that a “Post analysis” (the gold-standard for, well, Posties) of CDC data from select states and urban districts suggests “that about 1 percent of athletes in these jurisdictions are transgender.” Sounds right. But what about the other side? How many women are affected when biological men crash their track and field events or swim meets? It’s not a one-to-one equation. And even if it were, why should 1 percent of people be dictating policy?
When you write for the Post, you – and your readers – know who the bad guys are. “Chris Hartman, executive director of Kentucky’s Fairness Campaign, says the bills were part of a coordinated effort for Republicans to gain traction with conservative voters. Lawmakers are ‘seeking to drive a wedge between voters,’ Hartmann said.” Elsewhere, “In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) directed state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse for seeking gender-affirming health care, such as hormones, for their transgender children. Conservative parents have also targeted clubs for LGBTQ students.”
When you write for the Post, you get to pretend that the victim just wants to be left in peace but reactionary forces are forcing him to take a stand. “Fischer is reticent about the ways this unusual chapter has affected her,” Balingit says, “about what it is like to be singled out by a branch of the state government, about what it’s like watching the classmates she recruited head off to field hockey practice when she has been barred from competing.” But Fischer testified at the Kentucky capital,there are videos and news items all over Google about Fischer, and Fischer is in the Washington Post. Fischer – or the people manipulating him – aren’t really reticent about much.
In sum, when you write for the Post, you’re writing to flatter the worldview of good progressives.
