Abigail Anthony at National Review reports The Associated Press Stylebook, the longtime style manual for most news organizations, has issued a “Topical Guide” for transgender coverage that encourages writers to use “unbiased language” and to “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”
You know there’s a heavy dose of politics when they claim it’s “unbiased” to “avoid false balance.” So the trend continues of AP finding it “unbiased” to use all the LGBT-mandated lingo at war with biology:
A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.
The gender “assigned at birth” is merely a social construct that can “turn out to be inaccurate.” Remember that AP sells itself to the public as “Advancing the Power of Facts.” When they consult "Experts," then "Facts" go out the window. In 2017, the AP Stylebook commissars embraced “they” as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun.
The AP explicitly sides against conservatives. A section on “legislation” explains: “Starting in 2020, conservative-leaning U.S. state legislatures began considering a wave of bills aimed at transgender youths. Many political observers assert that the legislation is being used to motivate voters by falsely framing children as under threat.” This is an interesting claim, since transgender activists routinely frame any opposition to their agenda with threatening 'trans' children with suicidal thoughts.
AP gurus single out efforts to maintain sex-specific sports: “In the following two years, more than a dozen states passed laws banning transgender athletes from certain sports teams. Opponents say that the measures unfairly target an already marginalized community, and that rules and monitoring in individual leagues and conferences render such legislation unnecessary.”
In today's leftist media, the "marginalized" people are the powerful influencers, which means "marginalized" isn't an accurate term, either. An AP-supportive piece at Forbes adds AP even tries to deny than trans women have an obvious biological advantage in keeping with women:
Proponents of such restrictions assert that transgender women have an athletic advantage over cisgender women. Transgender athletes' backers argue, among other things, that individuals are different, that sweeping restrictions overblow the prevalence of the issue, and that it's not possible to know with certainty what gives any particular athlete, transgender or cisgender, a competitive edge.
Naturally, they add “Avoid terms like biological male, which opponents of transgender rights sometimes use to oversimplify sex and gender, is often misleading shorthand for assigned male at birth, and is redundant because sex is inherently biological.”
Some other rules:
-- “Do not use the term ‘transgendered’ or use transgender/s as a noun.”
-- “Do not use terms like ‘normal’ to describe people who are not transgender.”
-- “Don't refer in interviews or stories to ‘preferred’ or ‘chosen’ pronouns. Instead, [write] ‘the pronouns they use,’ ‘whose pronouns are,’ ‘who uses the pronouns,’ etc.
Under feminist objections, AP scooted back a little on "pregnant people," ruling that "pregnant women" is not so objectionable.
The most Orwellian terminology is describing hormone treatments and even the amputations of breasts or penises as “gender-confirmation procedures” and “gender-affirming care.” the guide explains that “treatments can improve psychological well-being and reduce suicidal behavior.” AP will insist everyone ignore examples of people who were more suicidal after gender-denial surgery.
