Trans Style Guide is Activism Cheat Sheet

THE Trans Journalists Association has produced a style guide to help media outlets provide “more accurate, sensitive coverage” of trans issues.

A style guide is a reference book used by journalists to ensure consistency in writing.

Here are some excerpts from the Trans Style Guide supplied to major media outlets.

Avoid the terms “biological gender,” “biological sex,” “biological woman,” “biological female,” “biological man,” or “biological male.”

These terms are inaccurate and often offensive.

When necessary, you can refer to someone’s assigned sex at birth using terms like “assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth.”

These can be abbreviated as “AMAB” and “AFAB” after first reference. Think seriously about whether a story requires this information.

The term biological sex is neither offensive, nor inaccurate.

It is inaccurate, however, to say someone was “assigned female at birth”.

Male or female? Are we expected to imagine the nurse flipped a coin? Sex is not assigned, it is observed.

Here’s another excerpt …

Avoid the phrase “identifies as” to write about a trans person’s gender when replacing it with “is” doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence.

This language questions a trans person’s gender by calling it an “identity” instead of just stating someone is non-binary or a man/woman.

Journalists never write about cis people’s genders this way. Extend the same respect to the trans people.

It is only acceptable to use this language when quoting a trans source.  

The reason we say a trans woman identifies as a woman is because it is important to make the distinction between objective truth and subjective opinion.

Journalists don’t write about a man identifying as a man because he is a man. That is an objective truth.

But if a man insists he is a woman, that is entirely subjective, by which I mean it is subject to the suspension of reason. The phrase “identifies as” is used so readers know they are required to do just that.

A recent article in a UK publication about a woman who stripped naked on a train featured a photograph of the perpetrator who looked suspiciously like a man.

What were readers to do? Should they believe what they were reading? Or should they believe what they were seeing?

Had the journalist reported that the perpetrator “identifies as” a woman, readers would have been spared the fear that they were going insane and, instead, understood that they simply needed to suspend reality while reading the UK’s Metro News.

The Trans Style Guide continues …

Do not over-describe the way trans people look. 

Journalists should not use descriptions that call attention to the sex trans people were assigned at birth. For instance, avoid descriptions of trans women being tall …

No problem. We’ll just leave this here …

The Trans Style Guide goes on to warn journalists …

“Anti–trans rights groups and individuals push a fringe, radical agenda.

Giving anti–trans groups a platform isn’t being unbiased, but rather giving fringe ideology outsized influence.” 

I’m old enough to remember when the “fringe, radical agenda” was called biology.

A recent national poll found 67% of Australians believed transgendered athletes should be banned from women’s sport. 

The ones seeking to have “outsized influence” would seem to be the Trans Journalists Association.

Let me give you one more excerpt from the Trans Style Guide …

The terms “sex change/sex reassignment” are outdated terms and sometimes considered offensive. Don’t use them unless quoting a trans source. 

Instead use: transition, gender-affirming care, or transition-related care

Removing your genitals so you’ll feel more like a woman is not affirming your gender. It’s a sex change. 

But even the term “sex change” is inaccurate since it’s not possible to change your sex. Please don’t get upset with me for saying that. I’m just “following the science”, as leftist love to say when arguing for climate action, though not when arguing for abortion, or for the Trans Style Guide.

NSW Liberal candidate Katherine Deves described removing one’s sex organs as neither gender affirming care, nor a sex change but, rather, as “surgical mutilation”. For that she received death threats and had to relocate her family.

If only Deves had heeded the Trans Style Guide, she could have taken more narrative-affirming care and would not have needed an address change.

Quite clearly, the Trans Style Guide is not a style guide. It’s a Trans Lie Guide; a Trans Activism Cheat Sheet.

Or, as Andrew Doyle wrote:

“It’s an ideological blueprint, an attempt to reconstruct society through the manipulation of words and their meanings.”

The Trans Journalists Association is really just insisting that news reporting becomes more and more removed from reality.

Real journalists don’t take instructions from fifth columnists seeking to deny facts. 

Sadly, much of the mainstream media are now activists, identifying as journalists.