“This family hopes their story will lead to more understanding, more acceptance, and ultimately more love,” the Fox journalist concluded.
QUICK FACTS:
- Fox News ran a video segment on Friday covering journalist Bryan Llenas’ reporting on biological female and teenager Ryland Whittington’s gender transition “for LGBTQ+ Pride Month.”
- “America’s Newsroom” host Dana Perino opened the segment, titled “California transgender teen, family hope to be an inspiration to others,” saying, “Pride month continues as we highlight Ryland Whittington, whose journey of transitioning at age five has been seen by seven million people in a family YouTube video.”
- “Before Ryland could even speak, he managed to tell his parents that he is a boy,” Llenas narrated over the segment as images of Ryland as a toddler wearing a dress and bows in her hair flashed across the screen. “And unlike some trans kids, when Ryland came out at age five, a few years later, he had the full support of his parents,” said Llenas.
- The reporter went on to describe Ryland’s parents’ allowing their young daughter to transition as a display of “extraordinary courage,” after that lamenting how “people are afraid of what they do not understand,” implying that opposition to the Whittington parents’ decision is ignorant.
- “This family hopes their story will lead to more understanding, more acceptance, and ultimately more love,” Llenas concluded.
WATCH THE FOX SEGMENT:
BACKGROUND:
- Fox News’ positive coverage of a teen’s gender transition conflicts with the organization’s public image of being a “conservative” media organization.
- “I’m stunned that Fox News ran a segment celebrating a girl whose parents ‘transitioned’ her into a boy when she was 5 because she apparently told them she was a boy ‘before [she] could talk,'” tweeted conservative influencer Allie Beth Stuckey. “Absolutely maddening & heartbreaking.”
- “Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer when my conservative news outlets don’t encourage parents to trans their little children,” tweeted Daily Wire host Michael Knowles.
- “I have appeared on Fox News many times. I appreciate the platform they’ve given me. If what I’m about to say ruins that relationship, so be it. We have to call this evil lunacy out wherever we see it. Especially on our own side,” wrote What Is a Woman? author Matt Walsh in an Instagram post. “Today Fox ran a long segment for Pride Month celebrating a ‘trans kid’ who ‘came out as a boy’ at the age of five. The piece did not simply report on the controversy surrounding child transitioning. It outright promotes the practice.”
- “The reporter says that the child announced a new gender as a toddler. Does Fox want us to believe that BABIES can choose their gender? This is the most extreme, radical, dangerous form of gender ideology. And it’s being promoted on Fox News,” Walsh went on to say. “The poor kid is 14 now with a permanently altered body, condemned to live forever with an identity imposed as a small child. It is horrifying, evil, and sick. And it is what Fox chose to promote.”
- “I know for a fact that many people at Fox do not approve of this and never would have agreed to air radical far left trans propaganda. But Fox reporter Bryan Lenas chose to do this story and someone at Fox chose to put it on the air. Everyone involved should be fired immediately,” Walsh concluded.
