Blindsided by CBS documentary

[suzifrommd]

 CBS news has on its website a documentary about non-binary people. It was a very sensitive, factual, carefully made that IMO accurately portrays the non-binary community. I was feeling this nice warm glow when it was over that the world might finally understand us.

The person who introduced the documentary promised a panel afterward to clear up things that were still confusing.

The "panel" contained no non-binary people, or even any trans people. There were four people, one of whom was a lawyer from North Carolina who doesn't believe that trans people are protected by federal law and another was Peter Sprigg who is a well known leader of anti-trans causes. There also was someone from HRC, which disappointed me greatly because I would have hoped that HRC would have refused to be involved if there were no actual non-binary people on the panel.

The panel did not talk about non-binary people. Instead they talked about the NC bathroom law and whether gender identities made any sense.

I feel like I've been totally blindsided.

[KathyLauren]

The news media do this all the time.  In an effort to appear "balanced" they always show a bias in favour of the weaker argument or the fringe position, to make it appear to have equal merit to the majority or reasonable argument.  It sounds like that was what they were doing.  It drives me nuts, but they aren't going to change.

[Asche]

This is why I generally avoid coverage of trans people and issues in the media.  Not only are they generally clueless anyway, but they always feel like they have to cover the "other side" -- the one that thinks we should be exterminated.  I did end up seeing the National Geographic documentary, which wasn't bad, but was just oversimplified enough to get on my nerves.

I also avoid shows and movies about trans people, because they're usually clueless and exploitive, and I don't have the spare neurons to deal with that.