The latest transgender media fail, brought to you by AP

[Butterfly]

The latest transgender media fail, brought to you by AP
Feministing
Posted by Jos
06 June, 2010


http://www.feministing.com/archives/021435.html


Members of the press are generally terrible at covering stories involving transgender people, the biggest error being incorrectly identifying folk's genders. This regularly comes up in stories about the murders of trans women (sadly a big chunk of the media coverage our community gets) who are way too often initially reported to be men. I found it interesting to see a similar error that could have very easily been corrected early on appear in a not very newsworthy story that was picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted in many publications that use their coverage.

People complained to the police because a group of sunbathers at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware were topless. Not exactly worth the AP's coverage, except the individuals involved are transgender, which makes this filler story titillating to media outlets. That's annoying enough, but of course the AP manages to get their coverage totally wrong: