If you scroll through the author’s twitter feed for a while, you will find that it was not just a random isolated news story, but that she shares critical stuff about trans people as a substantial part of her feed, many orders of magnitude more than the proportion of newsworthy stuff that trans people engage in. Beyond the stories criticizing trans women in women’s sports, I saw stories criticizing allowing trans teens privacy from their parents as they transition in schools, stories criticizing allowing mentally ill to transition, stories criticizing trans women flashing their breasts at pride events, and so on.
If Verona Lišková wanted to transition privately in school while keeping xer parents in the dark and not being stopped due to mental illness, flash xer breasts at pride events, and participate in women’s sports competitions, then having journalists who specialize in criticizing such events is quite inconvenient and disruptive for xer.
If you scroll through the author’s twitter feed for a while, you will find that it was not just a random isolated news story, but that she shares critical stuff about trans people as a substantial part of her feed, many orders of magnitude more than the proportion of newsworthy stuff that trans people engage in.
You can find a bunch of critical stuff about pretty much anything if you create a feed that is there specifically to collect it. But this is, by definition, not a representative sampling; it doesn’t show that the media, in general, are anti-trans, much less that there is a “massive media apparatus currently laser-focused on decrying” trans people.
(And newsworthy stuff that people don’t like is still newsworthy stuff.)
I don’t think “there is a massive media apparatus” implies a claim about all of the media, rather it is making an existence claim about fairly large bulk of media. Even if it is tiny as a fraction of the full media, there could still be thousands or tens of thousands of people having a core priority of decrying trans people in the media, and many more collaborating weakly, such as by supporting general conservative infrastructure.
If you scroll through the author’s twitter feed for a while, you will find that it was not just a random isolated news story, but that she shares critical stuff about trans people as a substantial part of her feed, many orders of magnitude more than the proportion of newsworthy stuff that trans people engage in. Beyond the stories criticizing trans women in women’s sports, I saw stories criticizing allowing trans teens privacy from their parents as they transition in schools, stories criticizing allowing mentally ill to transition, stories criticizing trans women flashing their breasts at pride events, and so on.
If Verona Lišková wanted to transition privately in school while keeping xer parents in the dark and not being stopped due to mental illness, flash xer breasts at pride events, and participate in women’s sports competitions, then having journalists who specialize in criticizing such events is quite inconvenient and disruptive for xer.
You can find a bunch of critical stuff about pretty much anything if you create a feed that is there specifically to collect it. But this is, by definition, not a representative sampling; it doesn’t show that the media, in general, are anti-trans, much less that there is a “massive media apparatus currently laser-focused on decrying” trans people.
(And newsworthy stuff that people don’t like is still newsworthy stuff.)
I don’t think “there is a massive media apparatus” implies a claim about all of the media, rather it is making an existence claim about fairly large bulk of media. Even if it is tiny as a fraction of the full media, there could still be thousands or tens of thousands of people having a core priority of decrying trans people in the media, and many more collaborating weakly, such as by supporting general conservative infrastructure.