Home » Twit Awards for the Week 3/14/23

Twit Awards for the Week 3/14/23

ceciliab | Mar 13, 2023

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CPAC was held last week, and many of the speakers chose to highlight their opposition to transgender people. Every one of the far too many speakers who chose to include a lack of rights for transgender people in their speeches shares a Twit Award. Everyone who ignores the medical studies which show that gender-affirming care is safe and produces better results than does the hatred of those deemed as “others” expressed by these speakers shares a Twit Award. The Guardian has this story.

One speaker at CPAC in particular deserves special recognition. Michael Knowles said, “Transgenderism must be eradicated.” While he insisted he did not mean to call for the genocide of transgender people, it is hard to see what else he could have meant. For calling for the elimination of civil rights for others, Michael Knowles gets a Twit Award. He shares it with the Daily Wire, which gets singled out for employing him despite rhetoric like this. This story comes from the Advocate.

As mentioned in the news, the U.S. House of Representatives has taken up a national ban on transgender women participating in sports against cisgender females. Mind you, the nation is bracing for potential bankruptcy if the debt ceiling crisis is not resolved, but rather than finding common ground, conservatives are concentrating on this sort of thing. For ignoring the real and pressing issues of the day in order to promote treating a class of people as lesser, and for ignoring any evidence which shows that the issue is nowhere near as obvious as they present it to be, the proponents of this legislation get a Twit Award. the Advocate has this story.

Media Matters for America has found that Facebook’s algorithms give right-wing views a good bit more play on the platform than pro-transgender views. 39 of the 40 trans-related posts with the most reach came from right-wing sites. While some potentially innocent reasons could be at play here, including the fact that right-wing sites discuss trans issues a whole lot, it appears that something more than sheer volume going on here. For not taking steps to address the problems with its sharing algorithm, and for sharing posts with promote prejudice against people based on their gender identity, Facebook gets a Twit Award.

As we mentioned in the news, Florida seems to have a battle to see who can introduce the harshest anti-transgender bill. The harshest seems to S0254, which not only declares affirming a child’s “non-biological” gender identity as “child abuse,” it allows (one might say encourages) the state to remove any transgender minor from the care of a parent who supports that child’s gender identity. It also offers the state’s support to any parent who brings a child to Florida with the intent of preventing the child from accessing gender-affirming care. For using the heavy hand of the state to determine who may and who may not receive certain medical treatments recommended by many medical associations, for misstatements about the potential harms of these treatments, and for refusing to accept the results of medical studies because they are different from expectations, the people behind this bill get a Twit Award. This story comes from them.