Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran a puff piece featuring a transgender sorority member, the self-styled ‘Artemis’ Langford. Langford expresses feeling rejected by fellow sorority members who sued to eject Langford from Kappa Kappa Gamma: “It was a gut punch after working so hard to get in to realize there were people who never wanted me there in the first place.”
The Washington Post largely glosses over the reasons why seven female sorority members wanted to oust Langford, wrapping allegations that Langford sported a visible erection and made fellow members uncomfortable in Langford’s sense of betrayal, rather than the female members’ sense of violation:
“I wish it didn’t matter to me. All the things they said. How they painted me like a mannish freak,” Artemis said quietly.
The lawsuit the young women filed goes into greater detail about why Langford’s housemates found the new pledge’s behavior “inappropriate and threatening.” The plaintiffs allege that Langford “repeatedly questioned the women about what vaginas look like, breast cup size, whether some women were considering breast reductions,” photographed women without their consent (“rest[ing] his phone on the table in a manner that it appears as though he is scrolling through an app when he is, in fact, covertly using the camera to photograph women”), and became “sexually aroused” while watching fellow sorority members change (“He stood by the door with his hands over his genitals,” according to the lawsuit). The plaintiffs also report that Langford maintained a “blacklist” of “transphobic” sorority members to be targeted for expulsion from Kappa Kappa Gamma.
The reporter bats away an alternative reading—that Langford may be “a perverted man who faked his way into a sorority to leer at women”—by pinning it on “right-wing pundits,” as if to say: what a ridiculous suggestion! Nobody without a Fox News haircut could believe such things!
The truth is likely more complicated than “legit oppressed transwoman” or “faker”—something the article hints at, perhaps without meaning to. The reporter supplies all the material needed for an unapproved reading: Langford’s upbringing in the notoriously restrictive Mormon church. Langford’s autism diagnosis and suicide attempts and permanent sense of misfittedness. Is this story really as simple as it seems? Was Langford’s sex simply misassigned at birth, or is more going on behind Langford’s trans identification? Where did Langford’s sense of wrongness come from? What possibilities did transition promise? (And what about the a-word, autogynephilia?)
This is a theme in reporting on transgender issues. Interviews with Elliott (formerly Ellen) Page lead with pride and authenticity and “euphoria,” before telling a story that’s anything but euphoric. The underside narrative of severe mental illness and persistent distress—present in every line of the interview—make a mockery of the headline. The New York Times Magazine’s feature, “When Ben Got His Penis,” is sheer body horror from start to finish. By the time Ben says, “I felt that any complication that would arise, including dying, was better than the alternative,” any attentive reader will be guilty of wrongthink. Such a proclamation is meant to underline the necessity of these procedures. Instead, one wonders whether it can possibly be ethical to perform such a risky surgery on such an unwell patient. Gabriel Mac’s grimly giddy New York Magazine cover story, “My Penis, Myself,” raises all the same alarms.
Again and again, the facts (troubling) rebel against the genre (upbeat personal-interest story). Until reporting on this issue improves, media consumers will have to read between the lines.
SO many people are swayed by these pro-trans pieces. *I* would have been one of these people before our two darling daughters became transfixed (no word play intended there) by the online videos and “sad”/victim stories of glamorous trans/emo teens and pre-teens.
And the schools, gah...They are TEACHING pro-trans ideology in the sex ed classes in my younger daughter’s 7th grade classes with 12 and 13 yo’s in suburbs of the Washington DC area of Maryland in the US.
I am just looking forward to the ADULTS to come forward and use some wisdom and logic. Our kids’ brains are still forming and they are IN THE period of identity vs role confusion in their child developed pathway (Erickson). Time for some intelligent, fore-brain developed, mature, wise, adults to come forward.
Mom of daughters
Twenty years ago, perhaps even ten, the idea that this man would be allowed to do what he did, would have been preposterous. He would have been laughed out of the room. There are plenty of wise adults coming forward to speak out against transgender ideology, but because many are conservative or religious their voices are discounted.