Trump FCC Proposes Vile New Trans Panic TV Warnings
from the ignorance-and-fear dept
Last month the FCC quietly issued a public notice saying the Brendan Carr run agency was demanding that the TV Oversight Management Board (TVOMB) create new TV ratings to alert viewers to “transgender and gender non-binary programming” and “the discussion or promotion of gender identity themes” included in children’s programming.
You are to ignore that the FCC has no actual authority to even be proposing this. The TV Oversight Management Board is an independent, industry-created coalition that manages the TV ratings system without legal influence by the FCC.
The FCC’s justification for these demanded changes are based entirely on the false claims of a bunch of anonymous “parents” who may or may not even exist:
“Recently, parents have raised concerns that controversial gender identity issues are being
included or promoted in children’s programs without providing any disclosure or transparency to parents. Specifically, the industry guidelines that parents rely on are rating shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming as appropriate for children and young children, and doing so without providing this information to parents, thereby undermining the ability of parents to make informed choices for their families.”
Of course these issues have only been made “controversial” by Republicans, who have taken brutal and ignorant aim at a very small segment of the population in order to actively hurt marginalized people and divide, misinform, and disorient the electorate. Like gay marriage was during the George W. Bush administration, trans rights are an effective wedge issue that exploits public fear, bigotry, and ignorance to redirect public attention away from things like, say, historic levels of corruption.
The idea that media and tech companies are actively flooding the population with a bunch of dangerous “gender non-binary programming” aimed specifically at children is a popular Republican lie designed to agitate and mislead, but there’s no evidence to support the claim. Still it pops up a lot; like Josh Hawley’s false claim at a recent hearing that Netflix is pushing trans-heavy kids programming.
Understandably the proposal didn’t sit well with organizations like GLAAD, which pointed out that it’s grotesque, ignorant, and dangerous to conflate gender fluidity with obscenities, drug abuse, and violence:
“And the Public Notice does not state how a change in TV ratings will impact gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters and stories on TV. Applying warning labels to programs with transgender and nonbinary characters and stories incorrectly equates them to programming with coarse and crude language, sexual situations, or violence.
This makes life harder for LGBTQ Americans. It sends a message that the FCC can pressure the TVOMB to add even more ratings that stigmatize other diverse groups.”
A broader coalition of 40+ public interest groups ranging from Free Press to Public Knowledge were equally disgusted by the proposal:
“This is Carr’s latest attempt to shut down speech and shift U.S. public discourse to please President Trump. Television-program ratings are wholly outside of the FCC’s control, and the use of this public-comment procedure to coerce change raises constitutional concerns. The FCC should abandon this contrived and morally repugnant exercise.”
Part of Carr’s actual job at the FCC is supposed to involve protecting the public from corporate power, whether it’s a telecom monopoly that leverages corruption to rip off broadband customers, to a cable company using sleazy fees to jack up the cost of TV service. Carr’s not interested in that. He’s repeatedly given large companies free reign to engage in whatever consumer abuses they see fit.
Carr likely figures that the more time the public spends freaking out about nonexistent trans kids’ programming, the less time they have to realize that he’s been captured by industry to the detriment of everyone.
Instead of doing his job, Carr’s obsessed with being a weird little zealot and authoritarian lapdog, whose post-FCC legacy, if he has one, will be one of ignorance, censorship, distraction, and fear.
Filed Under: brendan carr, bullying, censor, fcc, free speech, lgbtq, media, regulator, trans panic, trans rights, tv, tvomb
Companies: glaad
Comments on “Trump FCC Proposes Vile New Trans Panic TV Warnings”
The people who support the FCC go to different schools or live in Canada, but they’re very real. They sound nothing like chatGPT! Look at their blistering wit, they sound like grok, if they were AI, which they aren’t.
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They’re 100% non-human, just like all opposed-to-Net Neutrality comments were.
Well, there goes Euphorias TV-G rating!
I’m pretty sure all Teletubbies are non-binary (including Noo-Noo the vacuum cleaner) and they’re spending a lot of time hugging each other, so yes, a “This program contains explicit scenes. Viewer discretion is advised” warning at the start of every episode is relevant for… [checking my notes]… “allow parents to make informed choices for their children”.
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You jest, but the anti-gay moral panic actually did come for Teletubbies once upon a time. I remember it painfully well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletubbies#Tinky_Winky_controversy
Detailed content descriptors are a good thing! We should have more of this. Warnings on shows with capitalist themes. Warnings on shows that push religion. Warnings on shows that promote gender hierarchy. Warnings on shows that depict wealth as virtuous. Warnings on shows that depict cops positively. It’s all about letting people make their own decisions, right?
It’s almost certain that they found at least a handful of bigots with children. Their end goal is clearly to make it illegal to exist as a trans person.
insert meme comment here
“first they came for…”
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Funny enough, the guy who wrote that poem was a Nazi until he ended up in a camp. His crime wasn’t that he “did not speak out.” He very much spoke out, in favor of atrocities, until the leopards ate his face.
Also funny enough, the original Nazis started with trans people just like MAGA is. But trans people are icky, so our faceless Nazi poet started the poem elsewhere.
I can’t think of many shows aimed at children that do anything to include or promote “gender identity issues” in any way. But I can think of at least two Disney shows that were censored because they had a trans character in them (Win or Lose and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur), and that’s a hell of a lot worse.
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Closest I can think of is there’s a character in one episode of one of the Star Wars cartoons (Tales of the Empire, I think?) who uses they/them pronouns.
All the other examples I can think of keep it as subtext. The Bad Batch avoids ever having anyone suggest that there’s anything unusual about Omega being both a clone and a girl so hard that it becomes a kind of meta-joke. I haven’t finished the Netflix Voltron series but from what I’ve seen it suggests maybe Pidge is trans or nonbinary but if you want to read it as just a Mulan/Eowyn “girl pretending to be a boy so she can join the fight” story, that’s the surface reading.
I haven’t seen Nimona in awhile but my recollection is it’s a trans allegory by a trans creator with openly gay characters but doesn’t actually have any openly trans characters? At any rate Disney thought it was risky enough that they cut it loose after they bought out Fox and Netflix ended up releasing it.
Morph in X-Men ’97 uses they/them pronouns but X-Men ’97 isn’t for kids, it’s for middle-aged Millennials who watched the original cartoon when they were kids.
Welcome to the new “Satanic Panic”, or is it the new “Violent Videogames”, or “Rock Music praises Satan”. Or is this just an extension of their “Christ hates Queers”, and whatever buzzword, or slogan they can scream about?
Funnily enough, homosexuality wasn’t even mentioned in the bible until the 1800’s. Prior to that, it was denouncing pederasts (a.k.a. pedophiles) instead.
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It’s that. Once same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, conservative Christians realized they weren’t going to turn the whole country against gay people any more. So they turned to trans people. Most of the transphobic bullshit you hear these days is recycled homophobia, right down to the “well how are we supposed to explain this to our kids” bullshit. It even actually took them a couple of tries to hit on an issue they could use as a wedge—when the bathroom bills shit didn’t work out, they went for women’s sports, which was (unfortunately) a much easier lift.
The goal with their bullshit (at least for now) is to “split the T” from “LGBT” and turn cisgender queer people against trans people. The obvious notion is that if the queer community splits on “trans issues”, trans people become easier to attack—and once trans people are “dealt with”, other queer people become easier to attack as well. Literally some “first they came” shit.
Anyone who tells you to hate trans people for existing is trying to make you hate anyone who doesn’t fit some extremely narrow mold of “acceptability”. Fuck anyone who does that.
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Don’t forget many of the laws attacking trans healthcare will be used to establish precedents that will be used to attack birth control and reproductive healthcare, then later the rights for women to exist in public without men and all the TERF groups will be shocked to find all the far right groups they’re currently aligning themselves with to attack Trans rights do not, in fact, want to help them.
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The UK government literally ousted the chair of the Scottish equality committee in order to appoint a prolific anti-abortion lobbyist to the role to replace one who didn’t comply with their anti-trans agenda.
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“well how are we supposed to explain this to our kids”
Sounds like their problem, not everybody else’s. Suck it up, cupcake; you signed up for a whole shedload of awkward conversations when you decided to breed.
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If they’re anything like my godfearing christian conservative parents were, they’d ‘explain’ them with slur filled mockery.
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IDK man. How am I supposed to explain to our kids that our neighbors are following the Nazi playbook to the letter?
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Well, there’s that bit in Leviticus, next to where it says you can’t eat shellfish or wear mixed fabrics.
But the Sodom and Gamorrah story in Genesis is about hospitality. It’s a moral fable that translates extremely poorly into our modern social context, but Lot offers up his daughters to the mob not because it’s more moral to rape women than men, but because the right of hospitality is so sacrosanct that he owes his protection to the guests in his home more than to his own daughters.
(There are, of course, some pretty uncomfortable girls-as-property implications there, made worse by the resolution of the story where Lot drunkenly impregnates both daughters but the story says it’s their fault. In conclusion, if you ever hear anybody cite the story of Sodom and Gamorrah as a model for their own morality, keep your kids the fuck away from them.)
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Thad writes:
I prefer Genesis Ch 18-19, which says if you have a town so bad you can’t find ten good people in it god will go all Jason Statham on their ass.
Still, Leviticus or Genesis, these are parts of the transcribed revised made-up history of many people over many millenia.
When we studied the bible in school it was emphasized as a morals teaching device and less of a historic compilation; modern day revisionists feelz differently, just as they pretend the US Pledge of faith or moneylenders outside the Temple do so in the name of god.
It’s all a story. Learn from these stories. Don’t split the baby — that dog don’t hunt the way you [not Thad specifically, just common usage] think it do.
Time to split the baby chicken ovum and enjoy god’s great protein breakfast.
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So Sodom and Gomorrah are essentially an argument against GoT’s Red Wedding?
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Noted, although I tend to stay as far away from the religious nuts as possible (a bit hard in the bible belt though). Although some of the “Historical” changes to widely available books were somewhat fascinating. And shows how “current morals” were used for justification to alter classic/pre-existing works (Shakespeare for instance).
The people who support the FCC go to different schools or live in Canada?
No, Canada has something much worse – the CRTC, which might as well stand for “committee for repression and thought control” because of their routine tampering with US OTA TV signals on Canadian cable. WPBS-TV puts out four digital subchannels (PBS-HD, Create, World, PBS Kids) less than thirty miles from the Ontario border. Viewers in New York State (or with an antenna pointed directly across the border) see all four subchannels. Canadian cable subscribers only see the first of the four subchannels, most often with its HD and widescreen missing – effectively stealing from an in-region nonprofit charity. Meanwhile, their relation to the Bell-Rogers oligopoly evokes the finest days of the US Interstate Commerce Commission and regulatory capture. Please leave Canada out of this, eh?
We should carpet bomb the request for comment with demand that that they put a label on shows that contain “Sectarian Religion Indoctination” like…
Veggie Tales
Superbook
Friends and Heroes
What’s in the Bible? with Buck Denver
Owlegories
Theo
The Torchlighters…
I’m sure there’s more. and don’t parents deserve to know if their kids are being LITERALLY INDOCTRINATED.
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If parents can’t figure out that “What’s in the Bible? with Buck Denver” is a religious show without a warning… I don’t even know how to finish this sentence.
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Unless Buck’s answer is “a whole lot of bullshit”
The FCC having trans derangement syndrome? I’m sure pedophiles made that decision. The Venn diagram between pedophiles and radical transphobes is almost a perfect circle.
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Almost as if the group with the most to gain from isolating these kids and making them vulnerable, and the ones making these laws, are the same people…
Let’s tell the MAGA faithful that there is a new vaccine to protect us all from trans/gay and everyone is legally required to get it to protect the children.
If you want to post a comment on the FCC filing, you can do it here: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express?proceeding%5Bname%5D=19-41
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Trans ideology is in fact a fad that leads people to mutilate themselves and ultimately commit suicide. It is very, very harmful.
In advance: no, people are not happier after hormones and therapies. That study has not just been debunked, it’s been shown to be outright fraud.
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Do you know what actually leads trans people to commit suicide?
It’s people like you telling trans people that they’re a “fad”, a “harmful ideology”, a “threat”—or, to put it bluntly, less than a person. People as things, that’s where evil starts. And I should note that one of the first targets of the Nazi book burnings was an institute of sexuality that was studying queer people, so…maybe consider that you’re kind of on the side of genocidal madmen and adjust your shit accordingly.
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People as things – there’s an appropriate quote for that:
“And that’s what your holy men discuss, is it?”
“Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example.”
“And what do they think? Against it, are they?”
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of grey.”
“Nope.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things.”
(Carpe Jugulum. Terry Prachett)
(Is Sir Terry on US banned books lists with his young adult material, or is his subversive style enough to slip under the radar?)
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In advance: no, people are not happier after hormones and therapies.
And by ‘people’ you mean ‘people like you.’ I get it.
I personally don’t give a shit if hormones and therapies make you unhappy. I just don’t.
Now go fuck yourself.
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OK, groomer.
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Show me on the doll where you touched the trans kid.
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The regret rate for gender affirming care is lower than knee surgery, tattoos and breast implants, considerably lower than boob jobs, with less than 1% wishing they hadn’t, with a lot of those with regrets saying it was because of assholes like you making their lives unlivable rather than not being trans, so with all due respect, go fuck yourself.
Rated T for Trans
The following program contains strong themes of self-actualization. Viewer discretion is advised.
Label every children’s movie and TV show containing any heterosexual romance with “sexual orientation programming”. (The homophobes and transphobes will label the rest of the shows whether you want them to or not.)
The usual hateful bigotry from the usual hateful USA. The most hateful country that has ever existed.
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Hahaha. Look at the largest 20 countries in the world and how they treat trans people, and tell me the US isn’t in the top 25%. Would you rather be a trans person in China? Russia? Iran? You might like Brazil’s official trans policies, but you might not like the number of murders of trans people.
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‘Other countries are bad, lol, why u mad at America rapidly getting worse?’ That’s not the defense you think it is?