On the first day of LGBTQ Pride Month, Fox News hosts, contributors, and guests attacked transgender Americans by disparaging trans student-athlete Lia Thomas, attacking policies designed to help trans people, and opposing the very idea of trans children.
While Fox has tried to signal its support for Pride in the past, its own employees and at least one advocacy group have called out the channel for its failures on LGBTQ issues, recently taking action against its hateful programming. Vanity Fair reported in April that an internal resource group for LGBTQ Fox employees called Fox Pride had condemned the network’s “hateful” anti-LGBTQ coverage in a message posted to a company-wide Slack channel. The statement pointed to a contrast between Fox’s internal support for LGBTQ employees and its personalities’ public comments attacking the LGBTQ community. And earlier in April, CNN reported that the Human Rights Campaign “stripped Fox Corporation of its status as a preferred LGBTQ friendly employer and released a blistering statement condemning the network for its recent coverage of the LGBTQ community.”
Fox has quite a record of stoking hate against transgender Americans in general, and Thomas in particular. The right-wing cable channel floods its programs with smears, lies, and other attacks and misinformation about trans people, in one instance amassing nearly 200 such segments in just a few weeks. Fox’s June 1 segments attacking trans people continued this trend.
- On America's Newsroom, guest Michael Shellenberger, who is running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California, attacked the San Francisco mayor’s plan to end homelessness for transgender residents. He claimed such a plan would be illegal and ridiculed it as something worthy of satire. (Trans Americans are twice as likely to live in poverty as the national average, and homelessness has affected one in five trans people.)