REPORT: USA Today Deletes U.S. Senator's Op-Ed Opposing Trans Athletes, but Never Informed Him
Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
USA Today secretly deleted a previously published op-ed that spoke in opposition to transgender athletes written by a U.S. Senator without telling its readers or the Senator who wrote the piece, according to a report.
The opinion editorial was written by outspoken Republican Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy and was published this month. It was entitled, Is Transgender Inclusion More Important than Women’s Sports? Excerpts are still available on his Senate website.
But now, when you click on the former links to the articles, USA Today's network newspapers feature an error notice that reads, “Content removed: did not meet editorial standards,” and adds, “This content has been removed because it did not meet our editorial standards.”
Presumably, that means the senator's article didn't kowtow to the radical left-wing transgender agenda.
Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, speaks to media members as he departs the Senate Republican policy luncheon at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Sen. Kennedy blasted the Gannett-owned news network and told Fox News that “USA TODAY Network apparently does not like the way I express myself.”
“They think they are the speech police. Drunk on certainty and virtue, they think they are our moral teacher. This attitude is why so many Americans have lost confidence in the media. The media is not going to win that trust back until they return to neutrality instead of advocacy,” Kennedy continued.
“Most people don’t support allowing biological men to participate in women’s sports because they think that will bastardize sports, skew the results, and hurt women. Other people disagree,” he continued. “Gannett should simply report the two sides and not try to silence the position it disagrees with,” he said.
Kennedy made a series of assertions in his now-deleted article and included links to his evidence.
“Some activists claim that transgender athletes are different from typical men because they take cross-sex hormones. After two years of cross-sex hormone treatments, however, biological male athletes can still run 12% faster and pound out 10% more push-ups than women,” he wrote.
In another passage, he said, “Allowing biological boys to compete as girls will harm women’s sports. Still, many activists believe their feelings and the feelings of transgender athletes are more important.”
“Men and women don’t compete for the same reasons. Yet transgender activists want athletic institutions to ignore these obvious physical differences so transgender athletes can feel included, even if it hurts biological girls in the process,” the sen. said.
Demonstrators listen to the speaking program during an “Our Bodies, Our Sports” rally for the 50th anniversary of Title IX at Freedom Plaza on June 23, 2022, in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Kennedy received no communication from Gannett that his op-ed was improper. Still, by May 14, he began to notice that the links he supplied to the articles on his senate website no longer clicked through to the article.
Kennedy told Fox News that Misty Castile, the executive editor for the Shreveport Times, one of the papers that initially published the article, said they pulled the op-ed because of a lack of “citations” to support Kennedy's claims. But she backtracked on that claim when it was pointed out that the senator did add links to support his claims.
In other emails to the senator's office, Castile claimed that Kennedy was using “loaded language” when he dared to use the terms “biological male” and “biological female” and demanded that Kennedy rewrite the piece to include woke language instead of facts.
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