The Minnesota Child Protection League published an ad in the Star Tribune, Minnesota's largest newspaper, on Sunday about the alleged dangers that will come from allowing trans students to participate in high school sports. Though the anti-LGBT rights group should be held responsible for creating such a heinous ad, the Star Tribune should be held equally responsible for printing and circulating it. The ad says: "A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter. Are YOU ok with that?" which demonstrates the fact that the Minnesota Child Protection League HAS NO IDEA WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A TRANS PERSON AND THAT TRANS WOMEN ARE NOT MEN.
Unfortunately, this is not the first incident of a newspaper printing trans-phobic material. In 2011 a Canadian paper ran an anti-trans advertisement with the headline "PLEASE! Don't confuse me. I'm a girl. Don't teach me to question if I'm a boy, transexual, transgendered, intersexed, or two-spirited." The campaign ran in the National Post and got a lot of heat for violating Canada's Code of Advertising Standards. Unfortunately, we have no such law implemented with any sort of regularity here in the states, so it's essentially the job of the newspaper to filter out problematic advertising that perpetuates hate speech. C'mon, team. It's 2014.
Here's what the full ad looks like:
As one would hope, the internet is not amused by this news.
Let's hope the paper prints an apology and refuses to run the ad again.
Images: Twitter, http://thecolu.mn/
