CNN published a purportedly straight news article on Tuesday on South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s executive orders restricting womens’ college and high-school sports to biological females.
The article — which, it bears repeating, is not presented as an opinion column — claims, “It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.”
If that’s the case, the article’s author Devan Cole should speak to his colleague Maryam Mohamed, who wrote an article just two days prior that begins, “Hilary Duff has welcomed her third child, a girl named Mae James Bair.” Mohamed had better hope her sourcing is solid to go and assert something like that.
In fact, if Cole’s scientific breakthrough about the elusiveness of sex is true, CNN has a lot of work ahead auditing its past coverage of celebrity baby announcements. Here’s one from Saturday, the day before Mohamed went out on a limb with her reckless identification of Duff’s child as a “girl.”
“Powell shared his own thoughts about the birth of his baby girl,” wrote reporter Marianne Garvey in an article about the birth of actress Bindi Irwin and husband Chandler Powell’s baby.