Fired transphobic editor blames the ‘speech police’ and becomes the newest Fox News hero – By Jessica Sutherland (dailykos.com) / Jan 12 2018
Tucker Carlson believes that corporate America is an agent of the left, and he’s found his latest poster boy in Denis Finley, the newly-fired former executive editor of Vermont’s Burlington Free Press.
It all started last week, when news broke that Vermont was “one step closer” to adding a third gender option to its state identification cards. A Twitter user called the news “awesome,” but Finley voiced the opinion that such inclusivity signaled the end of the world was just around the bend.
https://twitter.com/denisjfinley/status/949456071554469888
He spent quite awhile tweeting his thoughts on the matter, only retreating when he seemed to realize that people were watching. Highlights include falsely equating trans folks with “pediophiliacs” and insisting he was just innocently “asking questions.”
As outrage increased overnight, he then framed himself as a truth seeker to Vermont’s indie paper, Seven Days.
In an interview Saturday afternoon with Seven Days, Finley said that his tweet may have been poorly presented but that his intent was journalistic.
“I really just wanted to ask the question: ‘Why is that awesome? And why is that necessary?'” Finley said. “That’s all, and I think any journalist would ask that question.”
Finley said his word choice was a reference to the regular Sports Illustrated feature “Signs of the Apocalypse.”
“It was a riff on that,” he said. “It was poorly chosen.”
It kept getting worse for Finley. More problematic tweets were uncovered on Finley’s timeline. Soon enough, Vermontonians started threatening cancellation of their subscriptions. As of this writing, Finley’s Twitter account is suspended. And Finley even claims he spent the weekend wondering if his job was in jeopardy. (Spoiler alert: it was!)
On Monday, Gannett, the parent company of the Burlington Free Press, announced Finley’s termination.
Upon review, it was determined that Finley had violated the company’s social media guidelines on a number of occasions.
Gannett leaders fired Finley on Monday evening after meeting with him.
Three days later, Finley brought his story of persecution to Liar Tuck. Carlson insisted he’s perplexed by the facts of the situation, but that didn’t stop him blaming liberals and the media for the decline of the world.
“I was sincerely…a little bit confused by your firing since you didn’t attack transgendered people, you didn’t even attack the idea of a third sex on the drivers licenses from the tweets I saw, but you asked questions…I didn’t understand how that was out of bounds.” ”Well, I believe, Tucker, it was out of bounds because I didn’t agree with it. I think it’s as simple as that. There’s a very powerful contingent of speech police out there, this is an extremely liberal state, it’s a progressive state, and I kinda galvanized them, unwittingly…and they didn’t want to stop until they had my head on a platter.”
Sidebar: Can someone PLEASE send Fox News this great piece from GLAAD about how to cover the trans population? “Transgendered” and “transgenders” are NOT preferred by members of that community.
Unfortunately, Finley’s blatant transphobia is getting more coverage than the breaking news that surfaced it. John Walters at Seven Days skillfully calls out the hypocrisy.
He and Carlson misled viewers on the substance of the dispute. Finley was deliberately provocative at best, downright intolerant at worst. He wasn’t just “asking questions.” He was poking his community with a stick.
As conservatives often do, he ascribed far more power to the leftist hordes than they actually possess.
If Vermont’s DMV does implement a third gender option, they’ll become just the third state to do so, alongside the District of Columbia. Massachusetts is on track to become the fourth.
Mason Dunn, executive director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, said people who don’t identify as male or female use different terms to describe themselves — including non-binary, gender-fluid, bigender and agender. Some, but not all, identify as transgender.
“There are a lot of people who don’t fit the textbook definitions of male or female,” Dunn said. “They don’t want their gender marker logged by the state.”
As Vermont Public Radio reported in the story that started it all:
Vermont Human Rights Commission Executive Director Karen Richards says if the DMV moves ahead with the change it would broaden the rights of transgender individuals in Vermont, as well as possibly offer more protection if they are pulled over by the police.
And she says in a legal sense it protects those Vermonters who are committing to a gender on an official state document.
“I think it’s a major victory for folks who are transgender,” Richards says. “It acknowledges who they are and that’s an important thing for us to do.”
Oregon became the first state to offer a third gender option on its driver’s license last year, and California and Washington D.C. have both since made the change.
While this third non-binary option may not seem like a big deal for cisgender folks, the third option is an important one. As Julie Butner writes at New America, the recognition is not just a step toward equality and inclusivity: Our identification documents are often crucial to executing our everyday lives.
In a survey conducted by NCTE in 2015 of more than 28,000 transgender individuals, 32 percent of respondents reported being verbally harassed, denied benefits or service, asked to leave, or assaulted when they showed an ID with a name or gender that didn’t match, and two-thirds of those surveyed didn’t have their preferred gender on identification documents.
