Young readers fed CRT propaganda by Teen Vogue
January 11, 2023
Teen Vogue pushes very heavily on its readers on the subjects of trans legislation and critical race theory.
The magazine claims that its mission is to “Educate the influencers of tomorrow.” This is different from what they’re doing here, which is to demand adherence to the extreme end of the ideological spectrum. This goes far beyond education, or even just influencing – this is an insistence that there is only one way of thinking about these things.
For example: “They have introduced and in some states passed legislation that bans transgender girls from sports, which legalizes discrimination based on the fallacy that these laws protect non-transgender girls by ensuring fairness in sports.” But it’s not a fallacy, we have the division into male and female sports because physiques differ. So, we need a definition of who may be in the protected – female – class. The entire point of there being two classes of sport is to discriminate based on those physical differences – so it cannot be a fallacy to do so.
“This is where the connection to anti-CRT legislation becomes clear. In most cases, anti-trans legislation and policies are passed in the same places where bans on teaching the history and legacies of slavery in the U.S. are passed. “ It was only a couple of months back that the insistence that CRT was something only found in graduate-level law school, nothing at all to do with K-12 education. If that’s so then limitations upon K-12 teaching can have nothing to do with CRT, can they?
Then, of course, the argumentation just falls off the edge of reason: “…reveal the aim of these bills is to preserve binary gender norms through the stigmatization and erasure of all those who do not conform. Digging further, because gender norms intersect with white supremacy to elevate white beauty standards for girls and women, these bills implicitly elevate the interests of white girls.” No, the aim is to decide upon what are the correct accommodations in our society to cover the issues of trans and race.
We do need to discuss these things. Only once we do can we, collectively, decide upon what is the right answer. What’s happening here is Teen Vogue is telling its readership – largely and obviously teen girls – that the only possible answer is that extreme end of the spectrum of possibilities. This isn’t education, it’s influencing to the point of propaganda.
Teen Vogue ranks at No. 424 in the list of news and media publishers in the US. It gains some 5.6 million visits a month from that position. Obviously, it is more influential than that raw position in its target market of teenage girls.
That aim, of educating the influencers of the future is one we share. But doing so does require education, not propagandizing. Society faces an actual question – a pair of them in fact – over trans and CRT issues. Educating teenagers is walking them through the cases, not beating them over the head with propaganda.