AP guide for journalists embraces woke ideology

By Sollas Richardson –

Capitulating to the woke agenda for remaking America, The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook – long the guide for the use of language by journalists – has been updated to include such ideas as gender fluidity.

The Stylebook is the behind-the-scenes manual for most news organizations. Though virtually unknown outside the industry, the Stylebook exercises an outsized influence to standardize communications by the news media and public corporations.

The update purports to promote “unbiased language” and “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”

Conservative voices at the National Review disagreed, stating it “appears to explicitly embrace the language and claims of transgender activists, a move likely to steer newsrooms away from objectively framing the issue.”

It’s just another domino to fall in the wholesale adoption of wokeism that has swept America like an avalanche. In 2015, progressives said they just wanted equal rights for gays to marry. Five short years later, they began telling us a boy is no longer a boy and pedophilia is acceptable.

In the AP Stylebook, the “Transgender Coverage Topical Guide” explains: “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.”

New guidelines also exhort reporters to:

• Refer to persons by their preferred gender identity.
• Avoid “deadnaming,” using the given name that was abandoned when someone changed gender.
• Use the word “identify” as in “identifies as a woman.”
• Don’t use “biological male or female.”
• Call it “gender-confirmation procedures” and “gender-affirming care” instead of sex change because, as they explain, these “treatments can improve psychological well-being and reduce suicidal behavior.”
• Avoid specifying “sex-specific sports,” siding with the “marginalized transgenders” who wish to compete on an easier level.
• In reference to pregnant mothers, refer to them as “pregnant people.” (The good news is that we won’t be seeing “birthing persons.”)
• Use “they” as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun.

The guide praises the World Professional Association for Transgender Health because it “recently lowered its recommended minimum age for starting gender transition treatment, including ‘sex hormones’ and surgeries. It says hormones can be started at age 14 and some surgeries at 15 or 17.”

A subsection “legislation” alleges: “Starting in 2020, conservative-leaning U.S. state legislatures began considering a wave of bills aimed at transgender youths. Many political observers assert that the legislation is being used to motivate voters by falsely framing children as under threat.”

The Associated Press is a “wire service” news agency whose articles can be used by any newspaper that subscribes to its service. It was widely used before the Internet by small town newspapers who couldn’t afford to maintain a staff in Washington D.C. and around the world.

Through the years, the AP Stylebook has become the gold standard for every stylistic option, whether to use “%” or “percent,” for example, and when to use Arabic numerals (10 and above) versus writing out the number (in most cases).

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Sollas Richardson studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near Beverly Hills, California.