Adam Zivo’s Unusual Story for the Washington Examiner

A piece that ran recently in the extremely transphobic Washington Examiner caught our attention. How did something so straightforward and even positive ever get published in that venue? We asked the author, Adam Zivo.

by Evan Urquhart

The headline read “Meet the transgender war correspondent breaking stereotypes in Ukraine,” but what caught my attention was the domain name. The Washington Examiner, a right wing, tabloid-style news outlet, and one who’s transphobic pieces have quickly become Assigned’s bread and butter. I clicked the story very much expecting there to be a knife twist lurking in the copy. From my outside observation, the Examiner’s house style seems to require all trans women to be referred to as “a biological male who identifies as female.” (For an example of that, I saw it in a piece today, with a similarly neutral seeming headline “Wyoming sorority makes history after accepting transgender student into sisterhood.”) But the piece, a profile based on an interview with American-journalist-turned-Ukraine-combat-medic Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, by Adam Zivo, had none of that.

I did note that it had been run in the opinion section, which seems a little unusual for a straightforward interview write up, especially one that ironically left out a lot of the little digs the Examiner usually engages in on stories about trans people. I needed to know more. And so, as soon as I finished reading about Sarah’s experience, I messaged Zivo on Twitter, and asked him for an interview.

Zivo is a good-looking gay dude from Canada, and he was quick to assure me that, while he considers himself politically conservative, Canadian conservatism is different from the US version (on this Zivo’s 100 percent correct: America’s conservatives have lost their minds completely). He’s also been a longtime activist for LGBTQ+ issues, although his main focus has been on sexual orientation, as is clear from the name of his nonprofit, LoveisLoveisLove.

The process of pitching the Examiner was, in Zivo’s telling, incredibly straightforward. “I made a phone pitch on Sarah, like ‘hey, this is an interesting story of survival on the front lines.’ It’s tired to do all these stories that are like, the first trans person to do X, but this is just a huge outlier that people found fascinating.”

One thing that made the process easier was that Ashton-Cirillo was, until very recently, also a journalist. “Sarah understood the assignment,” Zivo explained. “As a journalist, she understood that conservatives respond better to people who view their identity as incidental. It’s a framing that works well with that audience.”

Zivo highlighted three things that he felt made his piece on Cirillo right for the, and I cannot stress this enough, psychopathically anti-trans Washington Examiner:

First, he said that the pro-Ukraine sentiments of Ashton-Cirillo made a good fit for the Examiner, which has avoided the unsettling pro-Russia slide that seems to have taken over many right and far right outlets.

Second, he said that Ashton-Cirillo’s patriotism in joining the war effort would appeal to those with a more conservative outlook.

Third, he said that those who identified with libertarianism (or classical liberalism) ideologically would connect to Ashton-Cirillo’s framing of her experience in an individualistic manner, with her gender identity being incidental, rather than central to her personhood.

Zivo described how he and Ashton-Cirillo worked together to produce an interview they felt could make a transgender woman more sympathetic to the Washington Examiner’s audience.

As I talked with Zivo, at first, I really tried to paper over our differences and try to help him feel comfortable talking with me. But as the half-hour time went on, it became clear he had something he really wanted to get through to me, and that by trying to find common ground I was only standing in the way of him delivering it. Zivo has a message for the transgender rights movement.

“I have LGB sympathies,” Zivo said. “I’m not full LGB Alliance or anything like that, but there are these two distinct activisms, and I’ve come out of more of an LGB perspective.”

Zivo explained that he is concerned about the way that fears around childhood transition led into slurring transgender people as groomers, then to using the slur for drag queens and now, seemingly, to reviving all the ugliness of 90s homophobia. He feels that a more assimilationist approach to transgender rights would be helpful, that if people advocating for trans rights were more strategic, it would help to reduce the temperature on the right and help bring more sanity to the climate.

“The last thing you want to do is to piss off a powerful majority. We’ve made so much progress, and we don’t need to anger people who might take all of that away. You need to be careful about infuriating people with a monopoly on power,” he said, and I got the sense that he was pleading with me, personally, as a representative of transgender activism, rather than as a journalist who wanted to help him tell his story.

Zivo and I agree on the stakes. He’s clearly frightened, and so am I. He knows there are powerful forces of transphobic and anti-gay hatred that, at least right now, seem determined to wipe out trans people. Zivo also knows these bigots won’t be stopping at trans people. Gay men, even conservatives like Zivo, are on their list of targets. Where we disagree seems to be about whose fault that is, and what the LGBTQ+ community should or could be doing to try and stop the worst from happening. I’ve presented his views here, without my own, to give them an airing that felt like it would do him justice.