Some Old-Fashioned Line Item Reporting on a Transgender Dance Studio

From the website for Fresh Meat Productions, Sean Dorsey Dance dancers Héctor Jaime, Sean Dorsey, Nol Simonse, Will Woodward. Photo: Beth LaBerge

via Jessica Chasmarm on the website for FOX news, a far right cable news station

There’s a classic style of news story, one it’s almost possble to look back on with nostalgia in light of our vitriolic political climate, where a reporter finds a line item in a giant funding bill and pokes fun at it. In less heated times, there were even GOP politicians who made railing against such line items their whole personality. (Today, of course, such a schtick would have a hard time garnering the attention that is a politicians’ lifeblood.)

Enter the above relic of a story on FOX, which informs the reader in a scandalized tone that funds from President Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP), have been used to fund a transgender dance studio.

That’s right, one of the thousands of small businesses to recieve ARP relief funds from the 1.9bn economic stimulus plan, passed to help the country recover in the wake of COVID-19, is owned by a transgender man. FOX’s report includes details including that the business has a class by a drag queen, and that there’s another class, by Black queer trans poet J Mase III, who authored a book called “White Folks Be Trippin.’”

FOX, a network which consists largely (though not exclusively) of white conservatives, certainly seems to be behaving in a crazy or irrational way over this.