Newsletter #3: Parents’ Rights

Thursday | 10.13.2022

Assigned: Parents’ Rights

Far right activists think they’ve found an answer to those with the effrontery to use science and data to improve the health of America’s children. That answer? Parents’ rights. A movement to empower conservative parents to overrule educational or medical experts on issues from vaccines to diversity in schools, gutting public health measures against the will of the American mainstream. 

What’s really alarming about this parents' rights movement is that it seeks to decouple parental rights from ideas about a child’s best interests, arguing instead that whether or not vaccines are safe and effective, a parent’s right to have complete control in decision making should allow them to override their child’s best interest. Similarly, with transgender youth medicine, parents’ rights groups don’t rest their arguments on a discussion of what treatments really are in the best interests of children with gender dysphoria.

In our first deeper dive, Assigned took a look at the parents rights movement, what they want, why they’re dangerous, who is funding them, and how absolutely unavoidable the glowing coverage of parents’ rights activism is in the right wing media ecosystem right now. We’re incredibly proud of the results, and hope you’ll want to read the article in full on our website.

Again Thursday | 10.13.2022

Timeline: Michigan Healthworker Sues for Right to Misgender Patients

Thursday was a quite a day! In addition to publishing the piece on parents’ rights mentioned above, we noticed that coverage of a lawsuit by a Christian healthcare worker, a woman fired for refusing to use correct pronouns for trans patients or refer them to appropriate, gender affirming care, had absolutely exploded in the Christian and right wing press.

Assigned had already posted about this story during our first week (yep, we’re that good), but it was clear a full timeline was now necessary, to track the movement of the story through the right wing news ecosystem, and cover any new developments to this story as it unfolds.

Friday | 10.14.2022

A Great Second Week!!

Assigned Media’s earliest days could not be more exciting for me. I’m seeing just amazing enthusiasm for the project from within the trans community and beyond. It’s especially heartening because I am absolutely loving the chance to do this good work.

Of course, enthusiasm on Twitter is great, but it’s our supporters, and especially our members, that give me reason to think working 40+ hrs a week on a crazy one-man dream-of-a-journalism-project might not be the silliest thing I’ve ever done (luckily, I once made a homemade Popeye costume for Halloween, so the bar for silly is set pretty high). From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your support.

-Evan