Integrity Score 210
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Australian rugby Olympian champion Ellia Green’s name has been across media headlines traversing geographies after he came out as a transgender man recently at the summit on 'Transphobia and Homophobia in Sport' in Ottawa.
“Imagine not being able to do what you love because of how you identify, banning transgender people from sport, I think is disgraceful, and I think it’s hurtful,” said Green in the video. “I think that the alarmingly high rates of suicide and the mental health challenges which trans and gender diverse youth experience will get even worse.”
"One promise that I made to myself is that when my rugby career ended, I would continue to live the rest of my life in the identity, in the body that I should have," Green said in the video.
I was caught up with life-things, and couldn’t catch up with the gold medallist’s stories for a while, but when I did, I found that news reports continued to bury the multitudes of transness: there is no end to the continued pattern of diminishing a person through the lens of ‘trailblazing’ ‘history-making’ headlines.
“Ellia Green realized as a young child -- long before becoming an Olympic champion -- that a person’s identity and a gender assigned at birth can be very different things. Now, about 20 years later, one of the stars of Australia’s gold medal-winning women’s rugby sevens team at the 2016 Olympics has transitioned to male,” a news website reports.
What does this clickbait culture say about us as newswriters and newsconsumers? How do we unlearn this thirst for sensationalizing the reality of someone’s distress and mundanity?
I’m sorry for my relentless complaining, but I am tired. In no world do I think that this kind of reporting satisfies the “groundbreaking” category that it seems to set up in its tone. Just say that Green is trans, and move on to HIS story – not the story that we are building up around him.