The headline in the Billings (Mont.) Gazette reads “Trial begins for Casper resident charged with sexually assaulting 10-year-old girl.” The Casper Star Tribune has a similar headline: “Casper resident found guilty of sexually assaulting 10-year-old.”
The similarities don’t stop there. Both outlets identify the perpetrator as Miguel Martinez, and both carry some of the disturbing details of the assault. The Star Tribune Star, which provides the more recently written of the two accounts, affirms that a jury found Martinez guilty of first-degree and second-degree sexual abuse of a minor, adding that he could now face up to 70 years in prison.
So what is missing from both stories? Neither identifies Martinez by the name he currently chooses — Michelle — or the fact that he self-identifies as a woman.
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Not even that highly regarded arbiter of what’s fake news and what’s not, Snopes, is able to help out Shane Sanderson or Elise Schmelzer, the “journalists” responsible respectively for the Star Tribune and Gazette reports.
Snopes focuses its investigation on the claim that some “conservative journalists and bloggers” intimated that the rape happened as a result of laws permitting transgenders to use the bathroom of their choice. But that’s as damning as the Snopes analysis gets. In the end, the investigator ends up classifying the report as a “mixture” of truth and falsehood. The Star Tribune’s and Gazette’s concealment of an inconvenient truth is never touched upon. Nor is there any discussion of the obvious takeaway that transitioning between sexes is evidently not as cut and dried as liberal enablers make it out to be.
In the meantime, it looks like transgenderism will join race as one of the factors in crime that the mainstream media dare not speak.
