A senior standards director at CBS News told staffers on Tuesday to use the term “biological sex at birth” without quotations when referring to a case before the Supreme Court challenging state bans on transgender athletes from competing in women’s and girls’ sports, a break from its prior newsroom guidance.
Tom Burke, the network’s senior director of standards and practices, wrote in Tuesday’s memo that CBS News “will use the term biological sex at birth” with “no quotes needed” when describing arguments from West Virginia and Idaho defending their law that bans trans athletes. The company has been without a formal head of standards since October after Claudia Milne left.
CBS News declined to comment.
This new guidance reflects the latest shift in CBS News coverage under Bari Weiss, the co-founder and editor of the right-leaning Free Press, who was appointed the network’s editor in chief in October after CBS-Paramount acquired her site.
The network’s relaunch of “CBS Evening News” included laying out five “simple values” ahead of anchor Tony Dokoupil’s takeover, prompting criticism online. Weiss came under fire last month for holding a hard-hitting “60 Minutes” segment on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown just hours before broadcast. In defending the move, Weiss told staffers that the newsroom needed to make changes if it wanted to earn back its audience’s trust.
“The standards for fairness we are holding ourselves to, particularly on contentious subjects, will surely feel controversial to those used to doing things one way,” she wrote. “But to fulfill our mission, it’s necessary.”
In November, Burke recommended following style guidance from the Trans Journalists Association in an email discussion about a story on a Supreme Court decision to let the Trump administration enforce a policy that designates one‘s assigned sex at birth on their passport.
The TJA’s style guide says that “outside of medical literature, assigned sex at birth is preferable over biological sex” when describing a person’s anatomy at birth.
“However,” Burke wrote in the Nov. 6 email chain reviewed by TheWrap, “we would use ‘biological sex’ if quoting directly from the document or specifically attributed and quoting from an individual. We should not alter what they say or write.” (The existence of the November email chain, and some details, were first reported by The Guardian.)
Burke’s guidance prompted a response from Jan Crawford, the network’s chief legal correspondent. Crawford said she was “setting aside the question of whether we as a news organization should be adopting TJA style” and said the U.S. court system, including the Supreme Court, still used the term.
“We have had this discussion multiple times before, and I continue to believe we should refrain from adopting terminology advocated by the movement and continue to use ‘biological sex’ without putting it in quotes,” she wrote.
Nicole Cutrona, a producer for “CBS Evening News” who previously referred to the “biological sex” phrase as a “transphobic dog whistle,” acknowledged to Crawford the network had had repeated conversations on the use of the phrase.
“I continue to believe our continued use of the term ‘biological sex’ illustrates our organization’s ignorance about topics involving sex and gender,” she wrote.
Burke responded to the thread and said the standards team would “review the guidance” and “determine what, if any changes need to be addressed.”
The change appears to have gone into effect immediately. A Tuesday story after the oral arguments before the court referred to “biological sex at birth” without quotation marks.
