Fox News Ran 5X More Headlines on Trans Policy Than Epstein Files—Here's Why That Matters

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.They want us looking one way while they steal everything else. That’s the game. And it’s written in receipts.Let me show you what I mean. Behind me is a graph—data, not opinions—that illustrates something most media outlets won’t touch. In 2025 alone, Fox News ran nearly 4,100 headlines sensationalizing transgender policy and visibility. In that same year, they covered the Epstein files—documented evidence of systemic sexual abuse involving some of the most powerful men in America—approximately 610 times. That’s not a close call. That’s five times more coverage on trans existence than on industrial-scale child exploitation. Feel me?Now here’s where receipts get hard. In 2025, over 850 anti-LGBTQ bills were filed across the United States. Eight. Hundred. Fifty. Legislative attempts to constrain the freedoms and existence of people who make up less than 5% of the population. Yet somehow, in the Epstein files—the documented, prosecutable, testifiable evidence of what some of this country’s ruling class actually did—there were zero trans people. Not one. The hysteria, the legislative urgency, the moral panic? It wasn’t based on trans participation in those crimes. It was manufactured to distract us.And that matters. Because while we’re debating bathroom bills and drag performances and medical autonomy for young people, we’re not talking about why healthcare access is deteriorating across the board. We’re not examining why public education—the actual infrastructure meant to lift our children—has been systematically defunded. We’re not asking why we invaded a country or why poverty persists or why the social safety net continues to shred. We’re looking there instead of here. That’s not accident. That’s strategy.This is what I call victimization as policy. They create an entire narrative that positions one group as the boogeyman, justify the expansion of state power through “protection” rhetoric, and meanwhile—meanwhile—the actual architecture of exploitation stays invisible. The actual beneficiaries stay protected.The Hypocrisy Has a PatternHere’s the double standard that the receipts expose. When one or two transgender people do something—commit a crime, say something controversial, exist visibly—the entire community gets held responsible. I’ve watched this. One trans person shoplifts and suddenly we’re debating whether trans people should have civil rights. One trans person makes a statement and it becomes the rationale for stripping healthcare from millions. Collective punishment for individual action.But when we have an entire documented file—the Epstein files—with hundreds of cisgender, heterosexual, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male perpetrators doing “a whole bunch of ungodly things,” as my grandmother would say, what’s the response? “That’s just a reflection on them as individuals.” No collective responsibility. No legislative blitzkrieg. No moral panic manufactured across cable news 5,000+ times a year.The difference isn’t about the severity of harm. The Epstein files document organized, systematic, intergenerational abuse of children. That’s not opinion. That’s fact. The difference is about whose existence threatens the order, and whose predation can be absorbed by the system because the system was built by and for them.This is the epistemological violence we’re living through. They’re not just attacking trans people—they’re attacking our capacity to see what’s actually happening. Every headline about trans bathrooms is a distraction from healthcare policy. Every debate about drag performances is a distraction from wage theft. Every legislative attack on gender-affirming care is a distraction from the dismantling of public education.Education as the Real BattlegroundAnd let me be specific about education, because that’s where the logic breaks down for them. They claim to care about children. They file 850 bills supposedly to “protect” young people. But protecting young people from what? From the existence of trans people? Meanwhile, public schools are underfunded to the point of collapse. Teachers can’t afford to live in the cities where they teach. Students don’t have access to updated textbooks or mental health services. School libraries are being purged of books—including books about Black history, books about sexuality, books about anything that might complicate the preferred narrative.If they actually cared about protecting children, we’d be fighting about that. We’d have 4,100 headlines a year about school funding. We’d have 850 legislative proposals to increase teacher pay and reduce class sizes. We’d have urgent media coverage of the fact that poor Black and brown children in this country are systematically denied access to the resources their white, wealthy peers get as default.But we don’t. Because that would require attacking wealth. That would require dismantling the very power structures these politicians and media outlets serve. It’s easier to attack trans people. It’s politically profitable to create panic about trans visibility while the actual infrastructure of education—the actual promise of “protecting children”—gets defunded and forgotten.This is how misdirection becomes policy. This is how you can claim moral high ground while the ground itself erodes.The Intersectional Material RealityHere’s what doesn’t make the 4,100 headlines: Black trans people are experiencing the compound effects of this legislation. They face discrimination in healthcare and educational access and economic opportunity. The anti-trans bills being filed disproportionately impact trans people of color, who already navigate healthcare systems structured by antiblackness and poverty. When you layer anti-trans legislation onto an already-hostile environment for Black bodies in medical spaces, you’re not “protecting” anyone. You’re legalizing erasure.And it connects to education directly. Young Black trans people are being pushed out of schools through hostile policies, denied access to gender-affirming healthcare that research shows reduces suicidality, and then blamed for “community dysfunction.” That’s not protection. That’s the criminalization of existence.The 850 anti-LGBTQ bills aren’t neutral policy. They’re racialized policy. They hit hardest where oppression is already concentrated—in communities that have been systematically denied resources, denied access, denied recognition. And the media machine that manufactures consensus for these bills does so while ignoring the actual crimes documented in the Epstein files. While ignoring that those crimes involved predominantly white men with power.That’s not coincidence. That’s function.What Education is Elevation Actually Means HereYou can’t educate people toward liberation if you’re simultaneously lying about what oppression looks like. If you’re running 5,000+ headlines about trans visibility while running 600 headlines about documented, prosecutable abuse by the powerful, you’re not informing. You’re manufacturing consent for a specific political agenda.Education is elevation means we have to be willing to count receipts. To say: this many headlines, that many bills, these many people blamed, those many people protected. It means we have to name what’s happening—which is the deliberate misdirection of public attention away from the systematic extraction of resources from poor and Black communities, including through dismantled education systems.The people pushing anti-trans legislation aren’t primarily concerned about children’s safety. If they were, we’d see resource allocation matching that concern. Instead, we see legislative energy matched to political benefit. We see media coverage matched to how much anxiety it can generate in a targeted demographic. We see misdirection matched to a very specific logic: keep the marginalized fighting the more marginalized while the actual beneficiaries of extraction stay invisible.That ain’t it though. And we gotta say so.PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL-TO-ACTIONI’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media.That’s what this is really about. When I count receipts—when I show you that Fox News ran nearly five times more headlines on trans visibility than on documented exploitation by the powerful—I’m not just making a political point. I’m doing what journalism used to do. I’m holding systems accountable. I’m refusing the manufactured narrative. I’m insisting on receipts.But I can only do this work because readers like you choose to support it.I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. The Colfax Massacre that textbooks won’t touch. The machinery of residential segregation still shaping where Black families can build wealth. The Christian nationalism embedded in state policy. The Iran-Contra Affair and how it devastated Black communities. The real history of anti-trans legislation and what it actually serves.This work has no corporate backing. No wealthy sponsors. No institution paying me to produce it. That’s intentional. Because once you’re dependent on corporate dollars, you stop counting receipts that threaten profit. You stop naming misdirection when your advertisers benefit from it.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Media Creates the Narrative of Threat: Fox News ran 4,100+ headlines on trans policy vs. 610 on Epstein files in 2025—demonstrating how cable news manufactures moral panic to serve political interests while obscuring actual harms.* Collective Punishment Targets the Powerless: One trans person’s individual action = accountability for the entire community. Hundreds of cisgender men in the Epstein files = individualized responsibility. This double standard reveals whose existence threatens the system.* Anti-Trans Bills Are Educational Erasure Policies: 850+ anti-LGBTQ bills filed in 2025 directly undermine public education by attacking knowledge, autonomy, and access—while actual school funding collapses with a fraction of the legislative attention.* Misdirection Protects the Powerful: Every headline about trans bathrooms diverts attention from healthcare collapse, wage theft, and the dismantling of public services. The legislative urgency around trans visibility directly correlates with political benefit, not demonstrated harm.* Intersectional Harm: Race, Class, Gender Compress: Black trans people experience layered policy violence—anti-trans legislation, healthcare racism, educational exclusion—while media hysteria erases how these systems compound. This is not parallel oppression; it’s multiplicative.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGSMedia Analysis & Misdirection* Sut Jhally & Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (1992) — On how media manufactures consensus and obscures structural inequality* Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding” (1973) — Understanding how media narratives are constructed to serve power* Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (1988) — How media systems function to naturalize state and corporate interestsAnti-Trans Legislation & Policy* Movement Advancement Project (MAP), “State Equality Index” (annually updated) — Comprehensive tracking of anti-LGBTQ legislation by state* LGBTQ Nation, “2025 Anti-Transgender Legislation Tracker” — Real-time documentation of bills filed nationally* Human Rights Watch, “Do Not Erase Us” (2018+) — On criminalization of trans existence through legislationEducation, Epistemological Violence & Erasure* Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) — Banking model of education vs. critical pedagogy* George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes (2012) — Epistemological violence and anti-Black knowledge production* Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — Colonized consciousness and systems of erasure* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) — Foundational intersectionality framework* Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis (2015) — Knowledge systems and the encoding of human hierarchiesEducation Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. 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