The head of one group decried the ADL’s “disproportionate attention on left-of-center activists’ views on Israel while failing to apply the same scrutiny to the Trump administration.”
The heads of three left-leaning US Jewish groups on Monday admonished the Anti-Defamation League after the controversial watchdog once again conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism in its latest report on New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his transition team.
The Anti-Defamation League noted approvingly in its updated “Mamdani Monitor” that “at least 25 individuals” in the democratic socialist’s transition team “have a past relationship with the ADL or partner organizations, or a history of supporting the Jewish community.”
The group also appreciated that “Mamdani’s team can and will respond appropriately” to actual incidents of antisemitism, pointing to last week’s resignation of Catherine Almonte Da Costa, Mamdani’s former director of appointments, following the revelation of antisemitic social media posts she published in the early 2010s.
However, the ADL said it remains “deeply concerned” by Mamdani’s statements and actions, highlighting what the group claimed were “many examples of individuals who have engaged in some type of antisemitic, anti-Zionist, or anti-Israel activities and/or have ties to groups that engage in such activities” among the mayor-elect’s transition team appointees.
“These activities include spreading classic antisemitic tropes, vilifying those who support Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland, seeking to undermine the legitimacy and security of the Jewish state, and more,” the ADL said, adding that “at least a dozen transition committee appointees expressed support for the anti-Israel campus encampments in the spring of 2024.”
The Mamdani Monitor also noted that “at least 20% of the 400-plus appointees have ties to anti-Zionist groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which openly glorifies Hamas’ October 7 attack… Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a fringe group that advocates for the eradication of Zionism and demonizes Zionists; Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a New York-based radical anti-Zionist organization… and others.”
Asked about the report during a Monday press conference, Mamdani said, “We must distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli government.”
“The ADL’s report oftentimes ignores this distinction, and in doing so it draws attention away from the very real crisis of antisemitism we see not only just in our city but in the country at large,” he continued. “When we’re thinking about critiques of Zionism and different forms of political expression, as much of what this report focuses on, there’s a wide variety of political opinion, even within our own 400-plus transition committee.”
Critics say the ADL’s claim in the update that it “has long distinguished between legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies and antisemitism” is belied by not only the Mamdani Monitor’s language, but also its own significantly expanded definition of antisemitism and antisemitic incidents, which include protests against Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza.
Jamie Beran, CEO of the progressive group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, said in an X thread that “we were disappointed but not surprised to see today’s ADL report continue their conflation of criticism of the Israeli government’s actions with antisemitism” and the group’s “favoring of Trumpian tactics over bridge building and its prioritization of fearmongering over the safety of American Jews and our neighbors.”
Beran continued:
The ADL of today seems to have three interests: keeping their right wing megadonors happy, protecting the current Israeli government’s violent far-right agenda by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and cozying up to [US President Donald] Trump to stay close to power.
None of this fights antisemitism. Their McCarthyist Mamdani Monitor is the first of its kind because the ADL chose not to deploy a similar tactic when their bedfellows offered Nazi salutes, hired and pardoned neo-Nazis, and continued to openly spread dangerous antisemitic conspiracy myths.
“If the ADL truly wanted to fight antisemitism—like we do every day—they would actually confront it at its roots and how it works alongside all forms of bigotry, not instrumentalize it for an unpopular political agenda that has nothing to do with Jewish safety,” Beran added.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Jewish group J Street, also rejected the ADL’s “continued conflation.”
“J Street continues to be deeply concerned by the ADL’s ongoing use of its so-called ‘Mamdani Monitor,’ which goes well beyond combating antisemitism and too often conflates legitimate political speech with hate,” Ben-Ami said in a statement Monday.
Ben-Ami asserted that there is “something deeply wrong when major Jewish leaders and institutions focus disproportionate attention on left-of-center activists’ views on Israel while failing to apply the same scrutiny to the Trump administration and MAGA leaders, whose blatant antisemitism and ties to white nationalist movements pose a clear and dangerous threat to American Jews.”
“Our communal institutions should fight antisemitism consistently and credibly, wherever it appears—not selectively, and not in ways that inflame fear or deepen division,” he added.
Another liberal Jewish antisemitism watchdog, Nexus Project, also decried the ADL update, which it said “repeatedly blurs the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.”
J Street among the groups supporting the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act (ARPA), legislation introduced last week by US Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) in the wake of the Sydney Hanukkah massacre.
According to Nadler’s office, the bill “clearly states that it is against the policy of the United States to use antisemitism as grounds to pursue ulterior political agendas, including attacks on educational institutions, suppressing constitutionally protected speech, or any other enforcement of ideological conformity.”
ARPA stands in stark contrast with the Antisemitism Awareness Act (ARA), which was introduced in 2023 by Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ, Max Miller (R-Ohio), and Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) in the House of Representatives and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) in the Senate.
The bill would require the Department of Education to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism when determining whether alleged harassment is motivated by anti-Jewish animus.
The ADL has pushed a wide range of governments, institutions, and organizations to adopt the IRHA definition, which conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and colonization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
House lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the legislation last year; however, the bill remains stalled in the Senate.
Zionism—the settler-colonial movement for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine—is being rejected by a growing number of Jewish Americans due to the racism, settler-colonialism, illegal occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide perpetrated by Israel and rooted in claims of divine right and favor.
Jewish-led groups like JVP, IfNotNow, and Jews for Economic and Racial Justice (JERJ) have been at the forefront of pro-Palestine demonstrations since the start of Israel’s war and siege on Gaza, which have left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing; 2 million others displaced, starved, and sickened; and most of the coastal strip in ruins.
Hello all. I hope you are all having a grand Christmas. I did. I am … yet now I am struggling.
See Ron’s sister has been with us for two weeks and she had been a great grand help. She took over ever duty I had and helped me get back to the blog. Plus she gave Ron a connection to his childhood and his youth. Plus she gave me all her husband’s clothing and we are the same size. So for Christmas I got a complete new wardrobe of shorts / pants / shirts / and dress stuff. I was down to only two ill-fitting pair of old pants that hung off me. So it was a timeless gift. But her help was not done.
She brought big sister energy so while I have tried hard to get Ron to throw out old construction debris that he had piled in several rooms I never could get him to do so. She did. Then she got him to organize and pack away a lot of stuff he was just piling up. I was so happy we got back to a having two rooms that we had lost to just Ron piling things in them. But it gets even better.
She and Ron spent the time looking at places here that might fit her needs so she could be here in the winters instead of being up north and she has found what she wanted, she put in an offer and the people accepted. So she will come stay with us on and off this winter and then next year be here full-time. I love it.
Please understand I never had a caring sibling. I met my wonderful “brother” Randy well into adulthood and Randy is everything an abused kid like myself could every hope for in a supportive sibling. He has been the brother I always wanted … yet never had until a decade ago. But Ron had a tight knit large family who cares for each other and really they do care and love each other. Watching him and Diane this last two weeks has been amazing. In a way I am jealous because no matter how hard they try to include me … they are in a world of their own past. Having Ron’s sister as a part of our lives is going to be grand.
So the adventure begins again. She has already given me ideas on ways she can help if I wish. But I love her ideas.
Now the ugly and bad. Off and on I have been struggling and doing everything to hide it from them. Several times at night both the cat and Ron tried to wake me as I started to yell or scream out. My nightmares have gotten much worse. During the day while they were in the house I would come into my office, shut the door, and breakdown sobbing in tears. I am trying so hard to hold it all together but the memories hurt so bad, they are there always now pushing at the walls I try to build up in my mind. It used to be they were contained but now they are simply there, looking over the wall, shouting at me constantly trying to get my attention.
I did what so many advised and I admitted to my primary care I needed help. He was the first primary care I ever told of my abuse and he impressed me with how he handled the news and me after I told him. But h e sent me to their therapist on staff. But she is a very young woman and she is a behavior therapist and I need a trauma therapist. She is all about how to feel good, such as walk more each day, but I need someone to tell and get help for being a 3-year-old tied to the stair banisters with my arms strung up while I could barely touch the floor. I was nude and sometimes I was blindfolded. Either way I was hit or raped in this position. I need someone to tell these memories to. And it won’t be this 20 year old woman who wants me to think of how I can make my days happier by thinking of sunshine.
So I have tried to do the best I can. Tomorrow Ron will take his sister to the airport and on the way home get the supplies for me to make a tomato spaghetti meal for Randy. Ron will make the meat balls while I make the sauce. I will pretend I am OK and everything is great. Yet inside I will hear the screams of a beaten raped little boy, I will ignore it while I make good for everyone around. And when I lay my head down on the pillow after trying so hard to stop from doing so … the nightmares will come, the memories, the feelings, the screams trying so hard to burst out. And I will control what I can, the cat or Ron will wake me if the noise from my mouth gets too loud. A night of hopefully a bit of rest. Only to wake early in the morning and get up to do it all again. My life, over and over again. Thank you for reading / listening. It is hard to describe what my life is, but maybe this is the best example.
Ron just went to bed. He tried hard to get me to go with him. He knows how hard it is for me and how it is getting harder. The saddest point is he tries to help but doesn’t know how. When I scream out at night he asks if he can hold me knowing that to just grab me or pull me to him will induce more trauma. Having written this with the memories fresh in my mind I am scared to join him in the bedroom. Yet I must. How to finish this post? I never wanted people to feel sorry for me, my life is what it is and what I have tried to make it. Yet the idea of going to bed scares me.
Yes I have a way to end this post. As a kid from 8 to my teen years I would leave the local school and bike to the local town library in our little cow town. I would stay there in safety instead of going home to be abused. The local librarians must have known of my abuse because one of them gave me a book that described what abused boys could do to get help. But like me they were afraid of the big bruiser gorilla that lived in my home that I had to return to. So while I was not allowed to have books at home because that was not what a real boy did, they kept my books behind their desk for me … and every day I was beaten and every night I was raped. But the next day I could go to that town library after school and lose my sore body in the books. But no adult ever became my hero. That was little Scotties life. Good night. Best wishes and hugs.
tRump’s illegal military war crime actions / tRump’s gift to the oil companies that paid him prior / This is a war crime and illegal / tRump trying to get other countries resources for his own profits / tRump grifts and seeking bribes
It has nothing to do with US national security and all the minerals / traffic rights to make ships pay / and the “rare earth” metals that tRump wants a piece of. It is about profit. Hugs
The paying tribute and bribes to tRump and his slush funds is so anti what the US should and used to stand for. It is the very thing the founding fathers were most against. The courts have gutted the holding of tRump to account but the emoluments cause is what this was designed to stop. Ask yourself if Biden / Obama / Clinton had been so blatant in demanding bribes would you tRump cult supporters be OK with it still? Hugs
The appeals court told her to have it completely wrapped up by the first week of January and this is not doing that. I expect more to happen fast with this. She ignored the appeals court order to please tRump.
“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” the college student from Venezuela who sought U.S. asylum, said. “Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled until the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth.”
Mr. Miller’s belief that seven decades of immigration has produced millions of people who take more than they give — an assertion that has been refuted by years of economic data — is at the heart of the Trump administration’s campaign to restrict immigration and deport immigrants already in the country.
tRump trying to hold on to power illegally / Jan 6th insurrectionists / trying to change the history everyone seen live / Scamming / Using the US treasury & taxpayer funds to pay off tRump cult members.
The U.S. Air Force will provide Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt with military funeral honors, reversing a Biden-era decision that denied her family’s request, according to a legal group that has represented her family.
In June 2025, the Pentagon agreed to pay the Babbitt family a $5 million “wrongful death” settlement. Below, see the latest from Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who is himself reportedly suing the DOJ for $100 million.
This is not true. The construction industry has crashed in Florida. No workers so nothing being built. Half crews means nothing built. The work is far to hard for most people. Hugs
In his first year back in office, Mr. Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform American government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Mr. Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard M. Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.
Trump is expected to announce plans to build a new, large warship that Trump is calling a “battleship” and is part of his larger vision to create a “Golden Fleet” that includes as many as 50 support ships, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized comment publicly.
Bigotry / Hate / Racism / DEI Misinformation / White Supremacy
It is a .pdf. I was going to say, if you don’t want to read it top to bottom, go to the last (25th) page, but Justice Alito’s dissent is lengthy and verbose. (Yes, maybe worse than I, so I’ve given pages of particular pertinence here.) Justice Thomas joined him in that, then Justice Gorsuch also dissented on his own. Justice Kavanaugh concurred with the decision on page 2, denying the Petitioner, and in favor of The State Of Illinois. There is language there to read, as the scope was kept narrow by the Court: no stay, and as to various statements or defenses of Petitioner no finding of good application to the case. The concurrence (by Kavanaugh) agreed but named a circumstance in which he would have ruled to issue the stay. It’s a page and a half. I suggest reading it all, but I’m a nerd that way. This is a win, as long as protestors stay well-behaved, as we do.
A same-sex female couple in Pennsylvania is suffering through a “Kafkaesque nightmare” after one of the women was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when she showed up for a regularly scheduled immigration check-in.
ICE agents detained her and shipped her to a detention center in California.
Xiomara Suarez, 28, arrived in the U.S. in 2022 seeking asylum after fleeing Peru, where she was stalked and endured a violent sexual assault based on her sexual orientation. In a sworn declaration to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials reviewed by Advocate, Suarez said Peruvian police refused to acknowledge her complaints or offer protection, and she feared for her life.
Suarez was admitted to the U.S. on “parole” as her request for permanent status was processed.
In February, Suarez married her then-girlfriend, Grazi Chiosque, 29, an American citizen. The couple hoped to adjust Suarez’s immigration status and smooth the way for her to obtain a green card. They filed the required documents in May.
Before that request was processed, however, Suarez was swept up in a wave of detentions by ICE at courthouses targeting immigrants scheduled for hearings — only to be arrested and shipped to detention centers despite their legal non-criminal status.
Suarez was now one of them.
Chiosque says her wife is enduring degrading and isolating conditions at the Adelanto ICE detention facility in Southern California, where she’s been detained since September.
“There’s mold in the food,” Chiosque said. “You don’t have any privacy.”
“She was put into shackles,” Suarez’s wife added. “She told me that crying because it really made her feel like she did something that was wrong, and she didn’t.”
Far from expediting Suarez’s immigration status, the couple’s decision to marry may have only complicated Suarez’s legal claim.
Earlier this month, she was scheduled for back-to-back appearances with government officials. The first was with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to adjudicate her spousal petition. The second was before an immigration judge related to her detention and status in the country.
Chiosque flew from Pennsylvania to help Suarez through the process.
At the first appointment, a supervisor with Citizenship and Immigration Services told Chiosque, referring to her wife, “USCIS does not have jurisdiction because she’s detained.”
“The immigration judge would have to adjudicate on both,” Chiosque was told.
But at that hearing, the explanation flipped, Chiosque said.
“‘No, I don’t have jurisdiction on the I-130,” the judge told Suarez, referring to her spousal petition. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“If USCIS does not want to give you an interview,” he added, “contact your congressman.”
The couple had hoped their marriage claim would help expedite Suarez’s permanent residency. Now it was keeping her behind bars.
“USCIS says it’s not them because she’s detained. And the judge says it’s not them, it’s USCIS,” Chiosque said.
Suarez was returned to detention. Her next immigration hearing is scheduled for January 28.
The couple’s legal limbo is indicative of a broader, and intentional, pattern by ICE and the Trump administration, said Álvaro M. Huerta, director of litigation and advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center.
“This administration is separating and trapping families like Xiomara and Grazielli in a Kafkaesque nightmare, with the clear intention of making life so unbearable that they abandon all hope,” Huerta said. “It’s not only a policy failure, but also a betrayal of LGBTQ immigrant families who deserve dignity, safety, and the chance to thrive.”
“It feels like we’re begging,” said Chiosque, whose wife sits in detention a continent away.
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This is just hate and bigotry. It is a group of people who hate trans people for some unknown reason and have made their life / career the harassment of trans minors who play sports. I can not see how this harms this reporter and his group in any way. To make your life about harming others is a real petty way to exist. Many conservatives use their religion to justify such hate but the Jesus of the bible never said a word against the entire LGBTQ+ community. So their hate is internally driven and they must be such miserable people. So Sad. The drive to regress the world’s most progressive countries back to an uneducated straight cis white male controlled society is really causing a lot of damage to people and freedom to express your life as you wish. It seems driven by two groups, the older people who are uncomfortable with the progression of society and younger religious people driven by wealthy religious hate groups. Hugs
Since Sept. 5, right-wing sports publication OutKick has published 19 articles about a 12th grade girls’ volleyball player at Skyline High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The player caught the attention of reporter Dan Zaksheske after he obtained public documents that appear to show her requesting a legal name change from a traditionally masculine first name to a traditionally feminine one.
Over the next three months, Zaksheske would write 18 of the 19 articles OutKick would publish about this student. He and other OutKick reporters attended multiple high school girls’ volleyball games where they recorded and reported on Skyline High’s volleyball season. At the heart of each article was a focus on the girl, who Zaksheske refers to as a “trans-identifying biological male.”
Zaksheske’s reporting stoked a controversy that drew the attention of multiple right-wing publications, politicians and influencers. This coverage led Sean Lechner, whose cisgender daughter played against Skyline and allegedly shared a locker room with their team, to file a Title IX complaint.
Lechner’s daughter at a press conference about the complaint. Screenshot via Fox Business.
While the Michigan High School Athletic Association (MHSAA) does require trans athletes to get a waiver approved to compete in official state tournaments, the Democrat-majority state Senate outright rejected the idea of a trans athlete sports ban earlier this year. In addition, LGBTQ Michiganders have strong anti-discrimination protections under the state’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act.
In the complaint, Lechner calls for a ban on “biological males from competing in female sports” and for a “full investigation into actions and communications of Ann Arbor Public Schools/Monroe High/Chet Hesson,” citing a Trump executive order that declares that trans-inclusive policies are in violation of Title IX.
Shortly after the complaint was filed, Uncloseted Media published an interview clip with Hesson, the athletic director of Monroe Public Schools, in which he simply said his “heart goes out” to the player for being under such scrutiny. Less than 24 hours later, he was put on administrative leave.
As this story spreads like wildfire, experts in journalistic ethics are raising concerns about Zaksheske’s reporting.
“OutKick’s inflammatory reporting on a Michigan high school volleyball player who may or may not be trans disregards several core principles of the Society of Professional Journalists’ [SPJ] Code of Ethics,” Dan Axelrod, chairman of the SPJ’s ethics committee, told Uncloseted Media. SPJ’s Code of Ethics, originally drafted in 1973, has been embraced and used by thousands of journalists from numerous newsrooms and schools.
“The Code cautions reporters to ‘show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage,’ and to ‘use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles,’ while ‘weigh[ing] the consequences of publishing or broadcasting personal information,’” Axelrod says. “[OutKick] has essentially ignored all those ethical principles, given [Zaksheske’s] relentless coverage of the player, which has led the public to easily infer who she is, and its negative framing of her story.”
The player, whose mother did not respond to an interview request, does not appear to have publicly come out as trans prior to the publication of Zaksheske’s first article.
Chad Painter, associate professor and chair of the communications department at the University of Dayton, says this “brings up a whole host of issues.” While Zaksheske wrote that he did not name the girl “because the student athlete is under 18,” Painter says that doesn’t do enough to conceal her identity.
In his reporting, Zaksheske references the existence of publicly accessible name change documents, the girl’s county of residence and the name of a local volleyball club she’d been a part of. “Someone who is reasonably well-versed in being able to Google someone can figure this out pretty easily,” Painter, who has co-authored multiple media ethics textbooks, told Uncloseted Media.
“There’s longstanding norms in newsrooms that we don’t out people, that that is a very personal decision that an individual gets to make, and unless there is a massively compelling reason to do that, it’s not our role,” he says. “The idea that he is in the clear because he didn’t specifically write this person’s name in a story, it wouldn’t hold up to journalistic scrutiny.”
And Zaksheske’s reporting appears to have outed the girl. The same day that he published his first article on the matter, an X account whose mission is “to call out these male athletes and expose the damage that they have each caused to women and girls in sports” published the girl’s full name and deadname along with multiple photos and videos of her. (Uncloseted Media has chosen not to link to these posts directly in the interest of her privacy.)
In addition to the 18 articles Zaksheske wrote, he also tweeted about the situation at least 41 times and attendedatleastfourhigh school girls’ volleyball games. While watching, he recorded videos of the girls playing and then posted them to X and OutKick’s website.
“Having 19 stories about one athlete … to me, that seems like this coverage is out of line with how we’d normally talk about, especially high school sports, which, frankly, no one outside of this little area in Michigan are going to really care about,” says Painter.
“Outside of the culture war stuff, I don’t see where this is a story.”
When Zaksheske was confronted by multiple people at the school about attending and recording one of the games, he published another article accusing them of harassment. “I was shadowed by the school principal and harassed and stalked by Skyline supporters,” he wrote.
Painter notes that while Zaksheske was within his rights as a journalist and citizen to be attending and recording such events, he understands why the school would approach him with skepticism.
“I have a feeling that if I just started showing up randomly to high school volleyball games and taking photos and videos, there would probably be questions,” Painter says. “Because, again, we are talking about minors.”
“The reporter has a right to pursue news … and that right especially exists at a public school,” says Axelrod. “However, one has to wonder at what point is the coverage just pandering to curiosity as opposed to serving a valid societal purpose in informing and facilitating larger discussions about real and valid questions regarding the participation of trans athletes in sports.”
Misinformation and Animus
Zaksheske has pushed back against similar criticism on X, accusing those who question the ethics of his reporting of being “in favor of sterilizing, mutilating and castrating children” and characterizing his reporting as “exposing their heinous acts.”
“I don’t see that as an ethical problem because it doesn’t even enter into the world of ethics,” Painter says of Zaksheske’s rhetoric. “It is wrong factually and it doesn’t really have a place in what we do in terms of the journalism field.”
Misleading rhetoric about trans health care is common throughout OutKick’s reporting. Zaksheske has written several articles about gender-affirming care, where he has claimed that puberty blockers “take healthy children and sterilize them for life.”
Puberty blockers have been FDA-approved for treating precocious puberty in cisgender children since 1993. Multiplestudies have found no evidence of them causing permanent infertility, and gynecologists and endocrinologists have said that they do not cause sterilization.
Much of Zaksheske’s coverage of trans people has been negative. Of adult trans women, he wrote that “that person might see himself as a woman, but we are under no obligation to ‘affirm’ that.” He also wrote that doctors who provide gender-affirming care “have to answer to their consciences.”
OutKick also generally misgenders trans women and girls, referring to them as “males,” “biological males” or “trans-identifying males,” additionally using masculine pronouns to refer to them.
Painter notes that this goes against the “Associated Press Stylebook,” which he says “any newsroom worth its salt is going to follow.”
“The journalist and the news outlet squander their credibility covering these types of societal questions when they use language … that fails to recognize and respect the underlying humanity of an entire group of people,” he says.
In an email, Brian Karpas, OutKick’s director of media relations, told Uncloseted Media that the publication “stands by the thorough and responsible reporting of Dan Zaksheske and will continue to protect women from competing against biological males.”
Beyond Michigan
OutKick’s extensive reporting of the Michigan volleyball player is reflective of the publication’s increasingly conservative bent since it launched in 2011. In 2021, it was acquired by Fox Corporation. Since then, it has partnered with Fox News and has become home to numerous right-wing personalities known for anti-trans rhetoric. These include founder Clay Travis, who has said World Aquatics is “encouraging …super young kids to be transitioned”; Tomi Lahren, who said that liberals “don’t know what a woman is”; and Riley Gaines, who referred to an eighth-grade trans girl as a “mediocre man.”
This story in Michigan is not the first time OutKick and Zaksheske have hyperfocused on one trans girl. They were one of the first national publications to report on California-based track and field athlete AB Hernandez, who later became the center of a feud between the Trump administration and Gov. Gavin Newsom. Since March, OutKick has published at least 24 articles about Hernandez, 10 of which were written by Zaksheske. They sent reporters to at least twogames to photograph Hernandez and other teenage players. Additionally, OutKick published 15 articles and attended at least four games covering the story of a trans softball player in Minnesota, whose presence on the team became a key point of a lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom.
This massive amount of coverage is common for U.S. conservative media: A report published this year from Media Matters for America found that Fox News ran over 400 weekday segments mentioning trans athletes from Feb. 5 to June 6.
All of this has had an impact. While the Title IX investigation is still pending, Hesson, who was named in the complaint, told Uncloseted Media that he had been targeted with harassment and vitriol online.
Uncloseted Media on Instagram: “Last Friday, Uncloseted Media p…
In the comments of the Instagram post, Hesson was attacked by numerous users: squaredbeach9 wrote, “Stop normalizing these freaks. You don’t give a bulimic chick a bucket and some gum.”
And others chimed in, saying:
“Guaranteed he has child pron on an electronic device.”
“Fuck off, poor tranny hates attention, give me a fn break.”
“So a male playing in women’s sports. And this cuck is defending it.”
All of this has come even though Hesson is not directly affiliated with Skyline High School, which is part of a different district. As such, he was not involved in the decision to allow the girl to play, and he was also not privy to whether she had a waiver.
In addition, numerous right-wing lawmakers and candidates have endorsed Lechner’s complaint. Republican state Rep. James DeSana posted a statement to Facebook “calling for Chet Hesson to be removed immediately.”
“The public cannot have good discourse, debate, or dialogue without good information,” Painter says. “Supplying that information is the fundamental duty of the news media. When journalists are distracted by inconsequential stories, then we’re not spending the time to cover interesting and important news that our readers really need.”
Both Painter and Axelrod took note of the small number of known trans athletes in the U.S. Last year, the NCAA’s president told a Senate panel that fewer than 10 of the 510,000 college athletes affiliated with the organization were transgender.
“This controversy is part of a much larger national narrative about transgender athletes and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole,” Painter says. “The entire national conversation is based on virtually nothing, so this particular set of stories are based on an inconsequential premise.”
Going Forward
If the Department of Education does find that Title IX was violated, the school district could risk losing federal funding if it continues to allow trans athletes to compete.
Zaksheske has been pressuring the MHSAA to confirm whether a waiver was approved for the volleyball player to compete, citing a statement from early September in which the association said it had not yet approved any waivers for the semester. On Dec. 9, MHSAA confirmed that one waiver was granted in the fall season, though no details were given in the interest of the student’s privacy.
While research into the relative athletic capabilities of trans and cis women is ongoing, numerous experts and athletes say that politicized vitriol, misleading information and outsized media attention about trans athletes makes girls’ sports less safe for all athletes.
“There are real, valid, and necessary societal discussions to be had about trans athletes participating against competitors who don’t match their birth gender, and ethical journalism can have a place in informing those discussions,” Axelrod says. “At the end of the day, this woman is still a human, and a child at that, not a canvas for OutKick to paint a distorted picture of one individual who’s a tiny part of a much bigger societal dialogue about trans athletes.”
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Greg OwenDecember 21, 2025, 5:00 pm ESTShutterstock
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