CBS News is no longer merely reporting the news. By instructing its newsroom to use the phrase “biological sex at birth” without quotation marks, it has chosen to adopt the language of power and call it neutrality. This is not a style change. It is an editorial decision that amplifies one side of a legal and cultural debate while abandoning the standards that once distinguished fact from ideology.

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By instructing its newsroom to use the phrase “biological sex at birth” without quotation marks, CBS isn’t merely describing a legal argument—it’s laundering one. That distinction matters. Journalism is supposed to interrogate power, not quietly adopt its language and call it neutrality.

This shift did not arise from new scientific consensus. It did not come from updated medical guidance. It came from an editorial decision to stop treating a contested, ideologically loaded phrase as contested. That is not a style change. It is a values decision.

It also happens to align CBS News more closely with a presidential administration that has been explicitly hostile to transgender people—and to diversity, equity, and inclusion more broadly—since taking office nearly a year ago. That context is impossible to ignore. When the federal government is actively working to roll back trans protections, restrict participation in public life, and frame trans existence as a social problem, language choices in major newsrooms are not abstract. They either reinforce that agenda or resist it.

CBS has chosen reinforcement.

Newsrooms often hide behind the courts: the Supreme Court uses this terminology, therefore we should too. That argument has always been flimsy. Courts also use language journalists routinely contextualize, attribute, and challenge. Legal phrasing does not automatically become journalistic fact simply because it appears in a brief or an opinion. Treating it as such is not deference to accuracy—it is deference to power.

CBS understood this as recently as November, when its own standards guidance aligned with the Trans Journalists Association, recommending “assigned sex at birth” outside direct quotes. That guidance reflected a newsroom that understood the difference between attribution and adoption. Nothing substantive has changed since then. The science hasn’t changed. Best practices haven’t changed. What has changed is which instincts are now being rewarded.

CBS News has been operating since early October under the editorial leadership of Bari Weiss, whose record on transgender issues is neither subtle nor incidental. At The Free Press, Weiss presided over an outlet that consistently framed trans people less as people affected by policy than as a perpetual cultural controversy. Skepticism toward trans lives was not merely covered—it was normalized, platformed, and reframed as intellectual seriousness.

Putting someone with that worldview in charge of a legacy newsroom was always going to produce moments like this. The lag between her arrival and this memo doesn’t weaken the case—it strengthens it. Institutional shifts rarely announce themselves all at once. They surface gradually, through “guidance,” through quiet changes in tone, through decisions framed as technical rather than ideological.

The issue here is not that CBS is covering a Supreme Court case involving trans athletes. The issue is that it has chosen to adopt the rhetorical framework of one side of that case as its default language—without quotation marks, without attribution, without skepticism. “Biological sex at birth” is not a neutral descriptor. It is a phrase engineered to collapse sex and gender into a fixed, immutable category for political ends.

When journalists present that framing as ordinary, they are no longer explaining a debate. They are participating in it.

What makes this especially cynical is the invocation of “fairness” and “trust.” Fairness does not require mirroring the language of those in power. Trust is not rebuilt by pretending that language choices are apolitical—especially at a moment when government policy is openly targeting a marginalized group.

This wasn’t confusion. It wasn’t an accident. It was a decision—one that aligns CBS News not with journalistic rigor, but with an administration and an ideology eager to define trans people out of public life.

This is how trust actually dies—not with bias, but with cowardice, dressed up as standards and signed off by leadership that should have known better.