Under the guidance of consummate bully / chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC is taking steps towards cracking down on children’s entertainment that in any way explores the complexities of gender identity.
On Wednesday, the FCC’s Media Bureau announced that it is soliciting comments from the public about whether the TV ratings system has made sound decisions regarding children’s programming with transgender or non-binary characters. In a statement about the commenting period the FCC said that it was soliciting feedback due to an alleged uptick in “significant concerns” about whether “controversial gender identity issues are being included or promoted in children’s programs without providing any disclosure or transparency to parents.”
“Specifically, the industry guidelines that parents rely on are rating shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming as appropriate for children and young children, and doing so without providing this information to parents, thereby undermining the ability of parents to make informed choices for their families,” the FCC explained.
On X, Carr echoed his organization’s general sentiments and claimed that parents are worried that “New York & Hollywood programmers” are pushing some sort of nefarious pro-transgender agenda. Carr also insisted that these shadowy programmers are undermining both the law and the ratings system that was established to protect children from unsuitable content.
All of the incoherent noise Carr’s FCC is making here reads transparently as an attempt at weaponizing the entertainment industry’s ratings system (which is voluntarily) in order to erase transgender and non-binary people from the media. As Variety notes, the FCC is not directly in control of the ratings system, but it does have the ability to make judgements about whether the ratings board is operating effectively.
The way Carr describes it, you could get the impression that the FCC has been overrun with complaints from parents about shows filled with explicit messages and images that aren’t appropriate for young viewers. But in a comment to Variety, the FCC’s sole Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez said that, per the FCC’s most recent annual report, there were “only 11 pieces of public correspondence relevant to the [TV ratings] board’s work, and spot checks turned up just two instances where a rating actually needed to be changed.”
“American families are worried about affordability, access and rising costs, not whether the TV ratings system has enough warnings about gender identity,” Gomez said.
The baselessness of these concerns becomes even more apparent when you look at some of the questions the FCC is asking people to consider, like whether the ratings board should include “additional faith-based organizations” and more “stakeholders outside of the entertainment industry.” Each of the FCC’s questions is posed in a way that implies the current ratings board is not actually acting in children’s best interest. And while the FCC hasn’t just explicitly stated that it doesn’t want trans and non-binary people to be featured on screen at all, it’s easy to see how the organization might want to use this process to kick off a larger campaign designed to scale back queer representation.
What’s important to remember here is that, regardless of what kind of television shows or movies they watch, children who are transgender, non-binary, and queer will always exist. Those children and their cisgender peers deserve to be exposed to stories about different kinds of gender expression because they reflect the realities of how people live and move through the world. Parents owe it to themselves and their kids to recognize that the Trump administration FCC is trying to play on people’s fears about children’s safety in order to push its own bigoted agenda. With any luck, this will all blow over until Carr decides to pick another target.