by Susan Brinkmann
Staff Writer
(March 7, 2008) A popular ABC morning show shocked viewers this week with a show portraying a top executive at Microsoft and new father who decided to become a woman as just another one of those “complicated choices” in life.
“Switching sexes is far from a cultural norm in America, but Good Morning America’s sympathetic treatment of a transgender‘woman’ this morning was the type of reporting intended to normalize the practice,” writes Kristen Fyfe of the Culture and Media Institute, a division of the Media Research Center.
The show told the story of Michael Wallent, now known as Megan, who gave his wife and the mother of his new son a big surprise Mothers Day last year. He wanted to become a woman and admitted to having struggled for a long time with his identity as a man. Even though they had a beautiful new baby a happy marriage, this was what he wanted to do.
ow did his wife respond? “I was in tears,” she told the ABC reporter, Neal Karlinsky. She had no idea what he was going and admitted to being “blindsided” by it all.
For the next year, she watched her husband go through a series of surgical procedures, including facial feminization surgery,
breast implants, removal of the Adam’s apple and hormone treatments.
Mrs. Wallent admitted she would not have married him if she’d known this, but told the reporter that their marriage was recovering from the initial shock and they planned to stay together. When asked if she was still attracted to him/her, she hesitated but said yes, admitting that things had changed “a lot.”
The situation has forced them to deal with issues such as how Megan’s children by another marriage are still calling him dad even though he knows “it’s a challenge for them.” Megan said he worries they might be getting teased about it.
Good Morning America Anchor Diane Sawyer merely called the story “a reminder of the complicated nature of human biology . . . and the complicated choices people have to make.”
Fyle writes, “The entire story was treated as just another human-interest story even though the subject matter was provocative, arguably counter-cultural, and has implications dealing with character, responsibility and child welfare.”
The show’s producers regularly call on psychologists to weigh in on issues far less complicated than this and yet there was no follow up on the cost of Megan’s decision on the children or his wife.
“Surely a man’s decision to turn his wife’s world ‘upside down,’ ‘blindside’ her on Mothers Day and created ‘challenges’ for his children merited further analysis,” she writes.
Good Morning America’s socially progressive bias was certainly evident by their failure to offer context or perspective, she said, and by ignoring the glaring social issues raised by this story.
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