CNN sensationalized Harris’ position on trans health care while ignoring important context — part of a troubling pattern for a network that devoted just 15 minutes in the first half of 2024 to the more than 150 bills targeting trans access to health care and bathrooms in the United States.

Monday's CNN coverage of the Harris campaign focused on the vice president's response to a 2019 ACLU questionnaire in which she stated positions on incarceration, immigration detention, and other questions of civil rights. A CNN investigative report that republished the questionnaire emphasized that Harris had pledged to use, as described by the questionnaire, “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care – including those in prison and immigration detention – will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.” The network’s on-air coverage of the report emphasized the same point.

The Supreme Court has held for half a century that denying incarcerated people medically necessary care is a violation of constitutional rights, which CNN failed to mention in its reporting. Nor did the reporting note the low numbers of incarcerated persons who actually receive gender-affirming care, or the sexual, physical, and psychological abuse that many trans people face while incarcerated — of which denial of care may only be a part.

Only one question on the ACLU survey actually dealt with transgender rights. The questionnaire was primarily concerned with mass incarceration and the rights of detained persons. However, the CNN report dedicated a full section to Harris' stance on transition care, and the network further sensationalized her position in its on-air coverage:  

 

According to legal journalist Chris Geidner, “The government has obligations to provide necessary medical care for those who it forces under its control — whether due to imprisonment or immigration detention — and often faces challenges related to the failure to provide needed care.” Geidner also noted, “One only reaches the conclusion that gender-affirming medical care should not be provided when called for” if one presumes that such care is not medically necessary. 

As legislators across the country have challenged trans people's right to access care in recent years, trans detainees have brought suits against facilities that deny care. While some of these cases have sought access to gender-affirming surgery — including a recent case from an inmate whose acute gender dysphoria led her to consider self-castration — others have been brought by trans people who were denied access to hormone therapy treatments prescribed prior to incarceration, forcing them to medically detransition. 

In both its online and cable reporting, CNN failed to note that only about 1% of incarcerated people in federal prisons are transgender. Only 52 people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention self-identified as transgender as of August 2024 (though advocates argue that these numbers are often low estimates). Immigrant Justice also notes that many LGBTQ detainees would “have fled to the United States to seek refuge from persecution and torture.” 

Even more critically, CNN fails to note that trans people often face sexual, physical, and psychological abuse while incarcerated. While ICE published a special memorandum in 2015 “emphasizing the need for additional protections for transgender people in detention,” the most recent ICE report on solitary confinement revealed that “the number of transgender immigrants in solitary confinement more than doubled (increased by 114 percent) in the third quarter of 2023.” 

A Media Matters study found that, in 2023, CNN spent just 14 minutes discussing fatal violence against trans people. 

As mentioned above, a second Media Matters study found that in the first half of 2024, CNN coverage of legislation targeting gender-affirming care and bathroom access at the state level amounted to just 15 minutes. None of this coverage featured a trans guest.