Human Rights Campaign removes LGBT preferred employer status from Fox News

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) confirmed that it had deducted Fox News’s score from its Corporate Equality Index, removing its status as an LGBT preferred employer.

“Fox News has a history of sharing misinformation and disinformation about the LGBTQ+ community. We know from our own research, which we put out earlier this week, what their disinformation and misinformation means for the LGBTQ+ community: perpetuating stigma and marginalization of transgender and non-binary people,” Aryn Fields, senior press secretary at HRC, said in a statement. 

“At a time when transgender people – especially transgender children – are under attack in statehouses across the country, rhetoric has real consequences,” Fields added.

Fields said the network’s coverage of the LGBTQ community within the last 72 hours had contributed to a drop in its Corporate Equality Index score, which dropped from 100 to 75.

“We can no longer allow Fox Corporation to maintain it’s score if Fox News personalities and contributors continue to deny the existence of transgender people, minimize the violence transgender individuals face, refer to parents of LGBTQ+ youth as perverts, or equate leaders of LGBTQ+ diversity and inclusions efforts with sex offenders,” Fields said. “Each of these actions happened in the last 72 hours. Enough is enough.”

The cable news network told The Hill that it offers a variety of LGBT benefits, including puberty blockers for transgender adolescents in addition to facial feminization surgery, reduction thyroid chondroplasty or tracheal shave, and mastectomy surgery for adults.

Fox News also pointed to its recent hiring of former California gubernatorial candidate Caitlyn Jenner, who is transgender, as a contributor.

The development comes in the wake of recently signed legislation in Florida, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill to critics, that bars classroom instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation by teachers from kindergarten through third grade. Content has to be “age appropriate” for older students.