Media and Political Framing

CBS News has quietly updated its internal style guidelines to instruct reporters to use the phrase “biological sex at birth” — without quotation marks — when covering transgender issues, according to a memo from senior standards and practices director Tom Burke obtained by The Wrap. The change was issued ahead of this week’s U.S. Supreme Court hearings on challenges to Idaho and West Virginia laws that restrict school sports teams to participants’ 'biological sex at birth' and bar many transgender girls from competing on girls’ teams, and CBS web stories since Tuesday have begun using the term in describing those statutes. The move departs from the Associated Press Stylebook’s 2023 guidance, which urged journalists to avoid 'biological sex' in favor of 'sex assigned at birth' and warned that 'biological male/female' is often used by opponents of transgender rights. CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford, who reportedly argued internally against adopting movement‑driven terminology, has used the new phrase in on‑air reporting, as the network undergoes broader editorial shifts under new editor‑in‑chief Bari Weiss. The shift underscores how major outlets are recalibrating language in a politically charged arena where word choice — whether 'biological sex at birth' or 'sex assigned at birth' — shapes how audiences perceive the legal and scientific stakes of fights over transgender participation in women’s sports.