A Tuesday CNN news story stated as fact that “there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth” without attribution.

The CNN story, written by breaking news reporter Devan Cole, was about Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s battle with state lawmakers over H.B. 1217, a bill that seeks to ban biological males from women’s sports.

“​It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth,” Cole wrote, without attribution.

He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Latest: South Dakota's governor issues executive orders banning transgender athletes from women's sports https://t.co/KSLAlz0ZCK

— Devan Cole (@devancole1) March 30, 2021

The story further noted that “biological sex” is a “disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students’ original birth certificates” as CNN reported Noem’s two executive orders, one to “protect fairness in K-12 athletics” and another to “do so in college athletics.”

Cole wrote that the executive orders “do not explicitly mention transgender athletes, they ​reference the supposed harms of the participation of ‘males’ in women’s athletics — an echo of the transphobic claim, cited in other similar legislative initiatives, that transgender women are not women.”

CNN did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

Stream editor’s note: For a researched view on the concept that sex is merely “assigned at birth,” see Jonathan Wells’ “Is It a Boy or a Girl?” For information on transgender treatments for children, see the rest of his series, Understanding Transgenderism.

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