Breaking: Rob Gronkowski is NOT Transgender

Oct 25

Thanks to the magic of AI, the internet is awash in articles about how every notable cis person in the world isn’t transgender.

by Evan Urquhart

Is Rob Gronkowski transgender? No.

But, is he though? No.

OK, but does everyone know this? Yes.

A website called Key Management Insights nevertheless posed this question, and answered it in an article headlined “Is Rob Gronkowski Transgender? The NFL Legend’s Voyage From New England to Tampa Bay!!” This… article(?) was then aggregated by Google news, suggesting the further question of “Why does Google think Key Management Insights is a news source?”

screenshot showing Google news headlines, including "Is Rob Gronkowski Transgender? The NFL Legend's Voyage From New England to Tampa Bay!!" — screenshot from Google news

The article in many ways resembles an earlier entry into the genre of dodgy sites asking if cisgender celebs are transgender which we wrote about in July. That story falsely claimed that American swimmer Katie Ledecky was trans (she is not!), and ran on an Indian entertainment news site called MEAWW before being aggregated by MSN. This newer story clears the low bar of not transing a celebrity, but it is still very dodgy, and very funny. It’s attributed to Anjali Arora, who like the author of the fake Katie Ledecky story seems to post five or more “news stories” a day to the Key Management Insights website, mostly repackaging basic facts about notable people.

Assigned Media has no way of confirming whether Ms. Arora uses text predictive software (sometimes referred to as AI) like chatGPT to generate articles but… like… c’mon.

Gronkowski, who is not transgender, has nevertheless been in the news this month in connection to the word transgender recently because of a video from the Daily Caller where a right-wing personality ambushed the former tight end at the US capitol building where he was meeting with Republican lawmakers to lobby for a pharmaceutical company. The Daily Caller’s interviewer asked Gronk if men should be allowed to play women’s sports, and Gronkowski laughed and shook his head no in response to the question.

Later, Fox News followed up, and Gronkowski reiterated that “There are men’s sports for men, there’s women’s sports for women.”