TWIBS: Bob Ferguson, Spin Victim
An English tabloid put some spin on a brief altercation the Washington state governor had with a right-wing influencer.
by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Let’s talk about the ways in which media outlets with a particular slant like to linguistically frame certain events in a way that seems almost hallucinatory.
Last Friday, insufferable podcaster Brandi Kruse asked the governor of Washington state, Bob Ferguson, about “biological boys” in school sports, and she wasn’t satisfied with his answer. Kruse likes to package herself as a “rugged individualist” with “common sense,” but is ultimately a paint by numbers conservative influencer woman, now manifesting in brunette instead of bottle blonde.
“You talk a lot about your own daughter and her participation in athletics publicly, I know she goes to a private school… would you support a biological boy competing against your own child?” Kruse asks.
“Oh, Brandi, for god’s… look, I understand your obsession,” Ferguson begins, exasperated. Kruse interrupts to ask, “With what?” and Ferguson clarifies, “With trans kids.”
“So what I would say is, look, we live in a world right now where trans kids are going through a lot,” Ferguson goes on. “I want to support trans kids. We have a federal government that essentially wants to erase that community. I am diametrically opposed to that.”
Ferguson was Washington state’s attorney general from 2013 to 2025, and has been the state’s governor for about a year now. Ferguson is an accomplished lawyer who used to provide legal assistance to an Arizona indigenous tribe, as well as death row inmates. He also happens to be a chess master, and was included on the 2017 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world after George Takei nominated him.
Ferguson has long advocated for transgender rights, working alongside New York’s AG Letitia James and 21 other attorneys general to block trans bathroom bans before he was governor, and publicly signaling his support of the trans community as governor. In June of last year, after the disastrous results of United States v. Skrmetti, Ferguson posted to social media saying, “As long as I'm Governor, I will stand up for the civil rights of transgender Washingtonians. I know that many are deeply saddened and angered by today's Supreme Court ruling. I am with you. But today's ruling does not change Washington's laws or the civil rights protections that we've adopted—I will fight for those protections.”
Your boy B. Fergie seems like an all around upstanding, decent dude. So I was sort of bewildered to see his response to a transphobic twerp get so aggressively twisted this week, even if the slant was done by… well… the Daily Mail.
I know! I know, I know, I know. British readers (and probably quite a few American readers, really) are well aware that the Mail is an absolute fucking rag, and has been basically forever. “I saw something bad in the Mail” isn’t exactly news, right? I won’t link to the article, because I don’t want to provide the Mail with traffic through our website, but you can easily find it with a quick Google search (once you’ve scrolled past all the AI generated slop telling you to eat several medium-sized rocks a day at the top of the page), but it feels important, to me, to highlight the bizarro magic tricks these publications have to pull in order to convince their readership to believe in a reality that, frankly, doesn’t exist.
Writing for the Mail, Joe Hutchison, who looks like the sort of spindly fivehead weirdo that Hollywood typecasts as a school bully these days, described Ferguson as “Woke Washington governor,” and characterizes his reaction to Kruse’s obtuse question as “[sneering at a] journalist for voicing concern about biological males competing in women's sports.”
In his opening paragraph, Hutchison points out that Ferguson “sends his own kids to private school,” as if that has any real bearing on the situation at hand. He goes on to claim that Ferguson sidestepped Kruse’s question, which… no, he didn’t? You buffoon? You clown? You unrepentant toilet of a man? Ferguson answers the question very clearly by stating that he supports trans kids and will fight against the federal government’s intent to eradicate them, of which sports bans are a major component. Disallowing trans people of any age from participating in normal, day to day life is part of this administration’s plan to carry out social genocide against us. Kruse supports that genocide, Ferguson does not. Question answered!
The rest of Hutchison’s article gets very detailed about the private lives of Ferguson and his children for no particular reason, then pivots towards an interview with a cisgender athlete who claims to have been relentlessly bullied by a trans student athlete’s mere existence. He describes her tearful recollection of the trans girl showing up to compete and being “built very different,” though he undercuts that statement by providing pictures of the trans girl in question, who is exactly the same size as her cis peers, and notably did not win first place in the competition.
Oh, and he sourced that photo from Brandi Kruse’s website, to boot. What a funny coincidence!
Listen, I try not to highlight dishonest rags masquerading as news and the small fry wannabe journos who spend their time stoking hate against minority strangers. I’m not gonna talk about any of the players involved here again anytime soon, but we all need to consider how these losers lie. I mean, it’s practically all they do, and it’s downright Orwellian. Don’t believe what your eyes can see and your ears can hear. They’ll even show you photographic evidence that they’re lying.
Hopefully people with integrity, like Ferguson, continue to fight the good fight against these awful fools.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
