On Trans Women and Straw Men
My former boss tries to talk about one but only addresses the other
After John Oliver went viral last week for his 42-minute piece on transgender women in sports, many people have asked me to write about my former boss. I struggle to know whether and what to write about John; on the one hand, he launched my career and was good to me in many ways, but on the other hand, the show I helped build does a lot of stuff that I think contributes to our national en-stupiding. I need a heuristic to help me decide when to write about Last Week Tonight, and that heuristic will be: 1) I’ll write about LWT if my experience provides some particular insight, or 2) It’s lucrative. That is my ethical code, and I’ll stick to it.
What follows is not a comprehensive breakdown of the Last Week Tonight piece. The piece is, after all, 42 minutes long; when I was at the show, to get 42 minutes, we would have had to call HBO, beg for extra time, and they would probably have said “After you, we’re running Game of Thrones: The Untold Story of the Making of the Behind the Scenes Extras, so: Hell no.” I’m also gobsmacked that John greatly truncated the usually-ten-to-15-minute top of show news roundup on the week that the global economy was trembling like your sphincter after eating Taco Bell and then started his piece by saying: “Even as the market crashed in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, Fox News spent a lot of time on [trans women in sports].” AND SO DID YOU, GODDAMN IT!!! YOU SHORTENED TOP-OF-SHOW, YOUR SHOW IS NORMALLY 30 MINUTES, AND YOU’RE DOING 42 MINUTES ON THIS TOPIC ALONE, THIS IS A “VERY SPECIAL EPISODE” OF LAST WEEK TONIGHT! As stunning as that opening was, it did serve a purpose: It informed viewers that what was to follow would not be a master class in self-awareness and sound reasoning.