Fox News contributor Todd Starnes freaks out over new Facebook gender options

The staff at Fox News have not taken well to the announcement by Facebook that it is expanding by dozens the number of gender options for users. The Equality Matters blog reported that commentator Todd Starnes wrote in an anti-trans rant on his Facebook wall Friday that users might as well "identify as a pine cone" as being transgender, so why not include that option as well?

"In the beginning God made man and woman -- but Facebook decided to improve on the original models," Starnes wrote, as if Facebook invented transgenderism this week.

He continued, "You can still be male and female -- but you can also be gender neutral or inter-sex or transgender" and lamented that "Facebook says it wants their one billion members to feel comfortable being their true authentic self."

"But that's not exactly true," he said. "What if you identify as a pine cone or a chicken or a weed whacker? Facebook doesn't offer those options."

The remarks are just the latest trans-bashing from a news network that is widely acknowledged as the mouthpiece of the Republican right. The network has been vocally anti-trans in the past, condemning and spreading misinformation about California's School Success and Opportunity Act, which allows transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms associated with their expressed gender.

Fox's resident psychologist, Dr. Keith Ablow went so far as to say that transgender people don't exist at all, but are rather a plot by liberals to infringe upon the rights of cisgendered, heterosexual conservatives.

“I am not convinced by any science I can find that people with definitively male DNA and definitively male anatomy can actually be locked in a cruel joke of nature because they are actually female,” wrote Ablow earlier this year.

The California student law, Ablow said, is just an effort by “Governor Brown and liberal politicians,” who are “addicted to disempowering people.”

Starnes has been multiply discredited for stories of anti-Christian persecution in the U.S., twice in the last few months. In January, he falsely promoted a story about a California first-grader who Starnes claimed was censored by school personnel because a report she gave contained religious elements.

The family involved with the story and the school have confirmed that Starnes fabricated aspects of the story out of whole cloth.

In December, Starnes reported on Fox that a school in Georgia had censored Christmas cards and hidden them from students because they were deemed to be insufficiently secular. The school issued a statement -- after being inundated with angry calls, letter and emails from Fox viewers -- that the story had been grossly distorted and that religious matters had never come into play.