The mainstream media might have their hands full these days lying to their audiences about Donald Trump and Russia, but they still find time to peddle misinformation about the rest of their pet causes.

At the Washington Examiner, Emily Jashinsky calls out CNN, CBS, the Associated Press, and other outlets for peddling fake news about America’s supposedly exploding population of transgender tenagers.

At issue is a new study published in the journal Pediatrics which estimates that three percent of high school students identify themselves as either transgender or gender-nonconforming. Because a UCLA study earlier this year put the number of transgendered 13-to-17 year olds at just 0.7 percent, this would be a pretty remarkable shift — if that was all to the story.

Naturally, the press proceeded as if it was as simple as that:

Take, for instance, CNN’s report, which summarized the new research and concluded, “That’s a big jump from the UCLA study, which was published in January 2017 and estimated that 0.7% of American teens ages 13-17 identify as transgender.”

Here’s what CBS kept in their rewrite of the AP study: “Although the study only included teens in two grades, the rates are higher than a UCLA study released last year estimating that 0.7 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 are transgender, or about 150,000 kids.”

And here’s Teen Vogue: “The researchers analyzed surveys taken in 2016 by nearly 81,000 teens in Minnesota. Of them, nearly 2,200 said they identified as transgender or gender non-conforming. This is a greater percentage than in other studies: A 2017 UCLA study estimated that 0.7% of people ages 13-17 identified as transgender.”

You’ll find similar conclusions drawn in Bustle, the Advocate, NewNowNext, and Cosmopolitan.

However, Jashinsky explains, there’s a big — and simple — problem with all of this. The new study did not find 3 percent of teens to be “transgendered,” it found 3 percent to either be transgendered or otherwise “gender-nonconforming,” a broad designation that encompasses a multitude of other categories that do not include boys literally believing themselves to be girls or vice versa, including “genderqueer,” “genderfluid,” or “unsure about [one’s] gender identity.”

Researcher and pediatrician Daniel Shumer maintains that the new study still means that “previous estimates of the size of the TGNC population have been underestimated by orders of magnitude,” but Jashinsky did more due diligence than the AP or CNN and reached out to UCLA’s Jody Herman for comment, who explained:

Daniel Shumer’s statement assumes these estimates are comparable, but they are not. Each of the studies he cites has measured gender identity differently. The Minnesota Student Survey used a broader definition than prior studies in that they also include those who do not identify as transgender.

Even though the Minnesota study is not generalizable to the United States, nor comparable to these prior studies, it is a valuable contribution to the research for this population, especially since data about this population are rare.

Too bad a more complete understanding of the subject isn’t what the mainstream media was going for. The dishonest oversimplification suited their real goal — the erasure of sex as a fixed biological reality — just fine.