Opinion | A second look at the attacks on the New York Timess trans coverage -

The New York Times is used to spirited critiques from readers deploring its alleged biases and highfalutin tendencies. The attacks that flooded social media in mid-February, however, were something different.

“The @nytimes is jeopardizing trans folks’ lives for click bait,” read one.

Another: “The @nytimes is an arm of the oppressive regime that is waging war against trans kids. They light a match and hide their hands behind bothsidesism, but the only two sides in a genocide are right and wrong.”

These sentiments were by no means random. On Feb. 15, a group of Times contributors and staffers — some of whom are transgender, nonbinary or gender-nonconforming — released a letter taking the paper to task for its coverage of transgender youths, with a particular focus on several stories focusing on medical treatments for children in transition. The whole bundle, argued the letter, amounted to an “eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.”

GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ media advocacy organization, also released a critical letter on the same day and has kept the pressure on: A digital billboard truck from GLAAD and allied organizations appeared on April 17 outside the paper’s headquarters, bearing messages such as “Dear New York Times: Stop Questioning Trans People’s Right to Exist & Access to Medical Care.”

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Times management has responded with statements rebuffing the critique: “Our coverage of transgender issues, including the specific pieces singled out for attack, is important, deeply reported, and sensitively written,” wrote the paper’s top editors in a note to staffers in February. And in a March 2 address to colleagues, publisher A.G. Sulzberger mentioned that a newsroom staffer involved in the coverage had been “confronted in her neighborhood” and spat upon.

The New York Times has been targeted in part because it’s the New York Times — not only a powerful media organization but also one that dominates progressive headspace. When liberals become disenchanted with the paper’s coverage — as they did many times during the Trump administration — they roar with a fury rarely directed at other outlets guilty of the same alleged offenses. Last year, for example, Reuters ran a series of penetrating stories on health care for trans children — citing many of the same concerns as in the controversial Times articles — and walked away without triggering a months-long campaign.

So, yes, the outcry against the Times is understandable on one level: Its recent coverage of trans issues, including major pieces cited in the complaints, has focused on debates among medical experts over the treatment of trans youths. These debates, in turn, have been weaponized by anti-trans forces to promulgate measures curtailing care for this already vulnerable population. As the Times itself reported in April, conservatives have used trans identity and especially care for minors as a new wedge issue to drive voters to the right, replacing what some see as the lost cause of stopping same-sex marriage. It’s not hard to see how trans youths, their families and their advocates might come to view the Times as a hostile force.

But there’s a place for competent and compassionate discussion of the medical issues alongside the other trans coverage provided in the pages of the Times: discrimination against trans people, profiles of significant and memorable trans figures, obituaries and a great deal more. The work of the Times on trans issues over the past few years has been varied, rigorous, newsworthy and factual in a way that informs the paper’s readers.

The contributors’ letter falls short of these standards, and the rolling billboards are no better. That weakness masks the real purpose of the effort against the Times, which is to discourage in-depth stories on trans health care or put an end to such coverage altogether.

Letter prompts backlash against the Times

For a mediasphere already saturated with media criticism, the dueling letters on Times trans coverage gained extraordinary traction, launching a cavalcade of follow-up stories from NPR, WNYC, the Guardian, Vanity Fair, the Daily Beast, Semafor, Vox and others. The outburst has been slow to taper off; just weeks ago, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published a story headlined “NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias — by the Numbers.”

Though the critiques cited some coverage in the opinion section of the Times, they’re centered on a handful of in-depth stories on trans children in its Sunday magazine and on its front page from June 2022 to January 2023. A breakdown of the stories:

June 10, 2022: Times reporter Azeen Ghorayshi examined a report finding that the “number of young people who identify as transgender has nearly doubled in recent years.”
June 15, 2022: Magazine writer Emily Bazelon, in “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” explored efforts by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to update its standards of care for adolescents seeking gender-affirming care — a fraught process rife with disagreements among providers of medical care for trans youths. A draft of those guidelines, noted Bazelon, recommended two conditions before preteens and teenagers begin taking puberty suppressants and hormones: “provide evidence of ‘several years’ of persistently identifying as, or behaving typically like, another gender, to distinguish kids with a long history from those whose stated identification is recent”; and a “comprehensive diagnostic assessment, for the purpose of understanding the psychological and social context of their gender identity and how it might intersect with other mental-health conditions.” Those measures, as the story made clear, drew condemnations from some who object to “gatekeeping” recommendations on medical care for trans youths. Bazelon also surveyed the history of medical care for these patients, highlighting the work of a Dutch clinic that developed a careful assessment “for young people who seemed like candidates for medical treatment,” noted the story.
Sept. 26, 2022: Ghorayshi reported on how trans youths are increasingly embracing breast removal surgery (which remains very rare).
Nov. 14, 2022: Megan Twohey and Christina Jewett reported on growing concern in the medical community about giving puberty blockers to children as part of their gender-affirming care. The piece discussed the treatment’s impact on bone density, brain development and other considerations.
Jan. 22, 2023: Katie J.M. Baker reported on the pressures facing school districts that comply with the requests of children who don’t want their parents to know about their social transitions.

The dismay over these stories has splintered into scores of distinct complaints. Here’s a look at the main categories (addressed below in no particular order):

“Bulk and repetition”: In late January, journalist Tom Scocca wrote a critique in Popula of Times front-page articles on “care and support for young trans people” over the preceding eight months, citing a total count of more than 15,000 words (he later revised the count to approximately 14,000); that count doesn’t include Bazelon’s piece. The cluster, concluded Scocca, suggested a possible agenda. “The Times’ gender-treatment coverage insists, through its sheer bulk and repetition, that there is something particularly wrong about the way young people who identify as trans are receiving care,” he wrote.

“Tiny percentage”: The Times contributors regret that some good reporting by the newspaper has been “eclipsed” by the stories highlighted in Scocca’s critique. “A tiny percentage of the population is trans, and an even smaller percentage of those people face the type of conflict the Times is so intent on magnifying,” read the contributors’ letter.

Medical consensus: The GLAAD letter noted that “every major medical association supports gender-affirming care as best practices care that is safe and lifesaving and has widespread consensus in the medical and scientific communities.” What’s more, said Sarah Kate Ellis, president and chief executive of GLAAD, the Times has published “excessive, biased and alarmist coverage that makes no sense.” The succession of front-page stories, she told the Erik Wemple Blog, looks outsize when considering that trans people themselves make up a “small community.”

A dark chapter at the Times: The contributors’ letter — and other critiques — has drawn parallels between the Times’s history of homophobia in the 20th century and current coverage of transgender people. “You no doubt recall a time in more recent history when it was ordinary to speak of homosexuality as a disease at the American family dinner table—a norm fostered in part by the New York Times’ track record of demonizing queers through the ostensible reporting of science,” reads the contributors’ letter.

Boosting hate groups: Among the most common attacks on the Times’s coverage of health care for trans youths is the claim that it has been bootstrapped by anti-trans lobbies in red states. The contributors’ letter, for instance, noted that three Times pieces, including Bazelon’s, were cited in an amicus brief from the Arkansas attorney general supporting an Alabama law that would criminalize certain gender-affirming care. (Similarly motivated references to Times work have occurred in other states as well.) “As thinkers, we are disappointed to see the New York Times follow the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation,” said the contributors’ letter.

The Times is covering a legitimate news story

The various objections to the Times stories hint at the stakes involved in coverage of transgender people these days. For a flavor of what’s happening, just scan recent headlines from Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed wide-ranging anti-trans measures, including banning some gender-affirming treatments for trans youths and prohibiting transgender people from using bathrooms aligning with their identity while in government buildings.

Florida is riding a dismaying trend: At least 17 states have laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for children. Utah, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa, Kansas, Idaho and Tennessee — at a minimum — have promulgated anti-trans measures of one sort or another this year. Responsibility for these initiatives rests with the people who proposed them and voted for them — and certainly not with the Times, whose work has been referenced on occasion to promote them.

The Arkansas amicus brief quoting Times stories, for instance, cited Bazelon’s piece: “more teenagers than ever are seeking transitions, but the medical community that treats them is deeply divided about why — and what to do to help them.” It failed to quote the numerous passages that support the provision of gender-affirming care to children. “Nothing presented in Emily’s story supports banning gender therapy for youth nor restricting it for adults,” said Jake Silverstein, editor in chief of the Times magazine.

What’s more, the brief also cited work from CBS News, The Post, the Economist and the San Francisco Examiner, among others. Are they also culpable?

Critics of the Times’s trans coverage are free to blast the newspaper in group letters, tweets and mobile billboards. Attempts to hold the Times responsible for bad-faith actors bent on exploiting its journalism, however, threaten to establish a standard that would obliterate controversial reporting altogether.

There’s plenty of controversy, too, in the Times pieces at the center of the ongoing backlash. While critics argue that the newspaper is advancing an anti-trans agenda by “just asking questions” and otherwise elevating doubts about treatment, it’s actually quoting the concerns of people in the field with long track records of working in the interests of trans children — such that the broadsides aimed at the newspaper have a shoot-the-messenger flavor to them.

The story on puberty blockers, for instance, conveyed the concerns of pediatric endocrinologist Catherine Gordon, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, among others. Bazelon’s story filtered the discussion of trans youth treatment standards through Scott Leibowitz, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with a deep résumé on LGBTQ+ issues, among other experts. And Ghorayshi’s story on “top surgery” looked to researcher Kinnon MacKinnon of York University in Toronto. “I know personally many, many, many trans men that have benefited and are happy with their medical transition and their top surgery. I would put myself in that category,” MacKinnon, who is transgender, told the Times. “But just as a researcher, I do feel like there are questions that are deserving of answers and have implications for clinical care.”

MacKinnon’s quote captured a calibrated sensibility — embrace the treatments but be aware of their shortcomings — that suffuses the recent Times coverage. An embrace of caution, too, has taken root in countries such as Finland and Sweden, which have moved to restrict some treatments for transgender youths.

Providing grist for anti-trans efforts; elevating doubts about treatment; too many words — the attacks against the Times go heavy on conceptual points in part because the stories themselves were strong on the particulars. The contributors’ letter, for instance, took a number of swipes at the coverage yet didn’t really land a blow.

A misfiring allegation targeted Baker’s January article on the parent-school tugs of war. That story, the letter argued, failed to “make clear that court cases brought by parents who want schools to out their trans children are part of a legal strategy pursued by anti-trans hate groups. These groups have identified trans people as an ‘existential threat to society’ and seek to replace the American public education system with Christian homeschooling, key context Baker did not provide to Times readers.” Actually, the story said about one group in question: “Its president has spoken at conferences about the ‘existential threat to our culture’ posed by the ‘transgender movement.’” Since the contributors’ letter cited Baker for excluding context that she had included, we asked a group of co-authors of the letter whether they should have corrected their own letter. No such amendment, they signaled, would be forthcoming. “The published version of the story does not expand upon how that agenda might inform the legal cases in question,” a member of the co-authors group emailed us. “Name-checking the threat alone is not providing adequate context, especially as the extent of anti-trans coordination becomes even clearer.”

The contributors also took aim at Bazelon’s story, claiming that she “quoted multiple expert sources who have since expressed regret over their work’s misrepresentation” — a salvo that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. The letter linked to a nearly 80-minute podcast featuring commentary from historian and scholar Jules Gill-Peterson. Though Gill-Peterson said Bazelon interviewed her, the story never mentioned or quoted her, raising questions as to how Bazelon mischaracterized her work. When the Erik Wemple Blog pointed out this disconnect, the letter writers responded that the podcast made clear that Bazelon’s story “rests on a factually incorrect framing of Jules Gill-Peterson’s work.”

The podcast did make clear that Gill-Peterson takes umbrage at how Bazelon approaches WPATH’s historical role in transgender care. When we asked whether she claims that Bazelon misrepresented her work, Gill-Peterson responded with a critique citing alleged omissions and other problems with the story.

As for other allegations of misrepresentation, the letter writers mentioned Beans Velocci, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in sex, gender and sexuality. “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” summarized and quoted from a journal article written by Velocci. When we asked Velocci whether that reference misrepresented their work, they declined to respond directly and passed along a link to another nearly 80-minute podcast in which they criticized Bazelon’s story. “My name and expertise was used to do anti-trans violence, so that sucks,” Velocci said in the podcast. The Times says that it “accurately” cited Velocci’s work in order to clarify “WPATH’s problematic origins in the 1950s and 60s, when doctors made biased decisions to exclude some adult patients from receiving care for medical transition.”

In a side-by-side examination of Velocci’s journal article and Bazelon’s story, we found no misrepresentations.

The contributors’ letter also knocked Bazelon for using the term “patient zero” — long associated with the HIV/AIDS epidemic — in reference to a child who received gender-affirming care in the 1980s. (Silverstein told us the source had used the term to identify himself and that the magazine failed to couch it in quotation marks. In March, the magazine appended an editor’s note to the piece addressing the matter.) The letter also complained that Bazelon failed to flag the role of one source, who said she regrets her gender transition, with GCCAN, “an activist organization that pushes junk science and partners with explicitly anti⁠-⁠trans hate groups.”

Few pieces of journalism — at the Times or otherwise — have been more scrutinized than Bazelon’s 11,500-plus-word piece, which reflected a mammoth effort to abridge the medical literature on gender-affirming care. After all the pushback, the story, which was a finalist for a national magazine award, stands intact. “As a parent, you’re not going to pay the 50 bucks to get through the paywall to get an academic study,” said a D.C.-area “proud mom” of a transgender boy. The mother recalled that Bazelon’s piece was “a bit of a turning point for me and helped me and gave me comfort.”

Perhaps the most withering charge in the contributors’ letter claimed that the Times was publishing “pseudoscience” on this topic. We asked the co-authors to provide examples of such errors. They replied with one: the “patient zero” formulation.

There have been other attacks on Times coverage of trans youths. The Twohey-Jewett collaboration on puberty blockers, for instance, prompted a three-page condemnation from WPATH and its affiliate, USPATH. After reading the critique — which failed to puncture the piece — Twohey requested a discussion with the organization to vet the document’s claims against the Times story. Madeline Deutsch, a physician who is president of USPATH, recalled Twohey’s approach: “How dare we question her. And she’s trying to help kids.” Deutsch told us she responded by saying, “You’re not. You’re not helping kids with articles like this.”

A Times spokesperson said Twohey sought to address “inaccuracies and mischaracterizations” that she’d identified in the WPATH/USPATH letter. “But Dr. Deutsch largely refused to engage with the specific content of their letter or the article. Dr. Deutsch also said that she did not want news coverage that examined questions within the field of medical treatment of transgender youth because it would be used by those seeking to ban the treatment. She said she preferred there be no coverage of this at all.” (Deutsch said she didn’t suggest a “wholesale” abandonment of coverage; the Times stands by its account.)

What is outsize to the critics is, to the Times, a small subset of its overall coverage. A spokesperson for the paper claimed that it had published “hundreds of articles — with a collective word count of 329,000 — specifically on discrimination against transgender people and/or anti-transgender legislation” from January 2020 through the end of April 2023.

As for coverage more generally about transgender people and issues, the Times placed its volume at 891,000 words in the same time frame, much of which we’ve sifted through in recent months.

In article after article, Times journalists expose bigoted efforts to deny rights to trans people, tell the stories of memorable trans lives and treat the people at the center of contemporary controversies with humanity — a record that rebuts the alleged parallels with the paper’s homophobia of decades past. Example: In a January 2022 article on a competition featuring then-University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who drove a nationwide controversy, reporter Billy Witz wrote, “And so if there was something enduring about Saturday, it was not the two races that Thomas comfortably won or the two relays where she gamely tried. It was the way she carried herself in the water — head down, with grace and ease.”

A pair of politics articles zinged Republicans for “offensive language about transgender people” and an “ugly attack” on the transgender child of a Democratic lawmaker. A recent story, published after the critiques, exposed how Republicans behind anti-trans measures “have amplified” the voices of a small group of people who once identified as transgender but no longer do.

Asked about the wider sweep of Times coverage, the letter co-authors responded that their document had acknowledged some fair coverage but that the “aim” was to “rebuke the alarming anti-trans bias in recent coverage of trans issues.” Scocca’s response to the word counts of the Times pieces: “I’m not sure what overall picture they’re trying to draw, but my piece arose organically from my own experience as a subscriber, seeing story after story on the front page raising alarms about trans youth. When those evolved from warnings about medical interventions to scaremongering about schools letting kids use their preferred pronouns, I felt like it was pretty clear what was going on.”

Plowing through all the coverage takes time, and a mastery of the ins and outs can be elusive. When we asked GLAAD’s Ellis to cite particular objections to Bazelon’s piece, for example, she paused before saying, “I think the overall framing of it, truly. I think you’re asking for a little more detail than I can give at this moment.” (A GLAAD spokesperson later sent along concerns that largely mirrored those of the contributors’ letter.)

On a more basic level, there’s news to cover on this front. Reuters in October reported on an analysis of insurance data and other records, revealing that more than 42,000 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021, up 70 percent over the previous year. The population of children receiving medical treatments for their gender transitions is “growing fast,” added Reuters, which also noted that gender clinics treating youths have increased from “zero to more than 100 in the past 15 years.”

Debates among medical providers over how to treat trans youths, therefore, have wider implications with each passing day. The Times is doing what any good news organization would do: Cover them.

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