The national paper of record’s openness to occasionally allowing dissidents in its pages is not the same thing as an overall anti-trans bias.
There’s a bumper-sticker slogan, invoked in defense of whatever left-wing cause célèbre happens to be in the news that given week: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” It’s an appropriate summation of the progressive allegation that the New York Times is too right-wing. This fever dream hails from an alternate universe lightyears away from the reality-based community.
The latest iteration of this is today’s open letter from “nearly 200 New York Times contributors, a cadre of celebrities, and the top LGBTQ media organization,” which “publicly condemned the newspaper…for what some described as following the lead of far-right hate groups’ in its coverage of trans issues,” the Daily Beast reports. The letter takes issue with the “Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children,” which “has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.”
Most unforgivably, the letter notes some of that coverage has been cited by conservative lawmakers and legislators in their efforts to combat gender ideology:
The natural destination of poor editorial judgment is the court of law. Last year, Arkansas’ attorney general filed an amicus brief in defense of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which would make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, for any medical provider to administer certain gender-affirming medical care to a minor (including puberty blockers) that diverges from their sex assigned at birth. The brief cited three different New York Times articles to justify its support of the law: Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “Doctors Debate Whether Trans Teens Need Therapy Before Hormones,” and Ross Douthat’s “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.” As recently as February 8th, 2023, attorney David Begley’s invited testimony to the Nebraska state legislature in support of a similar bill approvingly cited the Times’ reporting and relied on its reputation as the “paper of record” to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
As noted above, this is not a new talking point. Last month, left-wing blogger and former Media Matters editor Parker Molloy — a signatory on today’s letter — published a blog post titled: “The New York Times Declares War on LGBTQ People With Hire of Anti-Trans Columnist.” That anti-trans columnist was . . . David French. If you’re not familiar with his work, French is about the most moderate conservative voice imaginable — so much so that he’s consistently invited criticism from other conservatives, particularly those of a social bent, for his overly charitable treatment of the cultural Left. (And for his opposition to bans on drag queen story hour and critical race theory, and his defenses of aspects of CRT and the concept of systemic racism.)
But that’s not enough for Molloy, who argues that the Times’ hiring of French was simply more evidence of the paper’s pervasive anti-trans skew:
My point in this piece is that NYT’s columnist roster is absolutely loaded with anti-trans voices with absolutely zero balance. For all the focus the paper keeps putting on “the trans debate,” it doesn’t seem particularly interested in actually involving trans people in said “debate” outside of the stray “Look! Here’s a trans person writing a ‘guest essay’ for us!” token piece they like to throw out there a couple of times a year. Meanwhile, their columnists will fire out half-informed pieces criticizing trans people and unnamed “trans activists” on the regular.
The articles that both Molloy and today’s open letter cite are a handful of relatively balanced reported pieces on the debate over gender ideology, particularly as it pertains to children, that — Quelle horreur! — attempt to give a fair hearing to both sides. They’re also angry about the fact that the Times opinion page has been willing to give a hearing to critics, as well as boosters, of the transgender movement.
But the national paper of record’s openness to occasionally allowing dissidents in its pages is not the same thing as an overall anti-trans bias — a claim for which no empirical evidence is offered other than the fact that the paper allows said dissidents to voice their views in its pages from time to time, in either Molloy’s blog post or the open letter she signed.
Here are a few other Times op-ed headlines: America Is Being Consumed by a Moral Panic Over Trans People; I Chose to Compete as My True, Trans Self. I Win Less, but I Live More; Is God Transgender?; These 12 Transgender Americans Would Love You To Mind Your Own Business. Here are some from the non-opinion sections: Transgender Americans Feel Under Siege as Political Vitriol Rises; Fears of Violence Rise on New Front in Gender Debate: Drag Shows; A Trans Icon of the 20th Century Revived by Trans Stars of the 21st Century; G.O.P. State Lawmakers Push a Growing Wave of Anti-Transgender Bills. (“Over the past three years, Republican state lawmakers have put forward a barrage of bills to regulate the lives of transgender youths,” the final piece notes. “The potential consequences for transgender people, for whom harassment and threats have become common and suicide rates are high, are profound.”)
If that’s not enough, the actual Times editorial board hews to a decisively pro-trans line. A December editorial, “How Americans Can Stand Against Extremism,” argued: “The silence from a great majority of Republicans on the demonization of, and lies about, trans people has indeed meant complicity — complicity in what experts call stochastic terrorism, in which vicious rhetoric increases the likelihood of random violence against the people who are the subject of the abusive language and threats.”
These are hardly the musings of a right-wing publication. But the allegations of the paper’s rightward skew are activist in nature. The open letter’s objections are telling — the Times published “reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.” (Not that the reporting is wrong, but that it didn’t do enough to inform readers that some of the sources it reported on were the bad guys.) Some of the reports were used “to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care” — again, not that they were factually incorrect, but that they gave aid and comfort to the enemy.
What this uproar is about, in essence, is that these activist writers see papers like the Times as theirs — conservatives aren’t supposed to get a hearing, and any effort to give them one is thus an unacceptable concession to the Right.
In other words: When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.