Dear New York Times: Do a Better Job Covering the Trans Community

By Jo Martin

The New York Times has come under heavy fire recently from transgender readers, journalists, and advocates for their coverage of the trans community. On Feb. 15, a number of New York Times journalists (currently over 1,000, as of this writing), published an open letter to the Times’ associate managing editor imploring the paper to improve their coverage of the trans community.

“The newspaper’s editorial guidelines demand that reporters ‘preserve a professional detachment, free of any whiff of bias’ when cultivating their sources, remaining ‘sensitive that personal relationships with news sources can erode into favoritism, in fact or appearance,’” the open letter wrote.

“Yet the Times 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,” the letter’s writers went on.

As examples, co-signing Times contributors cited a number of recent Times pieces covering transgender people. One, titled “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” and written by Emily Bazelon, was criticized in the letter for quoting source Grace Lidinksy-Smith without identifying her as the president of GCCAN, described — accurately — by the letter as “an activist organization that pushes junk science and partners with explicitly anti-trans hate groups.”

Another criticized articles was Katie Baker’s piece “When Students Change Gender Identity and Parents Don’t Know,” which directly parroted the talking points of anti-trans legislators like Ron DeSantis. DeSantis framed his much-criticized “Parental Rights in Education” bill in Florida (nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill by its many detractors) as a bill solving the crisis of children transitioning without their parents consent, a problem whose existence has been supported by DeSantis and others by threadbare, cherrypicked evidence and dramatically overstated in order to sell their broader agenda: attacking trans people.

The “Don’t Say Gay Bill” may have focused much of its text on ensuring that children cannot transition without parental consent, but in a few choice lines in also included language allowing bigoted parents to subject school districts to expensive lawsuits any time an educator mentioned the existence of transgender or queer people in a way that the parents subjectively deemed wasn’t “developmentally appropriate.”

Plenty of conservative parents don’t think transgender people deserve to be discussed as a real group — despite their obvious existence — at all, and the bill provides no protections whatsoever against lawsuits coming from this type of parent. Even if those kinds of lawsuits are ultimately unsuccessful, they could cost school districts exorbitant amounts of money, putting any transgender or queer teacher who even dares to mention their own identity in passing at risk of being terminated by a school district afraid of lawsuits they can’t afford.

Further commenting on Baker’s article, the Times’ contributors authors also added that the piece “the piece fails 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.”

It’s clear, however, that the Times has not only not taken these concerns seriously, but has doubled down on their platforming of devastating anti-trans rhetoric. The day after contributors published their open letter, Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn responding by staunchly condemning co-signers of the open letter and defending the paper’s coverage without a hint of apology or introspective. Kahn falsely claimed that the letter was created and organized by the advocacy group GLAAD (there were two letters; one was organized by GLAAD, and the aforementioned letter created by Times contributors was not.) “We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums,” Kahn wrote.

However, the Times’ response to contributors’ open letter didn’t end with Kahn’s note slamming the letter and its co-signers. On the day after the contributors’ open letter was published, the paper also ran an op-ed by columnist Pamela Paul called “In Defense of J.K. Rowling.”

Paul’s op-ed dismisses the criticism levied at Rowling by countless trans people as a “campaign” that she calls “as dangerous as it is absurd,” in a piece that includes numerous quotes from a former Westboro Baptist Member and not one statement from a transgender person. “If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights,” Paul concludes her piece. “They’d also be standing up for the truth,” she adds — namely, that “all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body” are “deeply misogynistic and regressive,” as Rowling put it in her controversial open letter published in 2020. Rowling may continue to contest that she is not transphobic, but it’s abundantly clear that saying “femaleness” comes from “the sexed body,” compounded with statements like “sex is real” and affirmations that “single-sexed spaces” be reserved only for those assigned a female sex at birth, indicate that “femaleness” comes only from someone assigned a female sex at birth.

Nevertheless, Paul decides that accusing Rowling of being transphobic is “absurd.” There’s a deep hypocrisy to Paul’s choice to write an entire, high-profile op-ed denying the statements of the vast majority of the transgender community without citing a single trans voice once in her piece. It clashes obviously with what Paul’s written about lived experience in topics that concern her personally, like abortion. She wrote in a column on abortion last summer that “just having the baby” “may seem perfectly viable to someone who has never been pregnant or given birth.” “Perfectly viable to someone who has never had to make these choices — and live with the consequences,” she went on.

And yet, Paul — along with the Times as a whole — tells transgender people to “just shut up about J.K. Rowling,” and anti-transgender rhetoric as a whole, while firing a transgender opinion columnist and publishing dozens of op-eds by cis writers on transness instead of amplifying the voices of anyone actually a part of the trans community.

The New York Times- do better.

About the Author

Jo Martin is a senior in college interested in journalism, queer politics, and the band MUNA.