The New York Times would like you to know that its coverage of transgender issues is “fair-minded, fact-based reporting”. Also, the paper would like you to know that it has “deeply and accurately covered the lives of trans people and the bigotry they face”.

The paper released these conflicting statements — bigotry is an interpretation, not a fact — on 5 January, in response to accusations levelled by a former employee, Billie Jean Sweeney, a transgender woman.

Sweeney told a publication called Trans News Network that the paper’s apparent “sustained, single-minded focus on promoting disinformation” began with the hiring of a new editor, Joe Kahn, in 2022. Sweeney’s examples include stories that “challenged every aspect of being trans,” including “the medical science of being trans,” “gender-inclusive language,” and how those things “undermined women”.

Sweeney’s charge is that refusing to adopt a singular view of complex issues is anti-trans. That reporting on controversies around schools secretly socially transitioning children, or covering the release of the four-years-in-the-making Cass Review in the UK — then the most comprehensive evaluation of youth gender medicine ever published — is bigotry.

Ad hominem attacks are the weakest form of argument, of course, but here they are mixed with gaslighting. When The New York Times reports accurately that some European countries are pulling back on youth gender medicine because of weak evidence, it is disinformation. In other words: anything that interrupts the narrative that Sweeney wants to promote is wrong and bad, designed to hurt, rather than inform.

The bitter irony for those of us who have been trying relentlessly to get the Times to cover this issue more accurately is that we also see the paper peddling disinformation — but from the opposite direction. “Puberty blockers and hormone therapy,” the paper wrote in 2021, “are most effective if taken when puberty begins” — not that we know what “effective” means. They boldly label laws and policies that protect women’s rights “anti-trans,” a value judgement and singular interpretation that has no business in reportage. Rather than helping people understand the Trump administration’s recent moves to stop hospitals and government agencies from paying for gender treatments as a rollback of policies that really never should have been passed, NYT reporters described them as “the latest signal that the federal government does not recognize even the existence of [trans] people.”

The paper defended itself against Sweeney’s accusations, pointing out the former employee’s obvious errors — like claiming a story about parental rights didn’t quote the child whom the story focused on. But the Times hasn’t dealt with the larger issue, which is that much of what’s described as the bigotry trans people face has often been simply people trying to assert the reality that men are not women, and that the evidence to support youth gender medicine is so weak that — as a report in Sweden clearly stated — the risks outweigh the benefits.

Of course, with the President using terms like “transgender lunacy”, some trans rights activists’ once-overblown claims ring truer than they once did. But it’s hard to explain to a group obsessed with its own victimhood that they manifested a self-fulfilling prophecy. That, unfortunately, is a far more complicated story, and one The New York Times should start reporting.

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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

LisaSelinDavis

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