A couple hundred NY Times contributors signed a letter complaining about the paper’s coverage of trans issues over the past year. Here’s a bit of the letter itself.

We write to you as a collective of New York Times contributors with serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people.

Plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly. Their work is eclipsed, however, by what one journalist has calculated as over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.

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.” 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.

For example, Emily Bazelon’s article “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” uncritically used the term “patient zero” to refer to a trans child seeking gender⁠-⁠affirming care, a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared. Bazelon quoted multiple expert sources who have since expressed regret over their work’s misrepresentation. Another source, Grace Lidinksy⁠-⁠Smith, was identified as an individual person speaking about a personal choice to detransition, rather than the President of GCCAN, an activist organization that pushes junk science and partners with explicitly anti⁠-⁠trans hate groups.

In a similar case, Katie Baker’s recent feature “When Students Change Gender Identity and Parents Don’t Know” misframed the battle over children’s right to safely transition. 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.

The complaint about Emily Bazelon’s piece (it used the phrase “patient zero”) seems pretty thin. The piece does use that phrase to refer to the first person to go through a new gender clinic in Amsterdam. But in the same paragraph, that patient described himself as “the first, the guinea pig.”

The criticism of Katie Baker’s feature story makes even less sense. The letter claims “the piece fails to make clear that court cases brought by parents…are part of a legal strategy pursued by anti-trans hate groups.” This except come from the piece in question [hat tip to Timothy B. Lee]:

Since 2020, at least 11 lawsuits alleging that these policies violate parental rights have been filed against school districts by parents who are represented by conservative legal groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization with a long history of backing cases targeting the rights of gay and transgender people.

Three parents, all self-described liberals, told The Times that support groups had connected them with a legal group affiliated with the Alliance, called the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, which was founded in 2019 with the mission of defending children and parents against “gender identity ideology,” according to its nonprofit disclosure forms. Its president has spoken at conferences about the “existential threat to our culture” posed by the “transgender movement.”

So far, however, the parents who have sued lean Republican, such as Wendell and Maria Perez, who filed a lawsuit in Florida against their child’s elementary school district with the assistance of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign. They claim that only after their child made two suicide attempts did the school tell them that an employee had been counseling their 12-year-old about “gender confusion” for months.

The letter also links to an Alliance Defending Freedom story about the Wendell and Maria Perez case. To describe that story as about “outing” trans children is odd since it’s about a 12-year-old girl who attempted suicide.

Wendell Perez received a call from the elementary school that would alarm any parent. School officials told him that his 12-year-old daughter had attempted suicide in the school’s bathroom. He was told it was because she wanted to be a boy, with a male name and pronouns.

Wendell couldn’t believe it. At home, his daughter hadn’t shown any signs of gender dysphoria or discomfort in being a girl. The Perez family is Catholic, and they raised their children with a biblical and scientific understanding of biological sex.

But when Wendell and his wife Maria arrived at the school, they found out that school officials had been having confidential meetings with their daughter and discussing her discomfort with her gender. Wendell and Maria found out that teachers and staff at school had begun treating their daughter as a boy at school without their consent or knowledge. Wendell was told by staff that they didn’t share information about his daughter’s “transition” with him or his wife because of “confidentiality issues.”

What exactly do the signatories want to see here? Should the school be able to withhold information about the girl’s social identity from her parents even after the suicide attempt? The letter continues by accusing the Times of following “far right hate groups.”

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. Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and gender⁠-⁠affirming surgeries have been standard forms of care for cis and trans people alike for decades.

That link goes to an SPLC story which discusses an Idaho trans sports bill:

Idaho’s 2020 anti-trans sports bill provides a window into how legislators coordinate with anti-LGBTQ groups on legislation like this.

Idaho state Rep. Barbara Ehardt, R-Idaho Falls, sponsored the bill, which specifically bans trans girls from competing in girls’ sports. In case of a dispute over a student’s sex, the bill requires that a student provide a health examination or a statement from a medical provider.

Ehardt is a former Idaho State University basketball player who later coached at other universities. She claimed the bill is designed to protect women and girls from having to compete against “biological boys and men” – trans women…

Ehardt has claimed that Alliance Defending Freedom (an anti-LGBTQ hate group) helped her. Ehardt claims that ADF’s legal counsel looked over her bill and assisted in crafting stronger legislation.

The bill described by the SPLC was passed and was supported by 67% of respondents in a poll conducted at the time. Again, the implication of the letter is that two-thirds of the population are transphobic haters. The possibility that trans girls have unfair physical advantages over girls born female (something we’ve seen play out at the collegiate level) seems like a possible explanation for the poll results, albeit one the letter writers aren’t interested in discussing.

In addition to the various NY Times contributors, the Hollywood Reporter says a series of celebrities are joining in:

Judd Apatow, Gabrielle Union, Tommy Dorfman and Wilson Cruz are among the members and allies of Hollywood’s LGBTQ community calling on The New York Times to stop reporting “bias, fringe theories and dangerous inaccuracies” in its coverage of transgender people…

Other entertainment signatories include Hannah Gadsby, Jameela Jamil, Jazz Jennings, Jen Richards, Joey Soloway, Johnny Sibilly, Jonathan Van Ness, Lena Dunham, Margaret Cho, Peppermint and Zackary Drucker.

Those names appear alongside prominent LGBTQ journalists and New York Times contributors such as Roxane Gay as well as LGBTQ organizations like GLAAD, GLSEN, the Human Rights Campaign, National Black Justice Coalition, Women’s March, National LGBTQ Task Force, PFLAG National, the Transgender Law Center and Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund.

No doubt we’ll hear more about this letter in the coming days but so far the letter seems to have picked out really nothing of significance from the 15,000 words they are objecting to, i.e. a complaint about a single phrase in one piece and about the framing of another that directly stated the thing the paper was accused of not making clear. If this is the best 200 contributors could come up with, maybe the Times should seek out some better contributors.