More than 170 past and present New York Times contributors signed an open letter on Wednesday calling out the paper’s coverage of transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people. The missive points to “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,” as well as “reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.” Among the prominent journalists and writers who signed the letter are Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Ed Yong, and Lucy Sante. Several current Times staffers, including culture reporter Dave Itzkoff, are also signatories, as are actress Cynthia Nixon and writer-director Lena Dunham.
Despite the paper’s editorial guidelines requiring that reporters “preserve a professional detachment, free of any whiff of bias,” the Times has, according to the letter, “treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language.” The letter, addressed to standards editor Philip Corbett, criticizes terminology and sourcing used in a number of pieces—from magazine stories to features to Opinion columns. Emily Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” is specifically cited as having “quoted multiple expert sources who have since expressed regret over their work’s misrepresentation.” (The Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Bazelon’s piece is among the Times articles that have made their way into Republican-led state legislatures attempting “to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care,” the letter states. “The natural destination of poor editorial judgment is the court of law.” South Dakota on Monday became the second state, after Utah, to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth this year. Meanwhile, more than two dozen bills attempting to restrict transgender health care access were introduced at the start of 2023 state legislative sessions, according to the Associated Press. Critic and writer Jo Livingstone, who helped organized the letter, told Hell Gate that it was “willfully ignorant” to “suggest that there is no relationship between the way that we are using language at the newspaper to discuss people’s lives.” She added, “This is not quite business as usual anymore.”
