In what must have been a disconcerting revelation to the editors of the liberal New York Times, “over 1000 contributors to the New York Times” have signed an open letter accusing the left-wing newspaper of following “the lead of far-right hate groups” in their coverage of transgender issues. They have been joined by “the countersignatures of 23,000 media workers, readers and subscribers to the newspaper.” The open letter was addressed to Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards at the Times.
Among the signatories of the letter are celebrity activists Lena Dunhan and Cynthia Nixon. Also represented by the letter is noted transgender author Gretchen Felker-Martin, a biological male who has threatened to “slit the throat” of Harry Potter series creator J.K. Rowling and others who won’t blindly accept transgender propaganda.
“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 letter contends.
“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,” the letter angrily asserts.
Or, put more clearly, some of the Times‘ reporters don’t simply parrot transgender talking points as they write about the fringe societal issue.
Chief on their list of anti-trans propagandists is staff writer Emily Bazelon, who penned an article published last June entitled “The Battle Over Gender Therapy.” The article took a critical look at the clear division in the medical community about how to treat so-called transgender youth amid the sudden explosion of requests for what trans activists term “gender affirming care.”
The signatories of the letter were miffed because Bazelon “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.”
Actually, the term “patient zero” refers to the first person to receive the so-called “gender affirming care.” Personally, I might have used the term “first child abuse victim of the transgender movement,” but that’s just me.
The transgender activist signatories were also vexed that Bazelon sourced Grace Lidinksy-Smith, a victim of transgenderism who experienced regret after receiving hormone therapy and a double mastectomy.
The signatories were upset that Lidinsky-Smith was presented “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.”
Regardless of her current affiliations, Lidinsky-Smith is indeed an individual who experienced regret after having her breasts removed. Are the transgender activists really saying that such a person’s story should never be heard?
The transgender activists were also upset about a recent article by Katie Baker entitled “When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know.” That article explored the recent phenomenon of schools allowing children to identify as a different gender without allowing parents to know about it.
The letter writers claimed that Baker’s 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.”
But the first few paragraphs of Baker’s article makes clear that the children are “outing” themselves publicly. The children and the schools involved are only hiding the so-called “transitioning” from the parents.
The letter writers then made a thinly veiled threat to the Times, writing that “the natural destination of poor editorial judgment is the court of law.” Whether the writers were suggesting a lawsuit was coming from them was left unclear.
The letter writers feigned “disappointment” with the left-wing newspaper. “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.”
The articles written by Bazelon and Baker were far from “anti-transgender.” To the contrary, they offered a bevy of pro-transgender talking points. However, they did do something that cannot be allowed from a transgender point of view — they allowed for the fact that society is not in complete agreement that transgenderism, so-called, is a great thing in the eyes of everyone in society.
Transgender ideology presents ideas so shallow and bereft of scientific validation that they cannot stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. The very suggestion that there are normal people — not raving bigoted idiots — who are not completely on board with what transgenderism represents cannot be allowed, lest the movement fall apart. And so any such suggestions — no matter how benign — must be stomped out.
