Looking For A Response From The Times
By Haha, right?
A coalition of organizations has put together a letter to the New York Times criticizing its recent inaccurate articles contributing to the moral panic against transgender people. The signers are people who have contributed to the Times and are LGBTQ+, along with allies.
A couple of excerpts:
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.
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. Legal challenges to gender-nonconformity date back even further, with 34 cities in 21 states passing laws against cross-dressing between 1848 and 1900, usually enforced alongside so-called prohibitions against public indecency that disproportionately targeted immigrants, people of color, sex workers, and other marginalized groups. Such punishments are documented as far back as 1394, when police in England detained Eleanor Rykener on suspicion of the crime of sodomy, exposing her after an interrogation as “John.” This is not a cultural emergency.
They go on to recall the Times’s equally knuckleheaded response to AIDS in the 1980s.
In the UK, a teen trans girl was murdered by two of her classmates. J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has been influential in a campaign against trans people. The attacks on transgender people are part of the far right’s ambitions for rule. The Times is right there with them.
Editors at the Times have stood firm that they will not respond to criticism. I suspect they will continue that policy.