The letter
The letter is available at the elegantly short address nyletter.com.
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.
15 thousand in eight months? So under two thousand a month? That’s not a lot. That’s not even close to a lot. An article or two per month. It’s a pressing issue, it’s in the news constantly, why would the Times not be covering it? Apart from the fact that the letter-writers don’t like the content?
Last year, Arkansas’ attorney general filed an amicus brief in defense of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which would make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, for any medical provider to administer certain gender-affirming medical care to a minor (including puberty blockers) that diverges from their sex assigned at birth. The brief cited three different New York Times articles to justify its support of the law: Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “Doctors Debate Whether Trans Teens Need Therapy Before Hormones,” and Ross Douthat’s “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.”
Then again calling it “gender-affirming medical care” is also highly tendentious, and in fact misleading. It’s not medical care as commonly understood, and “gender-affirmation” isn’t medical at all, it’s political, and fatuous besides.
To sum up the letter is bad and wrong, and the writers and signers should feel bad.
If I wasn’t mulling giving more Substackers money I might be inclined to subscribe in support…
I have learned from reading this site that it is just as important to look at what’s not being said as it is to notice the statistics on offer. So, someone ‘calculated’ (i.e. didn’t actually count, but extrapolated or guessed) that fifteen thousand words were written in front-page articles which the cult didn’t like. No breakdown of those articles, citing which parts they found upsetting or unscientific. Just a daft assertion which can be ignored, per Hitchens. What’s not being said is how many words were published which were sympathetic to the cult. Fewer than fifteen thousand? More?
In any case, what is being claimed is that the newspaper shouldn’t even be discussing this:
The letter writer(s) don’t even claim that the articles concluded that what they call ‘medical care’, and we might call ‘outrageous medical abuse’, should be withheld. What they are objecting to is the debate itself.
The letter is calling for a newspaper to ignore a pressing medical scandal, because it makes the cult look bad.
I read articles from Daily Kos via RSS. The feed includes items written by journalists and pieces by random contributors. Whenever I see an article that is rabidly pro-trans-ideology and anti-“TERF”, I check the byline to see if it’s by Marissa Higgins; and, almost invariably, she is the author.
She wrote a scathing article about how the New York Times has become so awful recently on these issues (I immediately remarked in my head that the opposite was true), and she linked to a protest letter. I didn’t bother with the details, I didn’t realize there might be a physical protest, but I assume the letter is the same one.
I don’t know if MH is actually male. Given the fixation on this issue, and the vehemence, I suspect she might be a TIM. But plenty of women have also signed on, sadly.