NY Times Accused of ‘Anti-Trans’ Coverage by Judd Apatow, Lena Dunham, Gabrielle Union, NYT Contributors, and Activists in Scathing Letter
AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
The biggest organizations fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in the U.S. today released a scathing letter Wednesday morning demanding changes at the New York Times over what the hundreds of signatories see as “biased coverage of transgender people” in the Times.
“We won’t stand for the Times platforming lies, bias, fringe theories, and dangerous inaccuracies,” the letter reads, adding, “We demand fair coverage, we demand that the Times platform trans voices as both sources and full-time writers and editors, and we demand a meeting between Times leadership and the transgender community.”
Organizations like GLAAD, HRC, PFLAG, Transgender Law Center, Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, and the Women’s March all signed onto the extraordinary letter taking aim at one of the country’s preeminent news institutions.
Additionally, celebrities including, Judd Apatow, Lena Dunham, Jameela Jamil, Gabrielle Union-Wade, Jonathan Van Ness, and many more, signed onto the letter, which included 3 key demands:
Stop printing biased anti-trans stories, immediately.
Listen to trans people: hold a meeting with trans community leaders within two months.
Hire at least four trans writers and editors within three months.
More than 100 Times contributors also signed onto the letter, including, Ashley P. Ford, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado Thomas Page McBee, Andrea Long Chu, Carmen Maria Machado, and John Cameron Mitchell.
The signatories pointed primarily at the Times’s opinion pages for their coverage of transgender rights and noted various articles have ended up in front of state legislatures or cited in legislation looking to restrict trans rights. “The Arkansas Attorney General cited three biased Times articles in her amicus brief supporting an Alabama law that criminalizes doctors and parents for ensuring trans youth can access necessary medical care: Emily Bazelon’s June 2022 piece, Azeen Ghorayshi’s January 2022 piece, and Ross Douthat’s April 2022 piece,” noted GLAAD in a statement on the letter.
The Times has covered the issue extensively in the last year and did a large project titled,”These 12 Transgender Americans Would Love You to Mind Your Own Business.” The project’s tagline reads, “We spoke with 12 transgender Americans from across the country and the political spectrum to try to better understand what their lives are like.”
The letter also took aim at the Times’s recently hiring conservative lawyer and author David French as an op-ed writer, as well as the paper’s science coverage on the topic. “The Science Desk decided to spend more than a year undermining support for transgender youth by writing ‘just asking questions’ stories about medically approved best practices for gender-affirming healthcare,” read the letter.
Sarah Kate Ellis, President & CEO of GLAAD, added some detail as to exactly what sparked the backlash against the Times.
“From the front page to the opinion page, readers are too often getting an inaccurate view of transgender people, with poor reporting that elevates harmful opinions from known anti-trans voices and so-called ‘concerns’ over the fact that every leading medical organization affirms healthcare for trans youth as safe and necessary,” Ellis wrote.
“And even more dangerous, politicians are using biased Times’ articles to justify support for anti-trans legislation. GLAAD and other advocates have tried to educate reporters and editors at the Times, but our community can no longer wait for the Times to do the right thing,” she declared.
GLAAD also took their protest to the headquarters of the New York Times on Wednesday.
The letter may not come as a surprise to some as last week, Media Matters’s Ari Drennen published a headline that read, “The New York Times helped fuel an anti-trans panic in 2022. Will 2023 be any better?”
The Times responded to the letter in a statement, saying, “We received the letter from GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD sees our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.”
The Times added:
As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.
The very news stories criticized by GLAAD in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society – to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we’re proud of it.”
