Hello, readers, Back in November, I wrote a piece explaining my key takeaway from the midterms: the press is out of touch with the public. After 2016, pretty much every mainstream media outlet took a few big steps to the right in hopes of not being called “fake news” by the new president, and then kept moving to the right in response to Democrats winning the House in 2018, and Democrats winning the House, Senate,
Jan 5, 2023·edited Jan 6, 2023Liked by Parker Molloy
I initially took McCullough's proposed "compromise" to be "Give up on legal protection from discrimination and conservatives pinky promise not to discriminate against trans people," but upon a second reading, it seems worse than that. His proposal sounds like it's just "Give up on legal protection from discrimination and conservatives pinky promise to say the discrimination against trans people that follows is bad." Have I understood correctly?
I can imagine writing this was a Herculean labor, but for what it's worth, I thought the argument was incredibly clear, thorough, and convincing.
Thanks, and yeah, I think your understanding of the McCullough piece is pretty much how I read it, too, just with vague "discrimination will happen and will be legal, but maybe we'll allow you to exist." It was such a non-starter, and the fact that French apparently felt the need to push back on that says a lot about how intensely he believes that actions should be taken to drum trans people out of society.
And, again, I don't think he should be fired or whatever. NYT decides to hire him, fine. I just think NYT needs to add some major counterweights to this.
I’m appalled by this hire and I am at a complete loss trying to understand what the Times gets out of running over transgender people over and over again. Is it the easiest ‘both sides’ issue for them because they don’t need to do any actual journalism or pay for research? Are they looking to the British press that has done roughly the same thing? How big is the market for this rank and deceptive bigotry though? Perhaps they don’t worry about their reputation as they’ve gotten away with so much racism in the past. Although we know there is no accountability this turn does leave a large and oily stain even as they remain one of the few games in town.
Like some of the reporting on covid, one thing that takes me aback is how anti-science this trend is. Somehow we’re supposed to believe, e.g., that caring parents, doctors, therapists, and nearly the entire medical community cannot assess the needs of transgender children but some columnists are able to determine their best interests.
Unrelatedly, I was glad for the aside about Pamela Paul’s writing. Her columns are an atrocity against the English language and the very idea of coherent argumentation.
It’s become bizarre at this point. They’ve hired columnists that reject the standards of science, social science, and medicine. They are so committed to giving a platform to right wing thinking they’re even willing to throw the standards of prose and conceptual intelligibility away. What is going on over there?
What frustrates me more than anything else is how these outlets will always frame this "debate" in the vaguest possible terms. That gives them so much leeway to "just ask questions" to the point of one of those "questions" being "Should this group of people be allowed to exist?" And that is never, ever a great sign when any group is being talked about in those sorts of terms.
This sentence from the article on Alabama really disturbs me “But the vanguard’s demand for revolution inevitably runs up against the majority’s urgent need for safety and basic rights.” There are many such sentences in this article. I think this is supposed to be an article sympathetic to the experience of LGBTQ people in Alabama but it’s shot through with thoughts like this. People are uncomfortable! Oh, no! Like the myriad diner stories the sympathy is with the ‘people who are very upset’ no matter what they’re upset about, whether their reasons to be upset have any justification, no matter what they do. And if you’re upset because those people get you fired or threaten you or try to restrict your freedom through unjust use of law and the implications of violence?
The author also mentions that LGBTQ people were ‘complacent,’ as if this has anything to do with what’s being done to them.
Again, I have to wonder WHAT is going on here. Why would a story like this require nearly every paragraph to contain a nod to the views of individuals who are doing nothing other than violating the liberty and safety of other citizens? What are the editorial mandates here?
I also believe that some of the commenters on anything the Times publishes on LGBTQ have to be trolls. Whenever there is a story like this in the Times you see absurd comments shoot to the top of the ‘I used to be a Democrat’ type. Can there really be hundreds of NYT readers who are gay men or committed allies of LGBT people who intensely disapprove of drag? Are LGBT Times readers largely conservative. Is this brigading? It’s notable to me because you see a different response on less prominent articles and WAPO articles on similar topics do not have this flood of scolds, echoing very prominent memetic ideas from the anti-trans lobby.
Maybe I’m just paranoid but it’s weird how the comments often have identical themes, very similar phrasing, and the most liked comments *only on this topic or on other beloved hobbyhorses of the right like CRT* when this is not the general slant of Times commenters elsewhere. (The comments on Charles Blow’s columns also have similar patterns--much more right-leaning comments than usual, comments repeating phrases and ideas, etc. as do certain stories about covid precautions.) Though one *never* sees this elsewhere on stories in the Times, where the comments are much more diverse in content, informed and detailed, and could even be described as largely left-leaning even if the paper clearly isn’t.
"Somehow we’re supposed to believe, e.g., that caring parents, doctors, therapists, and nearly the entire medical community cannot assess the needs of transgender children"
This is what always gets me. Especially when they offer up potential problems like bone density or whatever as if doctors aren't perfectly aware of those factors and keep them in mind as they go forward.
Ignoramuses like French talk about biological "fact:, but P.Z. Meyers, an actual professor of biology, produced a 15-minute video explaining why gender in not binary.
"Gender dysphoria may not 'go away,' but transgenderism is something else entirely."
French is probably hoping for his readers to see a parallel with "Islam" vs. "Islamism," or "Christians" and "Christianism." Islamists and Christianists aren't just devout Muslims or devout Christians, they are committed to Muslim or Christian supremacy; not necessarily through terrorism, but through the kind of legal and cultural privileges that (in the U.S.) drive home the point that this is a Christian Nation and the rest of us are here purely on their sufferance. But so far as I know there are exactly zero "transgenderists" by this definition. There is nobody who says this is a trangender nation, that cis-men and cis-women should be second-class citizens, that schools should teach that gender duality is unnatural, etc.
There certainly are Christianists, in this sense; David French is one of them. And I have no problem with Christians or Christianity; Christianity is not going away. But Christianism is something else.
"The glowing praise in the hiring announcement of noted transphobe and anti-LGBTQIA+ activist lawyer David French is clear communication to me that the New York Times does not want my patronage, my attention or my money. As a queer trans woman, I can not, in good conscience, continue to subscribe to a newspaper that will proudly and loudly support the oppression and subjugation of people like me."
It should definitely not have taken this long for me to do this after 6 years, but here we are. I'll happily find a better use for $180/year.
I should probably pull the trigger on subscribing to the now-non-profit-and-owned-by-Chicago-NPR Chicago Sun-Times...
At first, I was like, "Okay, I need to dig though his old work." Then, I realized that doing so would take time through more than a decade worth of work and would have led me off to write about other topics (he's anti-campaign finance transparency, for one, which is a weird take), so I limited it to trans stuff, and even then had to only pick a handful of examples.
The article, written by a trans man who had been a D-1 swimmer at Yale before he transitioned, is the exact kind of comfort food that NY Times liberals eat up. It's a beautiful, well-written article, but it does feel like the only kind of trans narrative that people who want to pretend they're okay with trans people are willing to accept.
The funny thing about it is that I hadn't seen that specific piece until after I finished writing this. NYT is so predictable. And, of course, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with trans people taking advantage of the ability to write for NYT when they are given the chance (I've pitched them on pieces dozens of times over the years, gotten rejected all but 3, had one of the pieces shut down before publishing, the other was online only, and the final one was actually in the print edition, so I've been that person -- though, that was more than 4 years ago now). It's just such a frustrating shame how limited (like you pointed out, always a very palatable piece that reinforces basics) this chance to tell a story is for this one specific group of people constantly being attacked in between those pieces.
OMG I had no idea NYT had hired French as a columnist. Massive ugh. Just in general, aside from the horror of everything you talk about here. He tries to sound reasonable and rational, so the mainstream welcomes him. But the substance of his views, as you point out here,particularly on LGBTQ issues, is radical and extreme. And you really get at the nut of the issue, which is simply respect and compassion for others' humanity. It's too painful for him to use someone's preferred pronouns? He prefers to wipe out their humanity? What kind of person acts like that? The Times has always been extremely sluggish about LGBTQ issues, for a long time banning them to the Style section. I guess it's still doesn’t care about what we think. Hey, we're subscribers too.
Yeah. I think the most important thing right now is for trans people to speak with their own, authentic voices on a platform where they can be as visible as possible.
This is gross, as is the entirety of the attack on trans people happening these days. To act like calling someone their preferred pronoun is an unthinkable and egregious personal attack is literally insane. French sounds like a religious fundamentalist to me, which I guess it's okay to be if you're Christian. Of course this is sadly unsurprising by the NYT, who will go out of their way to hire shitty conservatives and offer false equivalence. Yet people continue to exist this is somehow the beacon of liberal journalism...
Do you think the NYT hired him to meet a quota for some viewpoint they’re lacking or was it more of a general hire of someone who is good at what they do? And are you advocating that the Times should have a trans quota of writers too? Finally, what are your thoughts on affirmative action? Are these issues the same or similar in your opinion?
I initially took McCullough's proposed "compromise" to be "Give up on legal protection from discrimination and conservatives pinky promise not to discriminate against trans people," but upon a second reading, it seems worse than that. His proposal sounds like it's just "Give up on legal protection from discrimination and conservatives pinky promise to say the discrimination against trans people that follows is bad." Have I understood correctly?
I can imagine writing this was a Herculean labor, but for what it's worth, I thought the argument was incredibly clear, thorough, and convincing.
Thanks, and yeah, I think your understanding of the McCullough piece is pretty much how I read it, too, just with vague "discrimination will happen and will be legal, but maybe we'll allow you to exist." It was such a non-starter, and the fact that French apparently felt the need to push back on that says a lot about how intensely he believes that actions should be taken to drum trans people out of society.
And, again, I don't think he should be fired or whatever. NYT decides to hire him, fine. I just think NYT needs to add some major counterweights to this.
I’m appalled by this hire and I am at a complete loss trying to understand what the Times gets out of running over transgender people over and over again. Is it the easiest ‘both sides’ issue for them because they don’t need to do any actual journalism or pay for research? Are they looking to the British press that has done roughly the same thing? How big is the market for this rank and deceptive bigotry though? Perhaps they don’t worry about their reputation as they’ve gotten away with so much racism in the past. Although we know there is no accountability this turn does leave a large and oily stain even as they remain one of the few games in town.
Like some of the reporting on covid, one thing that takes me aback is how anti-science this trend is. Somehow we’re supposed to believe, e.g., that caring parents, doctors, therapists, and nearly the entire medical community cannot assess the needs of transgender children but some columnists are able to determine their best interests.
Unrelatedly, I was glad for the aside about Pamela Paul’s writing. Her columns are an atrocity against the English language and the very idea of coherent argumentation.
It’s become bizarre at this point. They’ve hired columnists that reject the standards of science, social science, and medicine. They are so committed to giving a platform to right wing thinking they’re even willing to throw the standards of prose and conceptual intelligibility away. What is going on over there?
What frustrates me more than anything else is how these outlets will always frame this "debate" in the vaguest possible terms. That gives them so much leeway to "just ask questions" to the point of one of those "questions" being "Should this group of people be allowed to exist?" And that is never, ever a great sign when any group is being talked about in those sorts of terms.
This sentence from the article on Alabama really disturbs me “But the vanguard’s demand for revolution inevitably runs up against the majority’s urgent need for safety and basic rights.” There are many such sentences in this article. I think this is supposed to be an article sympathetic to the experience of LGBTQ people in Alabama but it’s shot through with thoughts like this. People are uncomfortable! Oh, no! Like the myriad diner stories the sympathy is with the ‘people who are very upset’ no matter what they’re upset about, whether their reasons to be upset have any justification, no matter what they do. And if you’re upset because those people get you fired or threaten you or try to restrict your freedom through unjust use of law and the implications of violence?
The author also mentions that LGBTQ people were ‘complacent,’ as if this has anything to do with what’s being done to them.
Again, I have to wonder WHAT is going on here. Why would a story like this require nearly every paragraph to contain a nod to the views of individuals who are doing nothing other than violating the liberty and safety of other citizens? What are the editorial mandates here?
I also believe that some of the commenters on anything the Times publishes on LGBTQ have to be trolls. Whenever there is a story like this in the Times you see absurd comments shoot to the top of the ‘I used to be a Democrat’ type. Can there really be hundreds of NYT readers who are gay men or committed allies of LGBT people who intensely disapprove of drag? Are LGBT Times readers largely conservative. Is this brigading? It’s notable to me because you see a different response on less prominent articles and WAPO articles on similar topics do not have this flood of scolds, echoing very prominent memetic ideas from the anti-trans lobby.
Maybe I’m just paranoid but it’s weird how the comments often have identical themes, very similar phrasing, and the most liked comments *only on this topic or on other beloved hobbyhorses of the right like CRT* when this is not the general slant of Times commenters elsewhere. (The comments on Charles Blow’s columns also have similar patterns--much more right-leaning comments than usual, comments repeating phrases and ideas, etc. as do certain stories about covid precautions.) Though one *never* sees this elsewhere on stories in the Times, where the comments are much more diverse in content, informed and detailed, and could even be described as largely left-leaning even if the paper clearly isn’t.
"Somehow we’re supposed to believe, e.g., that caring parents, doctors, therapists, and nearly the entire medical community cannot assess the needs of transgender children"
This is what always gets me. Especially when they offer up potential problems like bone density or whatever as if doctors aren't perfectly aware of those factors and keep them in mind as they go forward.
Ignoramuses like French talk about biological "fact:, but P.Z. Meyers, an actual professor of biology, produced a 15-minute video explaining why gender in not binary.
"Gender dysphoria may not 'go away,' but transgenderism is something else entirely."
French is probably hoping for his readers to see a parallel with "Islam" vs. "Islamism," or "Christians" and "Christianism." Islamists and Christianists aren't just devout Muslims or devout Christians, they are committed to Muslim or Christian supremacy; not necessarily through terrorism, but through the kind of legal and cultural privileges that (in the U.S.) drive home the point that this is a Christian Nation and the rest of us are here purely on their sufferance. But so far as I know there are exactly zero "transgenderists" by this definition. There is nobody who says this is a trangender nation, that cis-men and cis-women should be second-class citizens, that schools should teach that gender duality is unnatural, etc.
There certainly are Christianists, in this sense; David French is one of them. And I have no problem with Christians or Christianity; Christianity is not going away. But Christianism is something else.
"The glowing praise in the hiring announcement of noted transphobe and anti-LGBTQIA+ activist lawyer David French is clear communication to me that the New York Times does not want my patronage, my attention or my money. As a queer trans woman, I can not, in good conscience, continue to subscribe to a newspaper that will proudly and loudly support the oppression and subjugation of people like me."
It should definitely not have taken this long for me to do this after 6 years, but here we are. I'll happily find a better use for $180/year.
I should probably pull the trigger on subscribing to the now-non-profit-and-owned-by-Chicago-NPR Chicago Sun-Times...
It must have been excruciating to go through those old columns. I'm impressed by you and horrified by the contents and how many exist
At first, I was like, "Okay, I need to dig though his old work." Then, I realized that doing so would take time through more than a decade worth of work and would have led me off to write about other topics (he's anti-campaign finance transparency, for one, which is a weird take), so I limited it to trans stuff, and even then had to only pick a handful of examples.
Ugh. That's how it always goes.
It's interesting that, at the same time they hired French, the Times published the exact kind of guest op-ed from a trans person that you talk about in this piece (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/opinion/trans-athlete-swimming.html).
The article, written by a trans man who had been a D-1 swimmer at Yale before he transitioned, is the exact kind of comfort food that NY Times liberals eat up. It's a beautiful, well-written article, but it does feel like the only kind of trans narrative that people who want to pretend they're okay with trans people are willing to accept.
The funny thing about it is that I hadn't seen that specific piece until after I finished writing this. NYT is so predictable. And, of course, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with trans people taking advantage of the ability to write for NYT when they are given the chance (I've pitched them on pieces dozens of times over the years, gotten rejected all but 3, had one of the pieces shut down before publishing, the other was online only, and the final one was actually in the print edition, so I've been that person -- though, that was more than 4 years ago now). It's just such a frustrating shame how limited (like you pointed out, always a very palatable piece that reinforces basics) this chance to tell a story is for this one specific group of people constantly being attacked in between those pieces.
OMG I had no idea NYT had hired French as a columnist. Massive ugh. Just in general, aside from the horror of everything you talk about here. He tries to sound reasonable and rational, so the mainstream welcomes him. But the substance of his views, as you point out here,particularly on LGBTQ issues, is radical and extreme. And you really get at the nut of the issue, which is simply respect and compassion for others' humanity. It's too painful for him to use someone's preferred pronouns? He prefers to wipe out their humanity? What kind of person acts like that? The Times has always been extremely sluggish about LGBTQ issues, for a long time banning them to the Style section. I guess it's still doesn’t care about what we think. Hey, we're subscribers too.
Yeah. I think the most important thing right now is for trans people to speak with their own, authentic voices on a platform where they can be as visible as possible.
This is gross, as is the entirety of the attack on trans people happening these days. To act like calling someone their preferred pronoun is an unthinkable and egregious personal attack is literally insane. French sounds like a religious fundamentalist to me, which I guess it's okay to be if you're Christian. Of course this is sadly unsurprising by the NYT, who will go out of their way to hire shitty conservatives and offer false equivalence. Yet people continue to exist this is somehow the beacon of liberal journalism...
Do you think the NYT hired him to meet a quota for some viewpoint they’re lacking or was it more of a general hire of someone who is good at what they do? And are you advocating that the Times should have a trans quota of writers too? Finally, what are your thoughts on affirmative action? Are these issues the same or similar in your opinion?
Thank you Parker!!