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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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!!