New Study Finds NYT Fails to Quote Trans People in 66% of Stories About Anti-Trans Bills
The paper has been making a bunch of Journalism 101-level mistakes and has a major problem with anti-trans bias.
Hey, everyone. Parker here.
GLAAD and Media Matters for America teamed up for a study about anti-trans bias in the pages of the New York Times. What they found was unsettling, if not entirely surprising, given the paper’s history of helping fuel the anti-trans moral panic that’s been sweeping the country in recent years.
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According to the study, between February 2023 — when two letters, one from Times contributors and one from activist organizations like GLAAD, were delivered to the Times in hopes of getting them to improve their coverage — and February 2024, the paper published “at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans legislation in either their headline or lead paragraphs.”
At the time, GLAAD called on the Times to address its anti-trans bias, to set up meetings with members of the trans community, and to hire trans writers and editors at the paper. The Times didn’t do any of these things, and the paper’s coverage on this topic has continued to be abysmal.
What GLAAD and Media Matters discovered:
66% of the articles did not quote even one trans or gender-nonconforming person.
18% of the articles quoted misinformation from anti-trans activists without adequate fact-checking or additional context.
6 articles obscured the anti-trans background of sources, erasing histories of extremist rhetoric or actions.
“The New York Times did not quote any transgender people in a majority of their articles about anti-trans legislation in the past year,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, President & CEO of GLAAD, in a statement posted to GLAAD’s website. “One of the first recommendations we make during the hundreds of LGBTQ education briefings we hold with national and local newsrooms is to include LGBTQ voices in LGBTQ stories: interview the people impacted by your coverage and include their perspectives. The New York Times failed that basic reporting lesson 101, and replaced it with a pattern of obfuscating sources’ anti-trans affiliations and allowing their misinformation to go unchecked. Our coalition of more than 150 organizations, community leaders, and notable LGBTQ people and allies remains steadfast in our calls for the Times to improve their coverage of transgender people.”
“The paper of record has an obligation to present its readers with the full human toll of the anti-trans legislative assault,” added Ari Drennen, LGBTQ Program Director at Media Matters. “Trans people are more than theoretical curiosities to be debated from afar. Each and every anti-trans bill affects living, breathing people whose voices deserve to be heard and whose stories deserve to be told.”
Between July and September 2023, the Times quoted trans people just once in 19 articles about anti-trans legislation.
The Times’ exclusion of trans voices from its coverage is more than just an oversight; it prevents the paper’s reporting from being accurate and informative.
As Media Matters notes:
When the Times covered North Dakota’s decision to ban transgender girls from playing sports with other members of their lived gender, the article didn’t give any of those girls space to talk about how it might impact them. The Times covered Missouri’s heavy restrictions on treatments for trans people without providing its readers a reaction from somebody who would be losing access to the health care they rely on.
…
Another article covered Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis approving “tough discipline for college staff who break bathroom law” but did not include a perspective from a trans person who might be affected by the rule, which requires colleges to fire employees who use a bathroom that does not correspond to their sex at birth.
Hopefully, we can all see why it might be useful to interview a trans person or two in an article about the implementation of a law banning trans people from public restrooms, yes? How do you run a story about that without talking to the people directly affected by the policy? The only reason you would exclude these voices is if the goal is not to report the news, but to advance the anti-trans cause.
During a speech earlier this month for the Reuters Institute, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger defended the paper’s coverage of trans issues — and the backlash it’s gotten from trans people — as evidence that the paper is doing a good job of remaining “independent.” In this defense, Sulzberger specifically highlighted the paper’s reporting on “the attacks and discrimination trans people face.” But as this study shows, even that coverage was poorly done and with an anti-trans bias.
If it wants to be taken seriously on this topic, the Times has to actually be independent and can’t keep putting its thumb on the scale in favor of anti-trans activists. Trans people should be interviewed for every story about trans issues.
Misinformation — such as the claim that “gender-affirming care” is a euphemism for “sex-change operations” — needs to be corrected in the text of the article. As the Media Matters report states, “The term “gender-affirming care” is used instead to encompass a broader range of treatments that do not necessarily include surgery. As the Human Rights Campaign explains: ‘It is not a single category of services but instead is a range of services, including mental health care, medical care, and social services.’”
Even so, there were several articles in which the Times allowed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to spread this distortion unchecked.
The Times has also published related claims that trans youth are being rushed into receiving gender-affirming care, and that doctors are manipulating parents into consenting to that care (some say that manipulation is achieved by pointing to suicide concerns). The reality is that transgender people are at high risk of ending their own lives, but having access to gender-affirming care, along with family support, reduces suicidality.
Wait times to receive gender-affirming care vary from months to more than a year, and Arkansas court filings also found that patients of one clinic wait 6.5 years on average before coming out to their parents. The shrinking number of available clinics must also take on more patients who often have to travel much farther than before. Insurance limitations and requirements can also create additional hurdles for those seeking care.
The whole thing is very frustrating. Go check out the reports on GLAAD’s and MMFA’s websites.
That’s it for me today. As always, thanks for reading.
Parker
It’s (rhetorically) funny how flexible the commitment to “balance” is—which voices it’s deemed unacceptable to exclude and which voices it’s totally fine to exclude.
It’s particularly sharp in this case, but one of the reasons Both Sides is a worthless principle is because Both Sides has never actually meant Both Sides. It’s not really a principle at all; it’s an anti-principle, a post facto self-justification.
Yeah I can’t think of another reason to not ask trans people about these discriminatory laws other than to be gratuitously anti-trans in coverage. It sucks and I hope this changes ASAP.