"Not Exactly Consequential": NYT Dismisses Trump's War on Trans Americans

After years of trans panic coverage, the paper now claims attacks on trans rights barely matter.

Over the weekend, The New York Times published what might be one of the most callous editorial exercises I've seen in a while. In a piece titled "10 Columnists and Writers Rate What Mattered in Trump’s First Full Month", the paper asked writers to rank Trump's first-month actions on a graph. The vertical axis measured importance (more or less important), while the horizontal axis measured impact (negative or positive).

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It's the kind of both-sides framing that has come to define the Times' approach to covering politics. But there's something particularly grotesque about turning the dismantling of civil rights and democratic institutions into a graphics exercise that looks like it belongs in a corporate strategy meeting.

The premise is simple enough: The Times acknowledges that Trump has been moving at breakneck speed, making it "hard for Americans to keep up with his actions" because "they are coming so fast and on so many fronts." Fair enough. But rather than doing what journalists are supposed to do — prioritize, analyze, explain — they've decided to turn human suffering into an exercise in charting.

As the intro states: "Times Opinion asked 10 columnists and regular contributors to assess Trump's moves in February to dismantle the state, end Russia's war on Ukraine, attack the justice system and military leaders and push radical executive orders."

The contributors include usual suspects like David Brooks, Gail Collins, Ross Douthat, and other Times columnists, along with conservative voices from publications like Modern Age and Compact. What follows is a scatterplot of opinions that reveals far more about the Times' own skewed perspective than it does about the actual impact of Trump's policies.

The most disturbing part of this exercise is how the Times collectively positioned Trump's systematic assault on transgender Americans. According to their chart, the columnists ranked Trump's attacks on trans rights as the least important policy area and the second most positive development of his administration so far.

Consider that for a moment. The complete erasure of legal recognition for an entire community of Americans was deemed the least consequential action Trump has taken.

Megan K. Stack, one of the contributors, wrote: "I can't say it's exactly consequential, since so few lives are materially affected (which is kind of my point) but it is a shameful mark on our national conscience."

This "so few lives" framing is both factually wrong and morally reprehensible. According to a 2022 study by the Williams Institute, there are approximately 1.3 million transgender adults in the United States. That's roughly the population of Dallas, Texas — the ninth largest city in the country. Imagine if Trump dropped a nuclear bomb on Dallas. Would the Times respond by saying, "I can't say it's exactly consequential, since so few lives are materially affected"? Almost certainly not.

But it's not just about numbers. It's about basic human rights. The worth of a marginalized community isn't measured by its size.

What makes the Times' dismissal of these attacks even more galling is that the paper has spent years obsessively covering transgender issues — largely from a negative perspective.

A 2023 FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) study found that the Times' front-page coverage of transgender issues has consistently focused on questioning whether trans people have "too many rights" or access to "too much medical care," rather than on the coordinated political campaign against them.

The study compared the Times with the Washington Post and found the Times ran significantly fewer front-page stories about trans issues. When they did appear on the front page, however, the stories overwhelmingly focused on concerns about transition being "risky" or "likely to be regretted" — narratives that align perfectly with the anti-trans movement.

Let's be clear: the Times can't have it both ways. Either transgender Americans are important enough to warrant year after year of breathless coverage questioning their healthcare and existence, or they're so insignificant that destroying their rights is the "least consequential" action of a presidency. The paper has clearly chosen to be inconsistent in the most harmful way possible.

While the Times treats this as a trivial matter, let's look at what's actually happening:

On January 20th, Trump signed a sweeping executive order that essentially erased federal recognition of transgender people by defining sex strictly based on characteristics at birth. This isn't a minor policy tweak, but a complete rollback of civil rights protections that eliminates accommodations for transgender individuals in federally-funded spaces like schools, shelters, and workplaces; directs prisons to house transgender women with men (putting them at severe risk of violence); rescinds federal funding for gender-affirming healthcare; and eliminates federal protections against discrimination based on gender identity.

On January 23rd, the State Department froze all passport applications requesting "X" gender markers or changes to gender markers on existing passports, effectively ending the ability of trans people to have identification documents that match their identity.

By January 27th, transgender people were banned from the military again, prohibited from enlisting and existing trans service members barred from transitioning.

The following day, January 28th, Trump signed an executive order ending federal support for gender-affirming care for people under 19 by directing federally-run insurance programs like TRICARE and Medicaid to exclude coverage.

On January 29th, another executive order barred federally-funded (read: virtually every) schools from allowing transgender students to use names, pronouns, bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams that align with their gender identity.

By January 31st, federal agencies began scrubbing trans-related content from government websites, and the Social Security Administration halted all sex identification changes in its records.

On February 5th, Trump banned transgender girls and women from competing in women's sports.

These are not inconsequential changes. They represent a coordinated campaign to make it difficult or impossible for transgender Americans to participate in public life. From having ID documents forcibly changed by the state to having healthcare taken away to being placed in danger in prisons, these are life-threatening and dehumanizing policies.

The Times contributors' comments on trans issues reveal the paper's fundamental problem. Matthew Schmitz of Compact magazine wrote approvingly about Democrats reassessing "support for transgender athletes in women's sports," while David French claimed, "Biological males should not compete in women's sports," deploying the dehumanizing language preferred by the anti-trans movement.

Even those who viewed the anti-trans policies negatively downplayed their importance. Tressie McMillan Cottom called it "red-meat content for Trump's culture warriors" but still ranked it only medium in importance (which is more than most of her colleagues could do).

This is the kind of "reasonable" discussion the Times thinks we should be having about whether an entire group of Americans deserves basic rights and dignity. It's presented as though we're debating tax policy or infrastructure spending — not whether over a million Americans should be able to exist in public.

What the Times has done with this chart isn't journalism, but a cruel exercise in both-sidesism that turns real human suffering into abstract data points. It suggests that there are "pros and cons" to erasing the legal existence of transgender Americans.

The paper that has spent years stoking moral panic about transgender people now wants to pretend that attacks on trans rights barely matter. It's a stunning example of how mainstream media consistently fails marginalized communities under the guise of "objectivity."

There's nothing objective about treating human rights as a game. There's nothing neutral about suggesting that erasing federal protections for over a million Americans is a positive development. And there's certainly nothing journalistic about pretending that systematically stripping rights from a vulnerable minority doesn't "materially affect" enough people to matter.

Shame on the New York Times for this. Marginalized people deserve better than to have their lives and rights reduced to dots on a chart.