According to a new report released this week from GLAAD and the watchdog group Media Matters for America (MMFA), the New York Times neglected to mention a single transgender person in two-thirds of its articles on anti-trans legislation last year. This is a result of false narratives about trans people and rights.
More than 200 Times participants signed an open letter condemning anti-trans discrimination at the paper in the 12 months since February 2023, and according to MMFA experts’ study, the Times published at least 65 reports focusing on or featuring anti-trans policy. (That number did not include opinion columns or editorials.) In those articles, 66% of them did not include any quotes from transgender or gender-neutral people, and 18% of them quoted anti-trans misinformation from conservative sources without any additional context.
The Times’ nine articles examining anti-trans legislation over the past year did not quote trans sources, according to the report. The largest gap came from July to September, when the paper only quoted one trans person in 19 relevant articles. Instead, the paper seemed more welcoming to Republican politicians and conservative activists, researchers found. Articles frequently directly cited right-wing figures, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, without bringing up their numerous false accusations about trans people, such as the propagandistic claim that trans communities “sexualize” minors.
On at least six occasions, researchers found that the Times failed to disclose the extent of a source’s anti-trans animus. Bailey’s public remarks about transness, which he has described as “a bloody scourge intended to defile innocents,” were not mentioned in an article about Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s short-lived restrictions on trans medical care. A spokesperson for North Dakota Can, which the paper described as merely a “conservative activist group,” was quoted in another article about anti-trans law in North Dakota. In fact, the organization states on its website that it is dedicated to “overcoming gender ideology” and provides resources for parents to prevent their children from being trans. “Be willing to do what it takes,” the site exhorts.
The report’s conclusions come more than a year after hundreds of journalists and LGBTQ+ advocates wrote two separate open letters criticizing the paper’s editorial board for handling trans issues. In response, editors formally warned its staff and contributors who spoke out, stating that their goal was to be as “panoramic as possible” in coverage. Editors may have chosen to devote 15,000 words to the topic of whether there are currently too many trans children.
The Times has reportedly doubled down on its approach to trans news, both in its news sections and in editorials, despite ongoing protests by GLAAD and other organizations in the past year. Republicans in Idaho cited an editorial that propagated inaccurate information about “detransitioners” in a legal brief just four days later to support a gender-affirming care ban. The paper has applied the same strategies to issues like the use of HIV/AIDS medications and Israel’s bombing of Gaza over the years, unintentionally demonstrating that centrism is not the same as neutrality.
“Trans people are more than theoretical curiosities to be debated from afar,” wrote Media Matters’ LGBTQ+ Program Director Ari Drennen in a post to X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday. Every anti-trans bill affects living, breathing people whose voices and stories deserve to be heard and told.
