UNITED STATES: The New York Times’ standards editor received an open letter on Wednesday from almost 1,000 authors, tens of thousands of subscribers, and readers criticizing the newspaper’s treatment of transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons.
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a non-profit group, put together a second letter on Wednesday criticizing the Times for its “irresponsible and biased coverage of transgender people.”
“GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’ journalistic mission are different,” according to The Times, which claims that its reporting is nuanced and fair.
“As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues, such as profiling movement trailblazers, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with care debates,” Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communications, said in a statement distributed to several media outlets.
The Times has recently published several articles and opinion pieces on transgender adolescents’ healthcare. Many Times reporters “cover trans issues fairly,” according to the contributors’ letter. Still, the newspaper and some individual reporters were criticized for running “over 15,000 words of front-page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children” over the previous eight months. As of late Friday, 30,000 people had signed that letter, including Roxane Gay, Cynthia Nixon, and Chelsea Manning.
The Times’ expanded coverage comes at a time when the GOP’s election campaign has increasingly focused on making fun of trans people. Republican state lawmakers are putting forward laws that have never been done before to control how transgender students are treated in public schools and how much medical care transgender people can get from doctors.
In his letter, the author says that the Times’ reporting has been used to support anti-trans laws, such as in an amicus brief from Alabama’s Republican attorneys general in support of an anti-trans law.
In their letter, the contributors criticized the Times for acting like gender diversity was something new. They said that the paper’s current editors are making the same mistakes they did when they first wrote about gay rights and the AIDS epidemic.
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