Shame on the New York Times

The paper's response to a letter decrying its anti-trans coverage was disgraceful.

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On Wednesday, nearly 200 contributors to The New York Times made a simple argument to the paper’s leadership: that its breathless coverage of transgender children and trans healthcare is biased.

What other conclusion can you draw, given the relentless string of Times stories raising supposedly troubling concerns about trans people? Or the staggering statistic calculated by Popula’s Tom Scocca that the paper has run some 15,000 words worth of front-page stories “asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”?

Rather than engage with the letter, though, the Times instead chose to patronize and dismiss its critics. To make matters worse, it then published even more transphobic content just 24 hours after the letter dropped. It all adds up to a disgraceful display of institutional arrogance.

Here’s how this fiasco unfolded.