More than 180 contributors to the New York Times wrote a letter to Times leadership earlier this year (2/15/23), raising “serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people.” LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD (2/15/23) made similar arguments in a separate letter.
Both letters highlighted a few particular articles and writers, but described an overall pattern of, in the GLAAD letter’s words, “repeatedly platform[ing] cisgender (non-transgender) people spreading inaccurate and harmful misinformation.”
A FAIR critique (6/23/22) of a New York Times story on trans healthcare.
Many critics, including FAIR (e.g., 6/23/22, 12/16/22), have offered detailed critiques of many of these pieces and writers. This study seeks to document the Times‘ bias in numbers by comparing it to its closest competitor: the Washington Post.
Both elite papers have a national audience and closely cover national political stories—which puts the right’s campaign to criminalize transness very much in their line. And both have a recent history of ceding the framework of their trans coverage to the right wing, as a political football rather than an attack on trans people’s right to bodily autonomy and self-determination (FAIR.org, 5/6/21).
But looking at a full year of front-page coverage from the two papers reveals that, while both papers still need to do a much better job of including trans and nonbinary sources, the Post has given trans issues significantly more attention than the Times, and with an approach largely focused on the right-wing political campaign against trans people. The Times, meanwhile, used its front-page coverage primarily to wonder whether trans people’s rights and access to healthcare have gone too far.
Front-page frequency
FAIR examined all front-page stories at the New York Times and Washington Post that centered on transgender and nonbinary people, and the politics and events engulfing them, from April 2022 through March 2023. While not capturing the entirety of a paper’s coverage of an issue, front-page coverage reveals both how important editors believe an issue to be and which angles of that story they believe to be most newsworthy. The Post put trans-centered stories on its front page 22 times during that year-long period; at the Times, trans issues were deemed front-page news only nine times.
Likewise, the Post ran more front-page stories that were primarily about other issues but mentioned the word “transgender,” with 54 to the Times‘ 30. This suggests that not only did the Post take trans-focused stories to be more newsworthy than the Times, it also is paying closer attention to the way trans rights weave into other stories, such as the larger web of right-wing strategies of scapegoating and censorship.
(The Times did finally publish an article on its front page analyzing the increasing centrality of trans issues to the GOP, after the study period—4/16/23.)
Quantity of coverage doesn’t necessarily translate to quality of coverage; after all, a previous FAIR study (5/5/22) found right-wing Breitbart covering trans issues more than either centrist paper, but in a way that didn’t even pretend to treat its subjects with respect.
However, the distinction between the Post and the Times on front-page trans coverage is also one of quality, with the Post—while still problematic at times—clearly coming out on top.
GOP-friendly framing
The New York Times headline (1/23/23) framed trans students’ right to privacy as a “clash” between parents and schools—rather than centering the people most directly concerned.
Republicans have introduced more than 500 anti-trans bills in 49 states, 63 of which have passed to date this year. They target such rights as trans people’s right to healthcare, to use the bathroom appropriate to their gender identity, to compete in school sports, to be free from discrimination, and to protect their privacy if they are not out to their parents.
These relentless attacks, dressed up in the language of “grooming,” “parents’ rights” and “protecting girls,” demonize and directly harm trans people, particularly trans youth, who already face staggeringly high rates of attempted suicide and homelessness. According to 2022 surveys by the Trevor Project, nearly one in five trans and nonbinary youth have attempted suicide, and 35–39% of trans and nonbinary youth have experienced homelessness and housing instability.
The New York Times, though, has decided that the news about trans issues that’s worthy of the front page is not, primarily, the massive right-wing anti-trans political push and its impact on those it targets, but whether trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly.
The Times‘ headlines tell much of the story:
- “Much Debate but Little Dialogue on Transgender Female Athletes” (5/29/22)
- “Number of Youths Who Identify as Transgender Doubles in US” (6/11/22)
- “Pressing Pause on Puberty” (11/22/22)
- “Parents and Schools Clash on Gender Identity” (1/23/23)
Only two of the paper’s nine front-page headlines (“Swimming Body Bars Most Transgender Women,” 6/20/22; “Roe’s Reversal Stokes Attacks on Gay Rights,” 7/23/22) even began to hint at the dire situation faced by trans people today as a result of the war waged against them by the far right. Even these fell woefully short, with the second of the two not even naming trans people. Neither headlined the perspectives of trans people in the United States or those fighting alongside them.
In contrast, the Post‘s front page abounded with such stories—fourteen of the 22 headlines referenced political or physical anti-trans attacks, and ten centered the personal experiences or perspectives of trans people and their allies. “She Just Wants to Play” (9/1/22, about a trans athlete), “Virginia Restricts Rights of Transgender Students” (9/18/22) and “For Trans CPS Worker, Texas Order Was a Test of the Soul” (9/25/22) all appeared on the paper’s prime real estate in a single month.
The third story explained how Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents of trans children for potential “child abuse.” Defending its order in court, the state offered a prominent New York Times article by Emily Bazelon (6/15/22; see FAIR.org, 6/23/22) as evidence that gender-affirming care for trans youth is controversial among medical providers. (It is not.)
That same month, the Times‘ only front-page trans-focused story, “Breast Removal Surgery on Rise for Trans Teens” (9/26/22), worried whether too many trans youth were able to access gender-affirming care. Not once has the Times put the Texas directive story on its front page—or mentioned its own role in the story anywhere in the paper.
Beyond the headlines
When you move past the headlines, the contrasts between the papers persist.
The Times‘ September piece on gender-affirming surgery devoted several paragraphs to people who came to regret having had the surgery. In reality, such experiences are highly uncommon–it’s far more common for trans people to want surgery and be unable to access it than it is for someone to access it and later regret it. A recent systematic review of 27 studies found the prevalence of regret was only 1%; the most recent National Center for Transgender Equality survey (2016) found that more than half of trans people who sought coverage for gender-affirming surgery in the previous year were denied.
Yet “detransitioners” are held up by the anti-trans movement as a key reason to drastically limit or halt all access to gender-affirming care. Offering them a prominent place in such a piece—and not highlighting any trans people who wanted surgery and were unable to access it—skews readers’ perceptions of the most pressing issues surrounding such care.
In the first Times front-page article appearing during the study period (5/29/22), reporter Michael Powell began by describing members of Princeton University’s women’s swim team who “spoke of collective frustration edging into anger” about a record-breaking trans swimmer on a competing team. Powell closed the piece with another cisgender source who found Thomas’s participation not “fair.”
In between, Powell set up the debate over trans participation in college sports:
The battle over whether to let female transgender athletes compete in women’s elite sports has reached an angry pitch, a collision of competing principles: the hard-fought-for right of women to compete in high school, college and pro sports versus a swelling movement to allow transgender athletes to compete in their chosen gender identities.
This is a distinctly right-wing framing, pitting the trans movement against women’s rights rather than recognizing that both trans people and cisgender women face widespread discrimination, in sports and beyond, based on their gender (and that trans women are women). Characterizing women’s right to compete in sports as “hard-fought-for,” in contrast to trans gender identities as “chosen,” suggests that those identities themselves are not hard-fought-for, but simply a whim—or even, as anti-trans sources often argue or imply, a way of skirting those Title IX protections.
Two-thirds of trans youth featured in this New York Times story (11/14/22) stopped puberty-blocking treatment; in a medical study, 1.6% of patients receiving such treatment did so.
Powell’s other front-page piece about trans issues, “Vanishing Word in the Abortion Debate: Women” (6/9/22), offered the same transgender-versus-women framing, this time pitting “allies and activists for transgender people” against “feminists.”
Or take the article “Pressing Pause on Puberty” (11/14/22), which ran online under the more revealing headline, “They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?” The investigation was so lengthy it spilled across three pages after the jump, incorporating 18 quoted sources. Only one was a transgender youth happy with her gender-affirming care. Three youths who had undergone treatment with puberty blockers in total were profiled (one anonymously and quoting only her parents); two of those three experienced negative side effects that caused them to stop treatment, and one later detransitioned.
That setup alone suggests far more danger and dissatisfaction with puberty blockers (and youth transition in general) than actually exists: A recent study (Journal of Sexual Medicine, 1/26/23) found that of 882 youth who received puberty blockers at a Dutch clinic between 1997 and 2018, only 14 discontinued treatment. That’s 1.6%, compared to the Times article’s 67%. The misleading methods and inaccurate science in the piece, which was quickly spread approvingly by right-wing media, were lambasted at length by trans medical experts.
The Times, maliciously or ignorantly, published that piece during Trans Awareness Week.
Five days later, a gunman walked into LGBTQ venue Club Q in Colorado Springs and opened fire, killing five—including two trans people—and injuring many more. While the shooting made the Times‘ front page (11/21/22, 11/22/22), the word “transgender” was only mentioned incidentally both times, no identifiably trans or nonbinary people were quoted, and neither story brought up the heated political campaign against trans and queer people that served as a backdrop to the shooting.
A shift in perspective
In total, six of the Times‘ nine front-page articles about trans issues wove narratives of transition being risky, likely to be regretted, or prematurely forced onto unwitting youth (9/26/22, 11/22/22, 1/23/23), and/or of trans people threatening others’ rights, such as those of cisgender women and parents (5/29/22, 6/9/22, 7/21/22, 1/23/23). These six articles also consumed far more space in the paper than the other three, averaging 2,826 words versus 1,636, suggesting which kinds of stories about trans people the paper believes are most worthy of deep investigation.
Most of the Post‘s front-page coverage, in contrast, avoided anti-trans framings—with two noteworthy exceptions. The first article in the study period, “In Lessons on Sexuality, the Right Sees ‘Grooming'” (4/9/22), was the focus of a FAIR Action Alert (4/12/22) for its egregious both-sidesing of a story in which the bigoted “side” was given the more prominent platform. As FAIR wrote:
Writers Hannah Natanson and Moriah Balingit (4/5/22) spent the first 12 paragraphs of their article describing and quoting the right-wing claims that teachers talking about gender identity or sexual orientation—and those who support them—”want children primed for sexual abuse.”…
Of those most directly impacted by the bills, no LGBTQ students and only one openly LGBTQ educator were quoted.
The Post did not publicly acknowledge the criticism, but its next front-page trans story, “Grooming Claims Part of Anti-LGBTQ Push in GOP” (4/21/22), revisited the same story with a different reporter and a different framing. Colby Itkowitz began with a Democratic state senator denouncing Republican “grooming” claims, and characterized those claims as “baseless tropes” in the reporter’s own voice in the third paragraph. Itkowitz explained:
The efforts ahead of the midterm elections are intended to rile up the GOP base and fill the coffers of its candidates, without offering evidence that any Democrat had committed a repugnant crime.
Several GOP sources were quoted making anti-LGBTQ claims, but the Post‘s presentation of them made clear they were false, “audacious,” trafficking in conspiracy theories, or “intended to denigrate transgender or nonbinary people.”
Later, an article about whether schools should be required to out transgender students to their parents, “Schools Face ‘High-Wire Act’ When Kids Say They’re Trans” (7/26/22), framed the story in a somewhat similar way to the Times‘ version (1/23/23), pitting trans students’ rights against parents’ rights. But the Post article opened and closed with a trans youth’s perspective, where the Times piece bookended its article from the view of a parent upset with their trans child’s school for not outing the child to them. The Times piece closed:
“The school is telling me that I have to jump on the bandwagon and be completely supportive,” Mrs. Bradshaw said. “There is only so much and so far that I’m willing to go right now and I would hope that, as a parent, that would be my decision.”
Few trans sources
One area where the Post still falls far short is in sourcing. Only 35 of their 243 sources (14%) in these front-page stories about trans issues were trans or nonbinary themselves. The Times did slightly better on this front, as 22 of its 116 sources (19%) were identifiably trans or nonbinary.
Yet, as described above, the Times also included three people who regretted their decision and detransitioned, offering a misleading picture of actual rates of such experiences.
No people who had detransitioned were featured in Post front-page stories during the study time period. (The Post did feature a person describing regrets over their transition on its op-ed page—4/11/22. Both papers have featured multiple anti-trans perspectives on their opinion pages over the past year, none so frequently as new Times columnist Pamela Paul, who pushed anti-trans narratives in no fewer than six columns during the study period.)
The Post also included 36 (15%) representatives of advocacy organizations fighting for LGBTQ rights (eight of whom were also trans or nonbinary themselves). At the Times, there were nine (8%) representatives of LGBTQ advocacy organizations (two of whom were trans).
The Post and Times featured similar percentages of family members of trans youth, with 17 (7%) at the Post and nine (8%) at the Times. But this category served very different purposes at the two papers.
Six of those nine family members featured by the Times expressed concerns, doubts or disapproval of their child’s transition, or of how it was handled by gender-affirming doctors or schools. In contrast, only two of the Post‘s 17 family members expressed such concerns, both in a single story (7/26/22) about school policies on whether schools should out trans youth to their parents. In the Post, the majority of family members talked about government attacks on their children, such as the push by Texas to take trans children away from their parents (9/25/22), or legislation to ban gender-affirming healthcare in Missouri (3/1/23) and Kentucky (3/26/23).
Many parents of trans and nonbinary kids have misgivings about their child’s gender identity. Indeed, less than a third of trans and nonbinary kids find their home gender-affirming, according to the 2022 Trevor Project survey—and the survey also found that those without strong support at home report suicide rates significantly higher than those with that support. When reporting on trans youth and the political and cultural attacks on them, it’s important for reporters to remember whose concerns ought to be at the center of the story.
Speaking for themselves
Despite the Post‘s coverage overall being much less problematic than the Times, this isn’t the first time FAIR has found the Post failing to give trans people the right to speak for themselves. When Texas issued a directive insisting that families with trans kids be investigated for potential “child abuse,” FAIR (5/22/22) found that while the Post ran more stories on it than the Times, its percentage of trans sources (8%) was not only far lower than the Times (27%), it was even lower than that of Breitbart (11%), and tied with the right-wing Daily Caller.
A year earlier, a FAIR analysis (5/16/21) of Post and Times coverage of trans youth likewise found both papers failed to center trans kids, declining to give them (and other trans people) a voice in coverage directly about them.
The Washington Post (3/23/23) noted that its survey found that “the vast majority of trans adults say they were happier than before they transitioned.”
While trans people have come under such vitriolic attack that it would be understandable if many—especially trans youth—would not want to be publicly interviewed by a national newspaper, it’s still critically important that journalists make every effort to let trans people speak for themselves in stories that focus on trans lives and rights, and the Post needs to do better.
The last two front-page pieces of the study period offered a hopeful sign. These two came from a new “Trans in America” series prominently featured on the Post‘s Gender and Identity webpage, built off of a survey (3/22/23) the paper conducted with health polling firm KFF. Post social issues editor Annys Shin (3/23/23) explained the project:
Since January, state legislators have introduced more than 200 bills that seek to limit transgender rights, whether it is access to gender-affirming care, what children can learn about transgender identity in schools or whether trans girls can play sports.
In this atmosphere of intense polarization around transgender rights, the Washington Post and KFF set out to hear what transgender Americans had to say, on topics ranging from their experiences as children in school to navigating the workplace, the doctor’s office and family relationships as adults. The resulting Post/KFF Trans Survey, which also includes responses from cisgender Americans on trans-related restrictions, is the largest nongovernmental survey of US trans adults to rely on random sampling methods.
This is how responsible journalism is conducted: Take a pressing political issue, identify who is most impacted, and listen to—and amplify—their perspectives. The first article of the series, “In Survey, Most Say Life Is Better After Transition” (3/24/23), featured six sources, all of them trans. The piece described in detail the discrimination and harassment trans people face, and also the relief that transition brings: “Yet most trans adults say transitioning has made them more satisfied with their lives.” It’s a take that was virtually nowhere to be found on the Times front page during the entire year.
It’s up to the Post now to make sure it continues to center trans voices in its coverage of the attacks on their lives. (The paper’s most recent front-page article on trans issues shows that’s far from inevitable—see Present Age, 5/8/23.)
Impact of activism?
Recent New York Times coverage of trans issues (e.g., 4/16/23) has included the political context that has often been missing.
In response to the letters about its anti-trans coverage, Times leadership forcefully denied any wrongdoing and attempted to silence their critics, threatening retaliation for speaking out against the paper (FAIR.org, 2/17/23).
Yet perhaps the letters did have an impact, as the paper also published three front-page stories on trans rights and politics after the conclusion of the study period, all of which avoided the “just asking questions” approach criticized by the letter-writers: “Conflict Over Transgender Care Brings Statehouse to a Standstill” (4/1/23), “Trans Athletes Facing Limits in Biden Plan” (4/7/23) and “How Transgender Issues Became a New Rallying Cry for the Right” (4/16/23).
As this study shows, such coverage is markedly different from what the Times has been publishing on its front page for the past year. That coverage has systematically underplayed the story of the right-wing assault on trans people, and centered anti-trans framings and perspectives. This has directly fed into the anti-trans panic and the state repression of trans rights and lives, with some laws and directives explicitly referencing Times reporting to support their claims (GLAAD, 4/19/23).
While the Times has been “just asking questions” about trans people on its front page, trans and nonbinary people and the families who support them have seen their lives being torn apart by the steady march of backlash across the country.
Research assistance: Kat Sewon Oh, Conor Smyth
Note: Article dates referenced are print dates. Web version dates (and headlines) often differ.
The post NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias—by the Numbers appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.
Julie Hollar | Radio Free (2023-05-11T22:32:14+00:00) NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias—by the Numbers – A FAIR study comparing front-page transgender coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/11/nyts-anti-trans-bias-by-the-numbers-a-fair-study-comparing-front-page-transgender-coverage-in-the-new-york-times-and-washington-post/
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