Searching for liberation in The Times.
Deep breath. Pamela Paul reentered the chat.
I have real deep love for The New York Times.
I’m a proud subscriber, a nerd about their bylines, and an admirer of their branding. Fifteen years ago, I was so excited about my first home delivery that I took multiple pictures of the shiny blue plastic-wrapped NYT on my Oakland doorstep. The Sunday Times became such a meaningful part of our courtship that my future wife and I staged a series of engagement photos on a Dolores Park bench, reading the paper. (Thanks, Mel!) There’s a NYT mug in my cabinet, often a grey NYT hat on my head. (Thanks, Dev!) NYT podcasts on repeat (Ezra, Hard Fork, The Daily, Matter of Opinion….) And—when I’m working from home—NYT’s 2018 “Truth” campaign anthem poster is visible behind me during video conferencing.
And, also—like nearly all great loves—it’s complicated. News from anywhere is frequently heartbreaking, but it feels worse when the coverage inflicts or perpetuates the pain.1
Over the past few years, I’ve felt an emotional shift in my community, especially amongst my trans friends, about the Times. So much so that now I think twice about putting on my beloved NYT hat before leaving the house.
This is not an explanation of how we got to this place but rather what it feels like to be here now. My original plan for today was to walk through all the steps I took to align the cards in my wallet with my male identity. I thought you might like to see it illustrated with a flow chart and cute drawings. You know how colleges banded together to create the Common App to make applying to school easier? No such thing for transitioning! It’s a bureaucratic mess. (States rights!?!) And thanks to a bunch of politicians who continue to use trans folks as a distraction and fundraising tactic—it’s getting worse!
Just this week alone:
Florida’s Director of the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles issued a memo forbidding any gender marker changes on driver’s licenses
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds introduced a bill banning trans folks from changing the gender marker on their license unless they had surgery, and if/when they do, trans folks would have to list both
You might have missed these headlines; I found neither story covered by The New York Times. (Thank you again,
, for your reporting.)Instead, here’s what I did find on the NYT app this week:
And then, here it is this morning in my paper. (With a notably friendlier headline.)
Roughly 4,500 words framed around trans activists and health care practitioners harming children. Ooof. Before I go any further, and lest you stop reading here, please know that
did the lord’s work and fact-checked the entire essay within hours of publication. (Which I used to mark up my copy.) TL;DR Pamela is relying on retracted papers, anecdata from detransitioners, and debunked science to continue cast doubt on the validity of trans experiences. Pamela is a persuasive writer; she’s got the NYT masthead distributing her messages, and if you squint your eyes, you can’t convince me that this essay was written by someone who genuinely wants trans people to thrive.Despite my heavy consumption of NYT content, Pamela Paul’s byline was not on my radar until my friend Kyle Lukoff sat in my kitchen one afternoon and caught me up on her series of columns taking aim at transgender people. Kyle and Pamela are well-known to one another. Kyle is an award-winning children’s and middle-grade author (and himself trans); Pamela joined the paper as a children’s book editor of The New York Times Book Review before becoming an opinion columnist in 2022. That first year on the desk she wrote “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count” a defensive essay arguing that trans folks’ efforts to make language more inclusive was instead a tactic of erasure and a movement “parsing women into organs.” Pamela is not the only, nor indeed the first, to make this case—see also the swirl J.K. Rowling lives in—but she is doing it with The New York Times’ brand and reach.
I spent most of Saturday writing my take on Pamela’s latest column but gave up and started over. I should have heeded Kyle’s advice from a year ago, “it is a waste to spend my time in conversation with someone who is laying the intellectual groundwork for my elimination in the paper of record.”
Instead, I highly recommend you go back and read Lydia Polgreen’s brilliant rebuttal-in-advance (published December 4, 2023), where she observes, in the very same Opinion pages, that “The discrepancy between the number of children who medically transition and the attention paid to them in our politics is striking.”
Whereas Pamela claims to seek complicated conversations but only spotlights negative stories of gender-affirming care gone ‘wrong,’ Lydia makes a case for actual nuance around how gender functions in our society.
Girls and boys, women and men are enthusiastic and active participants in the construction of their gender identities, making small tweaks or wholesale changes to make the way they feel match the way they look. Maybe the way transgender and nonbinary people feel about their genders is no different from anyone else. It is confusing and contradictory. It feels deeply personal and yet built on the images and influences of our culture. It sets unreachable ideals and is subject to unpredictable variations that spread like wildfire. What is gender if not contagious? We catch it in the form of fads all the time, from the Beatles mop-top craze to Bama Rush.
Even if you believe that maybe Pamela has some good points and you are sympathetic to how fighting for trans survival might have somehow negatively impacted women at large, I urge you to read the actual words coming out of the Florida HSMV:
Furthermore, the term "gender" in s. 322.08, F.S., does not refer to a person's internal sense of his or her gender role or identification, but has historically and commonly been understood as a synonym for "sex," which is determined by innate and immutable biological and genetic characteristics. Additionally, a driver license is an identification document and, as such, serves a critical role in assisting public and private entities in correctly establishing the identity of a person presenting the license. Permitting an individual to alter his or her license to reflect an internal sense of gender role or identity, which is neither immutable nor objectively verifiable, undermines the purpose of an identification record and can frustrate the state's ability to enforce its laws.
These political forces proposing record-breaking numbers of anti-trans policies and legislation are not a coalition dedicated to developing new, better standards of care for transgender kids and adults. They are working tirelessly to revert society back to rigidly defined gender roles. They are trying to reset American society to pre-Roe, pre-second-wave feminist times.2 Transgender folks are just the pawn du jour. And even if she doesn’t mean to, Pamela is fueling their fire.
ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio has been warning us of these efforts for years:
What concerns me, and what I have been writing about since 2016, is how the many failures to hold trans people in our full humanity — repeated over and over in media coverage — have created the conditions for the onslaught of attacks that trans people are currently experiencing at all levels of government.
There’s one truth that stands out in Pamela’s essay, a quote from one of her detransitioned subjects, Grace Powell:
“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one. It’s a mess.”
I agree. This situation is a mess. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. As Lydia explains, “Given the astonishing ferocity of the legislative assault on transgender people right now, and the need to secure even the most basic protections, much of the activism around transgender issues has understandably focused on survival over liberation.”
I don’t believe Pamela and her supporters are focused on my liberation, or yours. These are conversations about control and restriction. Listen to Lydia’s conversation with writer Masha Gessen (or read the transcript) from NYT’s The Ezra Klein Show back in October.
LYDIA POLGREEN: Why are we talking about gender right now? Why is gender the thing that has — I don’t know — seized the conservative imagination? Why is this assault on gender-nonconforming people, trans people, queer people happening in the world right now? What’s your theory?
MASHA GESSEN: So my theory is that autocrats and aspiring autocrats need an effective way of communicating a very simple idea, which is I can take you back to an imaginary past. And in this particular case, they’re saying, I can take you back to an imaginary past where women were women, and men were men, and families were families, and life was predictable. And you felt comfortable, and you didn’t have to accept things that made you uncomfortable and made the future seem unpredictable.
And importantly, you didn’t have to fear that there will be such a chasm between you and your child that you will not understand each other. And all of that, that whole big promise of past-oriented politics can be communicated with this very simple strategy of attacking trans people, in particular, but then all of what they call gender ideology and L.G.B.T. rights.
Please, keep listening—it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s let an actual trans-identified person have the last word here:
MASHA GESSEN: It’s certainly the easiest way to make the argument. But I have an issue actually with the rights-based discourse in the first place. I would really much rather live inside a liberatory discourse than a rights-based discourse. That’s what I thought I was signing up for.
LYDIA POLGREEN: Right, and you signed up for it, I mean, as a very young person working in the gay and lesbian press in — what year was your first job in journalism?
MASHA GESSEN: 1983.
LYDIA POLGREEN: OK. Yeah.
MASHA GESSEN: And I was 16.
LYDIA POLGREEN: Right. [LAUGHS] Precocious. So you felt like you were signing up for liberation.
MASHA GESSEN: And instead, I got the right to marry, which is great. I got the right to serve in the military. Also, not terrible, if not for me, personally. But yeah, no, that’s — I didn’t get a redefined family. I didn’t get a redefined concept of gender. I didn’t get a redefined understanding of kinship and community, like all the things that I thought I was actually going to get by joining this movement. So I have a chip on my shoulder about that.
But I think we, the L.G.B.T. rights movement, by choosing that strategy, fundamentally changed people’s lives for the better for millions of people. I mean, the gains in a single lifetime have been staggering.
But we also set a trap for ourselves, which I think we’re seeing now with trans issues. And that’s the immutability trap. We’re so used to arguing, we don’t really know how to argue anything else — that you’re born in the wrong body, that — and that is — I don’t mean to say that that is not true for some people. For some people, it is absolutely true. But it’s entirely possible that those are the people who fall into the safe, legal and rare category.
And there’s an entire spectrum of people who transition for other reasons, for a combination of reasons, who at some point, at least, experience it as a choice. And we don’t know how to see our way to that. That creates a lot of difficulties because it’s very difficult, for example, to argue that a nonbinary person was born in the wrong body, because how do you even do that?
See you next week,
xx Kyle
There are many reasons to critique NYT’s coverage around a range of issues. Now, in the past, and undoubtedly forever into the future.
In some cases, people openly discuss rolling back the first wave of the feminist movement. If you want your head to burst, listen to the top of Dan Savage’s latest podcast episode, where he clipped a pastor from Texas who regularly rants that women should not be allowed to vote because “women’s suffrage led to women’s suffering.”
I was hoping, wishing and praying you’d address this this week!!! Thank you!
Thank you for this. I am working on something for Wednesday and it really helped me wrap my head around a bunch of pieces of it. I'm going to link to it. Thank you thank you.