More than 200 New York Times contributors have signed an open letter published Wednesday calling out the legacy newspaper for its coverage of transgender issues.
In the letter addressed to the Times’ associate managing editor for standards, the contributors say they have “serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.”
Prominent Times writers, including opinion contributor Roxane Gay and culture journalists J Wortham and Dave Itzkoff, as well as occasional contributors such as Ed Yong of The Atlantic and Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker, signed the letter. While such a public rebuke of their editors is rare, journalists at The Times and elsewhere have become increasingly more willing to openly challenge newsroom leaders ever since the racial justice movement of 2020.
In the letter, they say the Times has treated coverage of gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language,” and recent reporting has omitted some sources’ associations with anti-trans groups.
They say, for example, a January article by correspondent Katie Baker that focused on the challenges schools face when students change their gender identity without their parents knowledge “misframed” the issue and failed to make clear that related lawsuits brought by parents against school districts are part of a legal strategy tied to groups that have identified trans people as an “existential threat.“
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