I almost got kicked out of grad school (a top counseling program) for questioning affirmative care for youth. My classmates “as trans allies felt unsafe” when I shared articles about countries in Europe rolling back on their interventions. I often wonder if those former classmates now have a part of them that feels uncomfortable, if they are getting some of the info that is now trickling out. I’m looking forward to your receipts posts, Lisa. I’m so grateful you’ve been steadfast in this fight for truth and ethical practice!
First of all, “At any rate, I’m not usually listed among the important writers on the subject, simply because I could not get these articles published—despite the fact that I have never tried harder at anything in my whole life.”
Don’t do this to yourself Lisa. We know that you’ve been here, knocking at the door. Screaming into the void. For years. To me, and a helluva lot of other people, you are absolutely one of the most important writers in this space.
Canadian, btw. Part of a small group that wrote letters to Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, CBC and Global, among others.
I hand delivered copies of Time to Think with letters that basically said, Look. A British writer already wrote -a whole book- about gender ID and young people. You can do the same thing for Canada. Use this book as a helpful guide!
I remember requesting my public library purchase that book. Along with many others on the subject ‘request denied’ or ‘not available from our approved list of vendors’
Did you try the "sent" folder of your email? The other thing to try to recollect is if you have a close friend or colleague that you would have shared the pieces with and check with them or again, check your "sent" folder under their names. I would love to see your attempts too, especially the early ones when you were still with WoLF. WoLF may have records too, if you used a different email address back then. Your attempts should be part of the historical record.
"...or wouldn’t assign it to liberals who would pierce the protective forcefield of the left-versus-right framing."
Bingo.
I remember Bazelon's piece, and it was sub-par and obvious she didn't know the lay of the land. Whereas you were an early adopter of reality-based thinking. I imagine you were more of a threat to that forcefield.
Over the years I have written several letters to the editors at NPR and the PBS Newshour and once to producers at Last Week Tonight. I've had announcements censored on professional listservs. Here is my most recent shout into the wind from last August to the New Yorker:
To the editors of The New Yorker:
This letter is for the editorial and writing staff with no expectation of publication.
I read Sam Wolson’s piece “A Mother and her Trans Teen Decide to Leave the U.S” in my TNY Daily email yesterday. It is a tragic, heartbreaking story, beautifully rendered by Wolson. It sounds like this teenager does not want to leave home but mom believes it is in the teen’s best interest. She has “done her research,” thought long and hard about this decision. This parent has only ever done what she believes is the right thing to do (as I believe we all do) and has based her decisions on what her cultural and social surround have told her is right and good. I don’t blame this parent. But, like all of us parents, she will someday have to reckon with the decisions she has made.
This story is a compound tragedy. Today I am calling out the journalists and cultural messengers who continue to promulgate the unfalsifiable, unexamined belief that a gender non-conforming child should be medicalized.
According to Wolson’s story, this child “came out” as trans at 11 years old and had a double mastectomy at 13 years old and is taking non-endogenous hormones. Is the only story to be explored here about how the truly horrendous behavior of President Trump and his Project 2025 administration is affecting people?
I am a life-long liberal and duly horrified that our country elected an imbecile who is doing irreparable harm to so many and so much. The 2024 election results are complex to be sure, but I believe the reason Trump was able to garner just enough votes to put him over the edge (and cause enough liberals to abstain from voting) is because of the widespread unexamined belief that medicalizing gender non-conformity in children is a legitimate and appropriate practice. Though the administration’s rhetoric is terrible, on this issue the underlying concern is accurate. Many of us liberals have been trying to get people to look more critically at this issue since long before the 2024 election. Because reporters and cultural voices like The New Yorker would not, we now have a second Trump administration and a subservient, idiotic Republican Party in power.
If journalists and thoughtful writers explore and examine this belief, they will find that it is just that: a belief. There is no evidence anywhere that a human (or any living thing) is “born in the wrong body.”
If an adult, once fully sexually matured, decides that surgically and chemically altering their body helps them live more adaptively, that is for an adult to decide. No adults should be making decisions that lead to young people to permanently chemically and surgically alter their healthy bodies before they are sexually mature and equipped to make decisions for themselves about how to live. Puberty and adolescence is a transformative period in human development. It is awkward and strange and sometimes painful – but it is normal.
“Tina and JJ” are in trouble because Tina currently believes in a false god. Please stop valorizing their situation. Protect them by NOT publishing such stories.
Protect them and our democracy by practicing journalism and actually investigating this belief system. Some on your staff may have medicalized children as well so taking the courageous step to investigate this phenomenon will be painful for all. But real journalism is about exploring and understanding, not reifying or foreclosing the status quo. As a clinical psychologist, it was painful for me to realize I had been believing and spreading ideas that are harmful but I have come through that pain; you can too.
If none of your staff has the courage to do this reporting, ask Lisa Selin Davis or Jesse Singal to write the piece for The New Yorker.
What I see continue to happen is Democrats and "Liberals" continue to ignore the science. Look at Hilary Clinton at the Munich Security Council last week -- that panel she hosted spun a long and complicated story about "right wing" attacks on women and gender, completely conflating the two and refusing to even consider for one second how "trans rights" usurp women's rights. The discussion ensued in the wake of advisory vote by the European Parliament to go on the offense to assert trans rights in the international arena. It ensued also in the wake of the Am. Society of Plastic Surgeons renouncing pediatric "gender" surgeries. And in the wake of how many systematic reviews that show GAC is harmful? Ditto the House "transbill of rights" advanced by Jayapal and many many Democratic co-sponsors. As though they are completely deaf to the medical scandal. ... They interpret the push-back from medical science as just more anti-trans politics, not as evidence of actual harm to actual children and vulnerable youth, not to mention the harms of short-circuiting women's rights in favor of trans. ...
So, cracking that Democratic resistance has not yet happened. Cancellations of your "good person" card can still happen to those who speak out in public against GAC.
They don't only ignore the science (and history) of pediatric medical transition, they also completely fail to see the fundamental lack of logic within the concept of "transgenderism" itself. Jaypal's public statement that her 22-year-old son "came out" to her as "gender non-conforming" is a testament to the core confusion from which all "Liberals" seem to suffer: the failure to understand that gender non-conformity is not the same as "trans", and that "trans" is in fact the negation of gender non-conformity, by exercising the need to "transition" in order to conform to stereotypes of the other sex. Their complete blindness to the assault on women's rights displays a similar lack of critical thinking.
Unfortunately, none of this is surprising to me, having observed my political side's ideologically-driven faux embrace of "following the science" during Covid, which was what peaked me with regard to gender (yeah, I was really oblivious to the problems with the whole "trans" phenomenon before that, vaguely thinking of it as related to gay rights).
To see the EU double down on this insanity is really disheartening. I have to imagine that every parliamentarian now suffers from "non-binary niece disorder" or a similar affliction. And with the new generation of young people who have been indoctrinated from an early age starting to run society, I'm not sure if things won't get worse rather than better. Those autogynephiles who started it all a few decades ago sure have done a hell of a job of their propaganda campaign.
"that "trans" is in fact the negation of gender non-conformity, by exercising the need to "transition" in order to conform to stereotypes of the other sex."
Bingo!!
I have argued this with my liberal, 'trans rallies' friends for years, and they actually say they get that, but they are also too afraid to contradict the team mantra. (Or appear to be a Trump fan.)
I tried it with my sister and didn't break through. She was too fixated on the belief that her daughter's boyfriend who thinks he's a woman has an innate female soul, just like those trans people who "have existed for thousands of years"...
I spent much of 2023 trying to get liberal outlets to accept a very anodyne pitch about what it’s like for pediatricians to work with this new population of kids with gender dysphoria. Everyone was too afraid of the subject and I finally just gave up on the pitch and started writing for conservative outlets on the subject.
Receipt from a group of SF ROGD parents who spoke to CA State Senator Scott Wiener’s office staff and shared evidence against medical and social transition of young people. Scott Wiener, now running for Pelosi’s seat in Congress to represent San Francisco, continues to run on a platform that supports pediatric medical transition. (See Helen Lewis’ latest piece on Scott Wiener in the Atlantic). https://open.substack.com/pub/sashaaguilar/p/meeting-with-california-state-senator?r=9benm&utm_medium=ios
Yes- Saikat , a socialist millionaire who worked on AOC’s campaign and sends his students to private school and Connie Chan, a current SF supervisor who appears to be favored by Nancy Pelosi and the unions.
Please don't forget that you have been publishing some of the key articles on it, in the Skeptic and then in the Boston Globe, which had great investigative work by you and by Jennifer Block.
But yes, the news organizations (most impactfully the NYT) could have stopped the destruction of lives--health-families-and sometimes even literally lives- years ago by just doing their job. And the left-right framing continues and will continue to harm these kids. It's on them.
Looking forward to seeing more of your great writing on this!
Oops. Put this in the wrong comment section at first.
This is a great idea. Following is a letter to the Yale Alum magazine that needless to say did not get printed:
As a clinical psychologist with over 35 years of working with adolescents and young adults, I eagerly yet also skeptically read Dr. Iarovici’s “Stressed: What’s Causing the Mental Health Crisis Among College Students?”
While I value her experience with this age group and embrace many of her ideas, my initial skepticism was validated by two facets of the piece — first, the assertion that “experiences of identity concealment or family rejection, and internalized LGBTQ+-phobia significantly affect psychological health in college,” and second, the mention of The Trevor Project as a beneficial LGBTQ resource.
Over the last decade, increasing numbers of college students have arrived on campus with transgender identities. The narrative is that these identities are inherent and immutable, and that parents who have not “affirmed” their children’s often sudden, post pubertal opposite or neither sex selves have “rejected” them and are bigoted and causing them harm.
The Trevor Project promotes the manipulatively false narrative that youth who are not affirmed in a transgender identity and who are prevented from medicalizing their inner gender identities are at high risk for completed suicide. Even the ACLU lawyer and activist, Chase Strangio, during recent oral arguments heard by the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, admitted that unaffirmed and unmedicalized trans identified children thankfully do not take their own lives at elevated rates. In fact, it is becoming more apparent that suicidal ideation and completed suicide increase after medical transition. But yet the narrative persists, and questioning, worried parents are vilified, new identities are medicalized, and underlying issues such as actual internalized homophobia (“trans the gay away”), sexual abuse, autism, eating disorders … go unexplored.
With the acceptance of gender ideology that permeates the article, seen in the mentions of “gender-fluidity” and college-aged people “of all genders,” the author misses an important source of some of their mental anguish— the “mass sociogenic illness” of trans identity (just like the infinitely more benign contagion of tic “disorders” the author cites). Vulnerable, identity-seeking youth, and also well-meaning “allies” determined not to repeat the horrors of homophobia, are not aware of the harmful repercussions of gender ideology, family estrangement, and hormonal and surgical interventions.
Bring on the receipts! They are part of the story that must eventually be told as history, and they can still change the trajectory. I admire your tenacity, your willingness to spend literally all of your professional capital as a previously vetted, respected, and published writer to try again and again to get through. That's a very small group of people, many who you must have known personally. Most of them said, "nope, not goin' there." Sanity and financial blows have been a huge cost to your one precious life, sacrificed for the sake of your integrity and the truth. I'm delighted to hear people are re-reading your pitch-perfect pitches. You are on the record, speaking for so many of us who wouldn't even have a chance to get our foot in the door. May sanity return.
In 2024, I was in talks with a liberal outlet to run an article about the battle over the definition of conversion therapy in the trans context. The outlet was so scared, I told them I'd write a dummy version of the article so they could get a very good sense of what the final product would look like. They thought about it for weeks and then said no. I eventually just dropped that text into this piece I did about the SCOTUS case on the subject: https://benryan.substack.com/p/supreme-court-to-hear-challenge-to
As for "or maybe they’re doing some CYA," it's all CYA. And as for " your own rejected letters to the editor, article pitches, or any other receipts," here are a few of mine:
Suspended from the Pennsylvania Psychological Association listserv after posting about this subject.
You're not the first person I've heard talk about that APA branch. https://benryan.substack.com/p/pennsylvania-psychological-association
Yes; the information that you received for that post was from me via a third party.
Ann, did that cancellation remove your license to practice? I hope you are pursuing legal recourse. ... You have a right to free speech.
No; I just was not allowed to post in the community listserv.
I almost got kicked out of grad school (a top counseling program) for questioning affirmative care for youth. My classmates “as trans allies felt unsafe” when I shared articles about countries in Europe rolling back on their interventions. I often wonder if those former classmates now have a part of them that feels uncomfortable, if they are getting some of the info that is now trickling out. I’m looking forward to your receipts posts, Lisa. I’m so grateful you’ve been steadfast in this fight for truth and ethical practice!
omg Lisa. I am -so- here for this.
First of all, “At any rate, I’m not usually listed among the important writers on the subject, simply because I could not get these articles published—despite the fact that I have never tried harder at anything in my whole life.”
Don’t do this to yourself Lisa. We know that you’ve been here, knocking at the door. Screaming into the void. For years. To me, and a helluva lot of other people, you are absolutely one of the most important writers in this space.
Canadian, btw. Part of a small group that wrote letters to Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, CBC and Global, among others.
I hand delivered copies of Time to Think with letters that basically said, Look. A British writer already wrote -a whole book- about gender ID and young people. You can do the same thing for Canada. Use this book as a helpful guide!
Crickets. No response at all.
I remember requesting my public library purchase that book. Along with many others on the subject ‘request denied’ or ‘not available from our approved list of vendors’
I don't think there's any way I could possibly find all the op eds and LTEs that went ignored for the past eleven years. I wish I could!
Did you try the "sent" folder of your email? The other thing to try to recollect is if you have a close friend or colleague that you would have shared the pieces with and check with them or again, check your "sent" folder under their names. I would love to see your attempts too, especially the early ones when you were still with WoLF. WoLF may have records too, if you used a different email address back then. Your attempts should be part of the historical record.
Thanks! I most likely have the receipts in my "Media" folder, but finding them would take forever. Maybe I'll give it a shot.
I would love you to do a concurrent Receipts Week! And get others to do it, too! Spread the word!
We need a Gender Heretics Day of Remembrance (or Remembering). It could be on 19 December, the anniversary of JKR's most famous tweet.
great idea!
Might not take as long as you think. Get a teenager to help--there are AI tools too that can help with searches.
You are my absolute hero. Keep at it. You are changing the world for the better. One story at a time.
"...or wouldn’t assign it to liberals who would pierce the protective forcefield of the left-versus-right framing."
Bingo.
I remember Bazelon's piece, and it was sub-par and obvious she didn't know the lay of the land. Whereas you were an early adopter of reality-based thinking. I imagine you were more of a threat to that forcefield.
Over the years I have written several letters to the editors at NPR and the PBS Newshour and once to producers at Last Week Tonight. I've had announcements censored on professional listservs. Here is my most recent shout into the wind from last August to the New Yorker:
To the editors of The New Yorker:
This letter is for the editorial and writing staff with no expectation of publication.
I read Sam Wolson’s piece “A Mother and her Trans Teen Decide to Leave the U.S” in my TNY Daily email yesterday. It is a tragic, heartbreaking story, beautifully rendered by Wolson. It sounds like this teenager does not want to leave home but mom believes it is in the teen’s best interest. She has “done her research,” thought long and hard about this decision. This parent has only ever done what she believes is the right thing to do (as I believe we all do) and has based her decisions on what her cultural and social surround have told her is right and good. I don’t blame this parent. But, like all of us parents, she will someday have to reckon with the decisions she has made.
This story is a compound tragedy. Today I am calling out the journalists and cultural messengers who continue to promulgate the unfalsifiable, unexamined belief that a gender non-conforming child should be medicalized.
According to Wolson’s story, this child “came out” as trans at 11 years old and had a double mastectomy at 13 years old and is taking non-endogenous hormones. Is the only story to be explored here about how the truly horrendous behavior of President Trump and his Project 2025 administration is affecting people?
I am a life-long liberal and duly horrified that our country elected an imbecile who is doing irreparable harm to so many and so much. The 2024 election results are complex to be sure, but I believe the reason Trump was able to garner just enough votes to put him over the edge (and cause enough liberals to abstain from voting) is because of the widespread unexamined belief that medicalizing gender non-conformity in children is a legitimate and appropriate practice. Though the administration’s rhetoric is terrible, on this issue the underlying concern is accurate. Many of us liberals have been trying to get people to look more critically at this issue since long before the 2024 election. Because reporters and cultural voices like The New Yorker would not, we now have a second Trump administration and a subservient, idiotic Republican Party in power.
If journalists and thoughtful writers explore and examine this belief, they will find that it is just that: a belief. There is no evidence anywhere that a human (or any living thing) is “born in the wrong body.”
If an adult, once fully sexually matured, decides that surgically and chemically altering their body helps them live more adaptively, that is for an adult to decide. No adults should be making decisions that lead to young people to permanently chemically and surgically alter their healthy bodies before they are sexually mature and equipped to make decisions for themselves about how to live. Puberty and adolescence is a transformative period in human development. It is awkward and strange and sometimes painful – but it is normal.
“Tina and JJ” are in trouble because Tina currently believes in a false god. Please stop valorizing their situation. Protect them by NOT publishing such stories.
Protect them and our democracy by practicing journalism and actually investigating this belief system. Some on your staff may have medicalized children as well so taking the courageous step to investigate this phenomenon will be painful for all. But real journalism is about exploring and understanding, not reifying or foreclosing the status quo. As a clinical psychologist, it was painful for me to realize I had been believing and spreading ideas that are harmful but I have come through that pain; you can too.
If none of your staff has the courage to do this reporting, ask Lisa Selin Davis or Jesse Singal to write the piece for The New Yorker.
Thank you for reading my letter.
Sincerely,
Mary, this is a fantastic letter.
A pox on their house.
Great letter!
LOL. Price is lost sanity indeed.
What I see continue to happen is Democrats and "Liberals" continue to ignore the science. Look at Hilary Clinton at the Munich Security Council last week -- that panel she hosted spun a long and complicated story about "right wing" attacks on women and gender, completely conflating the two and refusing to even consider for one second how "trans rights" usurp women's rights. The discussion ensued in the wake of advisory vote by the European Parliament to go on the offense to assert trans rights in the international arena. It ensued also in the wake of the Am. Society of Plastic Surgeons renouncing pediatric "gender" surgeries. And in the wake of how many systematic reviews that show GAC is harmful? Ditto the House "transbill of rights" advanced by Jayapal and many many Democratic co-sponsors. As though they are completely deaf to the medical scandal. ... They interpret the push-back from medical science as just more anti-trans politics, not as evidence of actual harm to actual children and vulnerable youth, not to mention the harms of short-circuiting women's rights in favor of trans. ...
So, cracking that Democratic resistance has not yet happened. Cancellations of your "good person" card can still happen to those who speak out in public against GAC.
Keep writing!!!
They don't only ignore the science (and history) of pediatric medical transition, they also completely fail to see the fundamental lack of logic within the concept of "transgenderism" itself. Jaypal's public statement that her 22-year-old son "came out" to her as "gender non-conforming" is a testament to the core confusion from which all "Liberals" seem to suffer: the failure to understand that gender non-conformity is not the same as "trans", and that "trans" is in fact the negation of gender non-conformity, by exercising the need to "transition" in order to conform to stereotypes of the other sex. Their complete blindness to the assault on women's rights displays a similar lack of critical thinking.
Unfortunately, none of this is surprising to me, having observed my political side's ideologically-driven faux embrace of "following the science" during Covid, which was what peaked me with regard to gender (yeah, I was really oblivious to the problems with the whole "trans" phenomenon before that, vaguely thinking of it as related to gay rights).
To see the EU double down on this insanity is really disheartening. I have to imagine that every parliamentarian now suffers from "non-binary niece disorder" or a similar affliction. And with the new generation of young people who have been indoctrinated from an early age starting to run society, I'm not sure if things won't get worse rather than better. Those autogynephiles who started it all a few decades ago sure have done a hell of a job of their propaganda campaign.
"that "trans" is in fact the negation of gender non-conformity, by exercising the need to "transition" in order to conform to stereotypes of the other sex."
Bingo!!
I have argued this with my liberal, 'trans rallies' friends for years, and they actually say they get that, but they are also too afraid to contradict the team mantra. (Or appear to be a Trump fan.)
I tried it with my sister and didn't break through. She was too fixated on the belief that her daughter's boyfriend who thinks he's a woman has an innate female soul, just like those trans people who "have existed for thousands of years"...
PLEASE stop using ambiguous acronyms such as "GAC".....what YOU call "affirming" is ALSO:
....gender denying, gender divisive, gender negating, gender reversing, gender destructive, gender undoing, gender altering, gender averse, etc., etc.,....
I spent much of 2023 trying to get liberal outlets to accept a very anodyne pitch about what it’s like for pediatricians to work with this new population of kids with gender dysphoria. Everyone was too afraid of the subject and I finally just gave up on the pitch and started writing for conservative outlets on the subject.
Receipt from a group of SF ROGD parents who spoke to CA State Senator Scott Wiener’s office staff and shared evidence against medical and social transition of young people. Scott Wiener, now running for Pelosi’s seat in Congress to represent San Francisco, continues to run on a platform that supports pediatric medical transition. (See Helen Lewis’ latest piece on Scott Wiener in the Atlantic). https://open.substack.com/pub/sashaaguilar/p/meeting-with-california-state-senator?r=9benm&utm_medium=ios
does he have a primary opponent?
Yes- Saikat , a socialist millionaire who worked on AOC’s campaign and sends his students to private school and Connie Chan, a current SF supervisor who appears to be favored by Nancy Pelosi and the unions.
None of them are good on this issue. Just more eager vs less eager.
Based on their policy pages out these 3 I'd choose Connie. She's less full-throated and specific and she has those union endorsements you mentioned.
Yes, I also believe she would be more receptive to holding conversations on this issue.
Lisa--you have done so much!
Please don't forget that you have been publishing some of the key articles on it, in the Skeptic and then in the Boston Globe, which had great investigative work by you and by Jennifer Block.
But yes, the news organizations (most impactfully the NYT) could have stopped the destruction of lives--health-families-and sometimes even literally lives- years ago by just doing their job. And the left-right framing continues and will continue to harm these kids. It's on them.
Looking forward to seeing more of your great writing on this!
Thank you!
Oops. Put this in the wrong comment section at first.
This is a great idea. Following is a letter to the Yale Alum magazine that needless to say did not get printed:
As a clinical psychologist with over 35 years of working with adolescents and young adults, I eagerly yet also skeptically read Dr. Iarovici’s “Stressed: What’s Causing the Mental Health Crisis Among College Students?”
While I value her experience with this age group and embrace many of her ideas, my initial skepticism was validated by two facets of the piece — first, the assertion that “experiences of identity concealment or family rejection, and internalized LGBTQ+-phobia significantly affect psychological health in college,” and second, the mention of The Trevor Project as a beneficial LGBTQ resource.
Over the last decade, increasing numbers of college students have arrived on campus with transgender identities. The narrative is that these identities are inherent and immutable, and that parents who have not “affirmed” their children’s often sudden, post pubertal opposite or neither sex selves have “rejected” them and are bigoted and causing them harm.
The Trevor Project promotes the manipulatively false narrative that youth who are not affirmed in a transgender identity and who are prevented from medicalizing their inner gender identities are at high risk for completed suicide. Even the ACLU lawyer and activist, Chase Strangio, during recent oral arguments heard by the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, admitted that unaffirmed and unmedicalized trans identified children thankfully do not take their own lives at elevated rates. In fact, it is becoming more apparent that suicidal ideation and completed suicide increase after medical transition. But yet the narrative persists, and questioning, worried parents are vilified, new identities are medicalized, and underlying issues such as actual internalized homophobia (“trans the gay away”), sexual abuse, autism, eating disorders … go unexplored.
With the acceptance of gender ideology that permeates the article, seen in the mentions of “gender-fluidity” and college-aged people “of all genders,” the author misses an important source of some of their mental anguish— the “mass sociogenic illness” of trans identity (just like the infinitely more benign contagion of tic “disorders” the author cites). Vulnerable, identity-seeking youth, and also well-meaning “allies” determined not to repeat the horrors of homophobia, are not aware of the harmful repercussions of gender ideology, family estrangement, and hormonal and surgical interventions.
Lisa (Melnick) Duval ‘88
Charlottesville, VA
Eventually some group of us should start a Substack or website, or both, called The Receipts: the debacle of gender-affirming care
Bring on the receipts! They are part of the story that must eventually be told as history, and they can still change the trajectory. I admire your tenacity, your willingness to spend literally all of your professional capital as a previously vetted, respected, and published writer to try again and again to get through. That's a very small group of people, many who you must have known personally. Most of them said, "nope, not goin' there." Sanity and financial blows have been a huge cost to your one precious life, sacrificed for the sake of your integrity and the truth. I'm delighted to hear people are re-reading your pitch-perfect pitches. You are on the record, speaking for so many of us who wouldn't even have a chance to get our foot in the door. May sanity return.
In 2024, I was in talks with a liberal outlet to run an article about the battle over the definition of conversion therapy in the trans context. The outlet was so scared, I told them I'd write a dummy version of the article so they could get a very good sense of what the final product would look like. They thought about it for weeks and then said no. I eventually just dropped that text into this piece I did about the SCOTUS case on the subject: https://benryan.substack.com/p/supreme-court-to-hear-challenge-to
The media outlet was so scared you offered to write a dummy version of the article?! And they considered it for weeks and chickened out?!
Good Lord Ben! These places used to be run by adults.
Yes, exactly.
Brava, Lisa!
As for "or maybe they’re doing some CYA," it's all CYA. And as for " your own rejected letters to the editor, article pitches, or any other receipts," here are a few of mine:
https://lisasimeone.substack.com/p/cowardice-on-parade-npr-nyt-wapo
https://lisasimeone.substack.com/p/sick-of-the-nyts-censorship-on-gender
https://lisasimeone.substack.com/p/letter-to-center-stage-re-trans-history
https://lisasimeone.substack.com/p/alarm-bells-on-transgender-ideology
https://lisasimeone.substack.com/p/womens-club-rejects-womans-perspective
Please do Receipts week on your substack! And at the end of the week I'll make a compilation of what people have shared here. Spread the word!
Ah, ok. Good idea.