I found it stunning the way the new article never used the term “gender affirming care” and also never used the phrase “trans kids.” I’ll be super interested to see if suddenly the language changes without any acknowledgment or mea culpa from the newspaper. If we can start using this more accurate language like “gender related medical treatments” I think we’ll find a huge shift in public opinion. And you may never get the credit you deserve, Lisa, from the NY Times, but all of us Moms know who’s been fighting the good fight with us for a long ass time. And we thank you.
So glad you noted this. This change in language is a really important point. I went back to the article on reading your comment to trace it through, and it was fascinating to see how assiduous the article was in NOT using the Orwellian language. So now, indeed, it will be interesting to see whether this is just another blip, or whether the Times does better. Given its overall horrible track record, including the recent absolutely ridiculous article on social contagion, which Eliza Mondegreen lampoons here: https://unherd.com/thepost/the-new-york-times-is-caving-to-trans-activist-pressure/, I am not holding my breath. At the same time, I live in hope that rationality will break through.
When reality wins, which won't be this year or next year, but reality <em>will</em> win, even in America... the idea that anybody was fighting against reality will disappear down the memory hole. People won't talk about it anymore, they will just pretend they had nothing to do with it.
The people who today fight bitterly "for trans children" (i.e. <em>to</em> trans children) will squid-walk backwards out of public memory as surely as did the people who pumped up the Satanic Panic a couple generations ago. Some of them (e.g. Diane Ehrensaft) are the <em>same exact people,</em> and our communal amnesia is too strong to even notice.
Fast forward thirty years and we will have a new adolescent delusion, and the witchfinders who remain will dust off their old robes and proclaim that they have found evil and that we must believe the children.
The "Doctors" and fellow travelers and useful/useless idiots responsible should lose their licenses if not be strung up by their nuts and left to twist in the wind -- figuratively speaking of course ...
I took a hike with that NYTimes reporter in April of 2022. This wasn't the first time I spoke to her either. She totally knew what the landscape was for parents trying to pump the breaks on "GAC". I explained my story in brutal detail. And she knew what was going on in Europe. Now they just need to stop printing the phrase "anti LGBTQ laws" - it's such BS propaganda.
Well deserved, Lisa! Thanks for your continued reporting and your efforts to keep this issue front of mind at the NYT. Your writing makes the world a little less upside-down and, eventually, people will have to listen.
For those of us who write in when they get it wrong, it may be worth acknowledging Azeen Ghorayshi for getting something right. If I'm correct, her articles were among those criticized by the GLAAD/NYT contributors' letters. I will encourage her, too, to keep going.
And Ghorayshi is definitely on the TRA s*it list. I was curious about her after seeing that article. I found a website that started denouncing her I believe as early as 2016 for her problematic "anti-trans" stance. She hasn't been as bold or brave (or ACCURATE) as you--but she's managed to stay enough in the NYT good graces to get pieces like this published, which is great after all. There's a price for everything--and though you have paid such an enormous price by the MSM shunning you and hurting your career, I hope that still may change and you get the credit you deserve Lisa. Maybe you can collaborate with Ghorayshi in some way in the future, give it a try if you haven't!
I've talked with her at length. I didn't use her name because I don't want to make it about her. It's institutional. She's getting better and better and so is the general coverage in fits and starts.
Thanks for the prompt to write her, which I now have also, as follows:
Britain Limits Use of Puberty-Blocking Drugs to Research Only (6/9/23)
I am writing to thank you for your clear, fair-minded coverage of the UK determination on puberty-blockers, including use of the value neutral term “gender-related medical treatments” throughout. Going forward, I will be looking for your byline for the kind of balanced, well-researched articles related to gender-related medical treatments and allied topics that you display so well here. Thank you again.
Excellent. Thanks, Susan. I believe it matters. And I greatly appreciate this community for staying engaged with this topic and keeping me that little bit more sane.
Sharing your pitch to the New York Times is valuable and important. I am grateful that you did, particularly in the wake of the news about Springer’s suppression of what looks to be an important ROGD research study. This may be hard to believe, but until I learned it from you, I wasn’t aware that journalists pitched news articles. Opinion pieces, yes, but not news articles. Beyond that, your sharing of your pitch makes vivid your reasoned and reasonable approach, which from the first sentence deftly separated how you would approach the article from any possible taint of political bias. I think one of the things those of us trying to get the word out face, which you know all too well, is incredulity that media outlets like the Times could possibly be suppressing the news. What you have provided here is a salient example of this problem, and you can be sure I will be noting it in future conversations with skeptical friends. So, thank you, once again, for your courage and hard work. You are definitely one of the grown-ups in the room.
I think maybe your voice and many others were finally heard. I hope they stick closer to the facts hereon than they have been! Indeed, this lifelong liberal and long time NYT reader has known they were getting it wrong for years, many of their staff must have known as well. But their readers didn't.There's a lot more to say: Reuters, the Economist, the Atlantic, Forbes, WSJ are way ahead of them...I hope they present truth about the rest of the picture, too. It's not only that puberty blockers are bad.
There are a lot of readers believing a lot of fallacies, they have their work cut out for them. I hope they take on a piece of yours on this topic, you've covered so many angles and so we'll!
Maybe we need a better term for it, but I think it's important to note that "I told you so" in this case isn't petty egoism. The one-sided media coverage and vindictive witch hunts have turned a moral panic into a medical crisis. Accountability for that is crucial for bringing this era to an end as soon as possible and setting a precedent for the next one, in whatever form that takes. "It's time to recognize that your advocacy has hurt kids and to question why you haven't heard what we've been saying."
Thank you to everyone for getting us to this point! ♥️🎉
Always keep your receipts. I suspect there may be a time in the future when major news outlets like NYT try to rewrite, or at least sweep under the rug, their history on this issue
AG Sulzberger in the latest New Yorker about trans issues:
"What I was building toward is that those folks, people within the trans community, people who have dedicated their lives to caring for people within the trans community, have written us notes at times begging us not to stop this reporting. What they’ve said is that their greatest fear is that they get to a world in which the only information they have is in talking points of various groups: the talking points that people want to crack down on trans people and the talking points of trans advocates, who are trying to make the strongest case for trans rights in this country. What they’ve said is, these are life-and-death decisions. These are decisions involving personal health. We need information we can trust. And, if there’s a debate happening in the medical community, we don’t want that hidden from us."
He tries to find the middle ground but even his language here is clearly in the tank for the trans ideology. Framing the issue as a struggle between those who would "crack down" on the trans community vs trans advocates is not the middle ground. Likewise accepting at face value the "life or death" direness of the situation. Given all that I sense a vague understanding in his language that there are questioning voices who do not operate out of bad faith.
Agree. His assumption is that the majority of people questioning the approach to gender dysphoria are "bad-faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country."
I posted my own comment on this. Up until about 2005, I had a subscription to the New York Times, but stopped subscribing in response to their disastrous reporting on the Iraq War:
Well, I think they can add another "haunting" failure to their already long list of failures. That is failure to report the widespread unnecessary mutilation of teenagers.
Not reported in the New York Times is that most health insurance policies don't provide adequate coverage for mental health therapy to treat conditions like gender dysphoria, anxiety, depression and eating disorders. But health care insurance policies are happy to hand out pills. So no surprise than so many teenagers end up on puberty blockers and hormones.
All the people I see screaming "transphobia" from the rooftops either don't have children at all, or have very young children. They're completely clueless. But some will meet with reality sooner than they think.
Something else may be a factor here. People of a certain class now know at least one person with a transgender child. It's easy for me to see how most people want to be supportive of their friends in this area. Add in the bad faith of the GOP and you've got reasons both to look away and to be on the defense against the hateful right.
Well, people of that certain class now know at least one person who is a girl struggling with anxiety and depression. In fact, if you do the numbers, there are far more teenage girls struggling with anxiety and depression than there are transgender teens.
The prominent psychologist Jonathan Haidt estimates that since 2010, fully one third of girls struggle with anxiety and depression to the point where they have considered suicide. I'm not exaggerating. That's published research. (His substack is After Babel.)
So one third of one half of teenagers is 1 in every six teenagers.
In Canada, the number of young people (20 to 24 years of age) who are trans is about 1 per hundred (based on Stats Can data):
"Under 1 in 100 young adults aged 20 to 24 were non-binary or transgender (0.85%)"
It's possible that there are many more trans teenagers that desist, and do not show up in the 20 to 24 year old data, or possible that the statistics for cities like Toronto and Vancouver, Canada are dramatically different than for New York and San Francisco. However. Even if the rate were twice as high in New York compared to Toronto, you would still only be talking about 1 in every 50.
So 2 in every 100 teens and young people who are trans is probably a reasonable estimate. At the same time, we have a group that consists of 16 in every 100 teens and young people that we almost never hear about and that cannot get appropriate insured medical coverage for their axiety and depression.
If this "group of a certain class" want to be supportive of their friends, then it is a very selective form of support.
The bad faith GOP? I live in San Francisco. I'm a long time liberal from Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver has always had a vibrant LGBT culture. As a registered Democrat, I recently went to vote for Democratic Party delegates in San Francisco. The ballot was loaded with trans identified candidates (about one third were not just trans sympathetic, but trans identified. I saw few family friendly candidates on the ballot and few women. So much for rep by pop. ) Scott Weiner, my state representative, is busy yelling from the rooftops on Twitter that anyone who questions the treatment for gender dysphoric youth is a trans hater and an LBGTQ hater. Anyone who is concerned about women's and girls sports, and the impact that allowing biological boys and men into women's sports, is a trans hater and an LBGTQ hater.
And this isn't the only issue on which the Democrats are currently out to lunch on.
Let's just say that balance of misdeeds is no longer tilted toward the GOP, IMO.
No, not at all but I was trying to get inside the head of a NY Times writer. For them, the concern of their friends well-being would contrast to the anti-trans bills the GOP are proliferating. It makes for an easy moral decision which then translates into an incurious stance when it comes to the facts.
With regard to bad faith, I think the GOP know they have a good wedge issue and will push the envelope toward hatred and division to gain power. It has little to do with the children. It has to do with replacing abortion as a way to win back suburban women. That's bad faith.
I am a longtime feminist. I am also a former competitive track runner at the university level. I do not consider the destruction of women's sports, the mutilation of children and teenagers, and the withholding of psychological care by insurance companies to be wedge issues.
Well you tried! Also good they didn’t say “ gender affirming care”
I would have taken issue with your pitch in that you characterize families in Texas as “ terrorized”. But I get you were trying to bridge two viewpoints
Oh yeah, I was trying to speak to them in language they could understand. And the pitch wasn't perfect. But I do think that Texas scared the shit out of a lot of families and they did feel terrorized. Is that a fact or a feeling? Don't know.
When the interviewer asked Sulzberger this question:
"Recently, leaders of the Times were not at all pleased with a letter criticizing the paper’s coverage of trans issues. Regardless of your objections to the way that letter was handled, or that specific reporters were singled out, did you find any of the criticisms to be valid?"
Sulzberger responded:
But part of our job is also to write the stories that society is working through—stories that are less cut-and-dried. We’ve never written a story that questions whether trans people exist or should exist, which is an accusation I’ve heard from many corners. That is just factually untrue. But it is our journalistic responsibility as an independent news organization to reflect, for example, the very real debates happening in the medical community, and even among trans people and parents of trans people, about what type of medical intervention should happen for minors, and when the risk of not acting outweighs the risk of acting. These are questions that the medical community is actively working through. There’s an active debate there. Our critics have effectively asked us to pretend that debate is not happening for fear that the information could be misused. That fear is legitimate, that some of this information will be misused. There are all sorts of bad-faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country."
The overarching assumption of Sulzberger's is that even if the medical community got the medicalized treatment for transgender care wrong, and people are questioning that, for the most part, "There are all sorts of bad-faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country" so it is OK to not report that the detransition rate for the current cohort of mostly trans identifying teens might be higher than 30 percent, OK to not report that puberty blockers, hormones and highly invasive surgeries are irreversible, and OK to not report the fact that many gender transition clinics have a profit motive and are not providing adequate mental health care for their patients.
Sulzberger betrays his bias in that he seems only to care about the opinion of the medical community. Yes, the New York Times has occasionally reported on the work of Jonathan Haidt, but it doesn't take rocket science to figure out that if a large cohort of teenage girls (up to 30% of girls, Haidt reports) are struggling with depression, anxiety, and suicide ideation, due to smartphones, that some of these girls will gravitate toward gender ideology.
Not reported by the New York Times is that parents cannot get insurance coverage for mental healthcare and therapists for the depression and anxiety that their teenagers are experiencing. But the moment any of these anxious and depressed teenage girls declares that they might have gender dysphoria, the medical community, schools and the online community rush in and say, "you are beautiful", we have a pill for you, and we support you.
All of these parents trying to advocate for their anxious and depressed teens must be "bad-faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country."
You have to be a willful idiot not to see this. Yes, I am saying that A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, is a willful idiot.
Also, I doubt that A. G. Sulzberger has ever had to battle a health insurance provider to get mental health care coverage for his child.
The article doesn't allow comments which I guess NYT doesn't do for all pieces. But since the walkout earlier this year and the Bud light/Target nonsense, I have noticed no articles on this topic for the past 5 months. Usually WaPo and NYT would have something questioning trans medicine once a month. I fear that those points of view have been silenced.
That was an excellent letter to the New York Times Lisa. You have a great deal of patience and optimism. Much more than the NYT and the trans terrorists deserve. Yes, they terrorize women needing to use a bathroom like my friend this weekend who had to use a bathroom in an isolated area on the seashore and saw a pair of huge feet in the stall next to her. She pulled up her pants and ran out. As her friend tried to calm her they saw a huge man in a skirt exit the women's bathroom. It's even more frightening for women in battered women's shelters and prisons. Only a tiny percentage of people are trans, but they are overrepresented in crimes committed. Serial killers like Marcel Harvey are often misgendered, as in the NYT. Others, like Hadden Clark and Archie Talley are not identified as trans. Now all statistics on sex are being falsified whether regarding crime, health, economics or education, which will cause woman harm for years to come. As someone working to halt violence against women for decades this transgender multi-pronged assault on women is heartbreaking.
I don't care if they don't care. And while I wish for some kind of political organization, it will take years. I just don't see it happening. But the receipts piling up will be historical reminder of those who cried out for reason. History won't look kindly on this chapter. It will go down like tobacco and opioids.
I will look into this. When I say they "won't care about receipts", what I mean is that simply reminding various media outlets five years from now that they failed to report a story about the rushing of teens to gender transition isn't enough. There needs to be a coordinated effort to hit the bottom line, one way or another, of media outlets who are not properly reporting this story. Healthcare providers who have rushed teens to gender transition, or who have pushed teens in that direction when there were clear signs that something else was going on, need to face significant financial consequences.
I looked up each of the doctors on the AMA Advisory Committee on LGBTQ Issues. There is only one member of this committee of six membersthat has a background in psychiatry. Given the lack of phychologists on this board with specialties in disorders like autism, eating disorders, gender dysphoria, anxiety, and depression, it is clear that this board is not qualified to deal with the range of problems that are currently confronting teenagers and their mental health issues.
The question is, how many of these gender surgery clinics have experts in teenage mental health? How many are mandated to provide objective and independent teenage mental health assessments before approving puberty blockers, hormones and surgery? Probably very few. There are no laws in California, and probably not in Oregon either, that mandate this kind of assessment.
I found it stunning the way the new article never used the term “gender affirming care” and also never used the phrase “trans kids.” I’ll be super interested to see if suddenly the language changes without any acknowledgment or mea culpa from the newspaper. If we can start using this more accurate language like “gender related medical treatments” I think we’ll find a huge shift in public opinion. And you may never get the credit you deserve, Lisa, from the NY Times, but all of us Moms know who’s been fighting the good fight with us for a long ass time. And we thank you.
So glad you noted this. This change in language is a really important point. I went back to the article on reading your comment to trace it through, and it was fascinating to see how assiduous the article was in NOT using the Orwellian language. So now, indeed, it will be interesting to see whether this is just another blip, or whether the Times does better. Given its overall horrible track record, including the recent absolutely ridiculous article on social contagion, which Eliza Mondegreen lampoons here: https://unherd.com/thepost/the-new-york-times-is-caving-to-trans-activist-pressure/, I am not holding my breath. At the same time, I live in hope that rationality will break through.
When reality wins, which won't be this year or next year, but reality <em>will</em> win, even in America... the idea that anybody was fighting against reality will disappear down the memory hole. People won't talk about it anymore, they will just pretend they had nothing to do with it.
The people who today fight bitterly "for trans children" (i.e. <em>to</em> trans children) will squid-walk backwards out of public memory as surely as did the people who pumped up the Satanic Panic a couple generations ago. Some of them (e.g. Diane Ehrensaft) are the <em>same exact people,</em> and our communal amnesia is too strong to even notice.
Fast forward thirty years and we will have a new adolescent delusion, and the witchfinders who remain will dust off their old robes and proclaim that they have found evil and that we must believe the children.
Indeed. A bloody medical scandal.
The "Doctors" and fellow travelers and useful/useless idiots responsible should lose their licenses if not be strung up by their nuts and left to twist in the wind -- figuratively speaking of course ...
I took a hike with that NYTimes reporter in April of 2022. This wasn't the first time I spoke to her either. She totally knew what the landscape was for parents trying to pump the breaks on "GAC". I explained my story in brutal detail. And she knew what was going on in Europe. Now they just need to stop printing the phrase "anti LGBTQ laws" - it's such BS propaganda.
Well deserved, Lisa! Thanks for your continued reporting and your efforts to keep this issue front of mind at the NYT. Your writing makes the world a little less upside-down and, eventually, people will have to listen.
For those of us who write in when they get it wrong, it may be worth acknowledging Azeen Ghorayshi for getting something right. If I'm correct, her articles were among those criticized by the GLAAD/NYT contributors' letters. I will encourage her, too, to keep going.
Yep, she's getting better and better!
And Ghorayshi is definitely on the TRA s*it list. I was curious about her after seeing that article. I found a website that started denouncing her I believe as early as 2016 for her problematic "anti-trans" stance. She hasn't been as bold or brave (or ACCURATE) as you--but she's managed to stay enough in the NYT good graces to get pieces like this published, which is great after all. There's a price for everything--and though you have paid such an enormous price by the MSM shunning you and hurting your career, I hope that still may change and you get the credit you deserve Lisa. Maybe you can collaborate with Ghorayshi in some way in the future, give it a try if you haven't!
I've talked with her at length. I didn't use her name because I don't want to make it about her. It's institutional. She's getting better and better and so is the general coverage in fits and starts.
Thanks for the prompt to write her, which I now have also, as follows:
Britain Limits Use of Puberty-Blocking Drugs to Research Only (6/9/23)
I am writing to thank you for your clear, fair-minded coverage of the UK determination on puberty-blockers, including use of the value neutral term “gender-related medical treatments” throughout. Going forward, I will be looking for your byline for the kind of balanced, well-researched articles related to gender-related medical treatments and allied topics that you display so well here. Thank you again.
Excellent. Thanks, Susan. I believe it matters. And I greatly appreciate this community for staying engaged with this topic and keeping me that little bit more sane.
Love this. You are deserving of every “I told you so” moment.
Sharing your pitch to the New York Times is valuable and important. I am grateful that you did, particularly in the wake of the news about Springer’s suppression of what looks to be an important ROGD research study. This may be hard to believe, but until I learned it from you, I wasn’t aware that journalists pitched news articles. Opinion pieces, yes, but not news articles. Beyond that, your sharing of your pitch makes vivid your reasoned and reasonable approach, which from the first sentence deftly separated how you would approach the article from any possible taint of political bias. I think one of the things those of us trying to get the word out face, which you know all too well, is incredulity that media outlets like the Times could possibly be suppressing the news. What you have provided here is a salient example of this problem, and you can be sure I will be noting it in future conversations with skeptical friends. So, thank you, once again, for your courage and hard work. You are definitely one of the grown-ups in the room.
I think maybe your voice and many others were finally heard. I hope they stick closer to the facts hereon than they have been! Indeed, this lifelong liberal and long time NYT reader has known they were getting it wrong for years, many of their staff must have known as well. But their readers didn't.There's a lot more to say: Reuters, the Economist, the Atlantic, Forbes, WSJ are way ahead of them...I hope they present truth about the rest of the picture, too. It's not only that puberty blockers are bad.
There are a lot of readers believing a lot of fallacies, they have their work cut out for them. I hope they take on a piece of yours on this topic, you've covered so many angles and so we'll!
Thank you!
Maybe we need a better term for it, but I think it's important to note that "I told you so" in this case isn't petty egoism. The one-sided media coverage and vindictive witch hunts have turned a moral panic into a medical crisis. Accountability for that is crucial for bringing this era to an end as soon as possible and setting a precedent for the next one, in whatever form that takes. "It's time to recognize that your advocacy has hurt kids and to question why you haven't heard what we've been saying."
Thank you to everyone for getting us to this point! ♥️🎉
Always keep your receipts. I suspect there may be a time in the future when major news outlets like NYT try to rewrite, or at least sweep under the rug, their history on this issue
AG Sulzberger in the latest New Yorker about trans issues:
"What I was building toward is that those folks, people within the trans community, people who have dedicated their lives to caring for people within the trans community, have written us notes at times begging us not to stop this reporting. What they’ve said is that their greatest fear is that they get to a world in which the only information they have is in talking points of various groups: the talking points that people want to crack down on trans people and the talking points of trans advocates, who are trying to make the strongest case for trans rights in this country. What they’ve said is, these are life-and-death decisions. These are decisions involving personal health. We need information we can trust. And, if there’s a debate happening in the medical community, we don’t want that hidden from us."
He tries to find the middle ground but even his language here is clearly in the tank for the trans ideology. Framing the issue as a struggle between those who would "crack down" on the trans community vs trans advocates is not the middle ground. Likewise accepting at face value the "life or death" direness of the situation. Given all that I sense a vague understanding in his language that there are questioning voices who do not operate out of bad faith.
Wow, I gotta get in touch with him and show him the many, many pitches I have sent that his workers have ignored.
Agree. His assumption is that the majority of people questioning the approach to gender dysphoria are "bad-faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country."
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a-g-sulzberger-on-the-battles-within-and-against-the-new-york-times
I posted my own comment on this. Up until about 2005, I had a subscription to the New York Times, but stopped subscribing in response to their disastrous reporting on the Iraq War:
https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-still-haunts-new-york-times
Well, I think they can add another "haunting" failure to their already long list of failures. That is failure to report the widespread unnecessary mutilation of teenagers.
Not reported in the New York Times is that most health insurance policies don't provide adequate coverage for mental health therapy to treat conditions like gender dysphoria, anxiety, depression and eating disorders. But health care insurance policies are happy to hand out pills. So no surprise than so many teenagers end up on puberty blockers and hormones.
All the people I see screaming "transphobia" from the rooftops either don't have children at all, or have very young children. They're completely clueless. But some will meet with reality sooner than they think.
Something else may be a factor here. People of a certain class now know at least one person with a transgender child. It's easy for me to see how most people want to be supportive of their friends in this area. Add in the bad faith of the GOP and you've got reasons both to look away and to be on the defense against the hateful right.
Well, people of that certain class now know at least one person who is a girl struggling with anxiety and depression. In fact, if you do the numbers, there are far more teenage girls struggling with anxiety and depression than there are transgender teens.
The prominent psychologist Jonathan Haidt estimates that since 2010, fully one third of girls struggle with anxiety and depression to the point where they have considered suicide. I'm not exaggerating. That's published research. (His substack is After Babel.)
So one third of one half of teenagers is 1 in every six teenagers.
In Canada, the number of young people (20 to 24 years of age) who are trans is about 1 per hundred (based on Stats Can data):
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm
"Under 1 in 100 young adults aged 20 to 24 were non-binary or transgender (0.85%)"
It's possible that there are many more trans teenagers that desist, and do not show up in the 20 to 24 year old data, or possible that the statistics for cities like Toronto and Vancouver, Canada are dramatically different than for New York and San Francisco. However. Even if the rate were twice as high in New York compared to Toronto, you would still only be talking about 1 in every 50.
So 2 in every 100 teens and young people who are trans is probably a reasonable estimate. At the same time, we have a group that consists of 16 in every 100 teens and young people that we almost never hear about and that cannot get appropriate insured medical coverage for their axiety and depression.
If this "group of a certain class" want to be supportive of their friends, then it is a very selective form of support.
The bad faith GOP? I live in San Francisco. I'm a long time liberal from Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver has always had a vibrant LGBT culture. As a registered Democrat, I recently went to vote for Democratic Party delegates in San Francisco. The ballot was loaded with trans identified candidates (about one third were not just trans sympathetic, but trans identified. I saw few family friendly candidates on the ballot and few women. So much for rep by pop. ) Scott Weiner, my state representative, is busy yelling from the rooftops on Twitter that anyone who questions the treatment for gender dysphoric youth is a trans hater and an LBGTQ hater. Anyone who is concerned about women's and girls sports, and the impact that allowing biological boys and men into women's sports, is a trans hater and an LBGTQ hater.
And this isn't the only issue on which the Democrats are currently out to lunch on.
Let's just say that balance of misdeeds is no longer tilted toward the GOP, IMO.
No, not at all but I was trying to get inside the head of a NY Times writer. For them, the concern of their friends well-being would contrast to the anti-trans bills the GOP are proliferating. It makes for an easy moral decision which then translates into an incurious stance when it comes to the facts.
With regard to bad faith, I think the GOP know they have a good wedge issue and will push the envelope toward hatred and division to gain power. It has little to do with the children. It has to do with replacing abortion as a way to win back suburban women. That's bad faith.
I am a longtime feminist. I am also a former competitive track runner at the university level. I do not consider the destruction of women's sports, the mutilation of children and teenagers, and the withholding of psychological care by insurance companies to be wedge issues.
Agreed.
I hope we are now righting this huge ship. Thank you Lisa, for the hard work you have done to help this happen.
Well you tried! Also good they didn’t say “ gender affirming care”
I would have taken issue with your pitch in that you characterize families in Texas as “ terrorized”. But I get you were trying to bridge two viewpoints
Oh yeah, I was trying to speak to them in language they could understand. And the pitch wasn't perfect. But I do think that Texas scared the shit out of a lot of families and they did feel terrorized. Is that a fact or a feeling? Don't know.
Maybe they could feel challenged and slow down the rush to medicalize
Read this in a New Yorker interview of A. G. Sulzberger (June 10th, 2023)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a-g-sulzberger-on-the-battles-within-and-against-the-new-york-times
When the interviewer asked Sulzberger this question:
"Recently, leaders of the Times were not at all pleased with a letter criticizing the paper’s coverage of trans issues. Regardless of your objections to the way that letter was handled, or that specific reporters were singled out, did you find any of the criticisms to be valid?"
Sulzberger responded:
But part of our job is also to write the stories that society is working through—stories that are less cut-and-dried. We’ve never written a story that questions whether trans people exist or should exist, which is an accusation I’ve heard from many corners. That is just factually untrue. But it is our journalistic responsibility as an independent news organization to reflect, for example, the very real debates happening in the medical community, and even among trans people and parents of trans people, about what type of medical intervention should happen for minors, and when the risk of not acting outweighs the risk of acting. These are questions that the medical community is actively working through. There’s an active debate there. Our critics have effectively asked us to pretend that debate is not happening for fear that the information could be misused. That fear is legitimate, that some of this information will be misused. There are all sorts of bad-faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country."
The overarching assumption of Sulzberger's is that even if the medical community got the medicalized treatment for transgender care wrong, and people are questioning that, for the most part, "There are all sorts of bad-faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country" so it is OK to not report that the detransition rate for the current cohort of mostly trans identifying teens might be higher than 30 percent, OK to not report that puberty blockers, hormones and highly invasive surgeries are irreversible, and OK to not report the fact that many gender transition clinics have a profit motive and are not providing adequate mental health care for their patients.
Sulzberger betrays his bias in that he seems only to care about the opinion of the medical community. Yes, the New York Times has occasionally reported on the work of Jonathan Haidt, but it doesn't take rocket science to figure out that if a large cohort of teenage girls (up to 30% of girls, Haidt reports) are struggling with depression, anxiety, and suicide ideation, due to smartphones, that some of these girls will gravitate toward gender ideology.
Not reported by the New York Times is that parents cannot get insurance coverage for mental healthcare and therapists for the depression and anxiety that their teenagers are experiencing. But the moment any of these anxious and depressed teenage girls declares that they might have gender dysphoria, the medical community, schools and the online community rush in and say, "you are beautiful", we have a pill for you, and we support you.
All of these parents trying to advocate for their anxious and depressed teens must be "bad-faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country."
You have to be a willful idiot not to see this. Yes, I am saying that A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, is a willful idiot.
Also, I doubt that A. G. Sulzberger has ever had to battle a health insurance provider to get mental health care coverage for his child.
The article doesn't allow comments which I guess NYT doesn't do for all pieces. But since the walkout earlier this year and the Bud light/Target nonsense, I have noticed no articles on this topic for the past 5 months. Usually WaPo and NYT would have something questioning trans medicine once a month. I fear that those points of view have been silenced.
That was an excellent letter to the New York Times Lisa. You have a great deal of patience and optimism. Much more than the NYT and the trans terrorists deserve. Yes, they terrorize women needing to use a bathroom like my friend this weekend who had to use a bathroom in an isolated area on the seashore and saw a pair of huge feet in the stall next to her. She pulled up her pants and ran out. As her friend tried to calm her they saw a huge man in a skirt exit the women's bathroom. It's even more frightening for women in battered women's shelters and prisons. Only a tiny percentage of people are trans, but they are overrepresented in crimes committed. Serial killers like Marcel Harvey are often misgendered, as in the NYT. Others, like Hadden Clark and Archie Talley are not identified as trans. Now all statistics on sex are being falsified whether regarding crime, health, economics or education, which will cause woman harm for years to come. As someone working to halt violence against women for decades this transgender multi-pronged assault on women is heartbreaking.
I don't care if they don't care. And while I wish for some kind of political organization, it will take years. I just don't see it happening. But the receipts piling up will be historical reminder of those who cried out for reason. History won't look kindly on this chapter. It will go down like tobacco and opioids.
So glad you kept your receipts! We should all keep the receipts because they are really stacking up! I'd like to see a book of receipts in the future.
They won't care about your receipts.
Only widespread political organization will stop this.
I will look into this. When I say they "won't care about receipts", what I mean is that simply reminding various media outlets five years from now that they failed to report a story about the rushing of teens to gender transition isn't enough. There needs to be a coordinated effort to hit the bottom line, one way or another, of media outlets who are not properly reporting this story. Healthcare providers who have rushed teens to gender transition, or who have pushed teens in that direction when there were clear signs that something else was going on, need to face significant financial consequences.
I looked up each of the doctors on the AMA Advisory Committee on LGBTQ Issues. There is only one member of this committee of six membersthat has a background in psychiatry. Given the lack of phychologists on this board with specialties in disorders like autism, eating disorders, gender dysphoria, anxiety, and depression, it is clear that this board is not qualified to deal with the range of problems that are currently confronting teenagers and their mental health issues.
The question is, how many of these gender surgery clinics have experts in teenage mental health? How many are mandated to provide objective and independent teenage mental health assessments before approving puberty blockers, hormones and surgery? Probably very few. There are no laws in California, and probably not in Oregon either, that mandate this kind of assessment.