It is hard to succinctly describe what they got wrong. Omissions, false statements, lopsided reporting....it's a decoy report. The idea appears to be to convince everyone that yes, there is a controversy--that the controversy is between those who follow WPATH and those who are less cautious. There. Now we understand the controversy about gender medicine....
So people will think they have the story. But they don't. They have the story that the authors of the Endocrine Society and WPATH recommendations want you to hear, the authors of those recommendations which are based on....well...what a lot of clinicians really feel is true. [let's just ignore all the problems with these recommendations that you have been detailing for years and let's not mention the recommendations which are not messed up like these are....]
The NYT has been pushing this angle for years. It's inaccurate but I believe readers now think they understand the issue and the solution. It's a decoy.
Unbelievable. Did the authors of the podcast not understand the situation or do they just want to mislead us...?
I have only one nitpicking suggestion: in your sentence "and families that lost custody of kids or whose relationships were damaged by the insistence that a lack of affirmation equals harm." [add that these families were not accused of mere "harm," but "abuse!"]
Also, as I began reading, here was my worry (I'm really good at worrying, so take this with a grain of salt from a person ignorant of the publishing game):
What if these bloviating fools' latest re-packaging of their usual bullshittery into this slickly-produced podcast series is enough to suck all the oxygen out of the room? We need a sufficiently-informed public in order to gain broad enough support for what must be done to fully de-legitimize these practices and clear out from our healthcare systems (as much as practically possible) all of the "true believers" who will not be dissuaded from continuing to offer them. But what if the uninformed masses that we need to fully understand this Medical Scandal gobble up this latest NYT-crafted snow job, leaving them with no remaining appetite for a more accurate story? In short, will this crowd your book out of the market? Steal your thunder?
I mean, for generations the defenders of Communism have used the old excuse "Well, they just did it wrong! But just go along with our communist revolution and we'll get it right and finally eradicate inequality and poverty and usher in a brave new world! Trust us!" It's an easy argument to make, especially when most people don't know the first thing about what actually happens when people actually have tried to implement communist theory in real life . . . because the ideologues distort the historical record. Is Gender Affirming Care going to persist for decades more under the label "new and improved"?
Should we all pray for a whistleblower to emerge from the staff who worked on this carefully crafted piece of propaganda passing itself off as ethical and well-balanced journalism?
It's terrifying to see how tribal everything is now. The NYT will not investigate the failures of so-called expertise, because the people who write for the Times believe they are the expert class.
This should not surprise us. The same thing happened with the war in Vietnam. The same thing happened when Times star reporter Judith Miller allowed herself to be used by the Bush administration to push the lie of WMDs in Iraq after 9/11/2001. There will be no apologies from the NYT--just a growing retrospective acknowledgement that pediatric sex changes were the Recovered Memory Syndrome of the 2010s and 2020s.
Johanna Olson-Kennedy's (or JOKe, as I think of her) clinic is closing down next month at CHLA. Those in the thrall of the cult will insist this is "killing trans children," but my sense is that hospital administrators and the legal team are deeply relieved that the Trump administration is playing the bad cop now.
I was most struck by the discrepancy between the way Reed and Bowers were characterized.
In episode 4, the podcast featured that mom yelling at Reed for including in her affidavit something Reed had not personally witnessed. That is a fair criticism, and indeed one Ghorayshi made in previous reporting. Fine.
However, Marci Bowers, she of the only-one-side argument, was never asked what she thought of the WPATH files. You'd think it would be important for listeners to hear about a member of the Biden administration strong-arming WPATH to change its world-famous standards of care. As a former WPATH president, surely Bowers had *something* relevant to say about this incident.
It was clear to me, therefore, that "The Protocol" was out to discredit Reed in a way it did not attempt with Bowers, or with anyone else, for that matter--Bowers wasn't the only one who got the kid-gloves treatment. There was no mention of the detransitioner suing Joanna Olson-Kennedy, or the medical records that Olson-Kennedy lost because they were paper only and lost to water damage. I had hoped for better from Ghorayshi.
I couldn't stand to listen to it, so very glad to know impressions and thoughts. It's disappointing and painful to hear. To learn from you that they completely omitted ANY reporting about desisters and detransitioners is beyond "egregious." Denying the experience and implying the non-existence of so many people harmed is heinous and harmful journalism. And it sounds like a new shift of activism on this topic disguised as reporting. It's a message to soothe progressives confused on the topic, a message they were FORCED to craft because of incontrovertible evidence such as that brought forth by Jamie Reed. Another "cancel my NYT subscription" moment. Just like the spell check on this post I am typing indicates, "the D words" underlined in red apparently are not even real words, and thus not real people. They are real, the harm done to them and their families matters. I am looking forward to reading your book.
I listened too and felt it did not remotely do justice to the issue. As usual, they were trying to have it both ways. They want to say, “see, we gave it a thorough investigation. We worked on it for two whole years!” They are probably just hoping not to get too much blowback from either side. Btw, I only found it in the online edition because I knew about it and did a search. I wonder if the average reader gave it a listen.
Thank you, Lisa, for an excellent critique. Sadly, I agree with what you say here (and I believe you have no need to apologize):
"They took two years to do a podcast on the youth gender culture war, and didn’t feature a single young person hurt by it. They didn’t feature a single young person who lost body parts only to find out later that they were just gay, or autistic, or depressed. I’m sorry. I was willing to give this podcast a chance—grateful, even, that finally the Times-worshipping people in my neighborhood would understand the issue better. But they won’t."
I appreciate your writing about the NYT "The Protocol". I could not bear to listen; mostly because of Marci Bowers and the omissions I suspected by the NYT of any balance in reporting. After reading several of your articles I am very interested in your book. Keep up the good work.
It's not because of politics. It's because medical concerns arose. And the clinicians pushing the interventions ignored them. And the NYT continues to do so.
I listened to the whole thing, and I appreciate your pointing out the ommissions. You're right. I also thought they were trying to make Jamie sound bad with that audio of her talking to the mom, but she actually came across to me as very compassionate and thoughtful. The mother was nuts.
I agree with these criticisms 100%, but I actually came away from "The Protocol" feeling a bit more positive about the effect it might have. Broadview readers have absorbed so much information that we might forget how much of this series is stuff that most normies have never heard-- and it's coming from the New York Times.
Yes it got a LOT wrong, but it does address many of the issues that I was shocked to discover when I first went down the gender rabbit hole circa 2020 and kept asking "why isn't this being reported in the US?" Even though it's about 10 years too late, I think it could really help get more people to start questioning the narrative.
SO well-explained, Lisa—thank you for this! My husband is in the midst of listening to The Protocol; I will tell him he needs to read your critique next.
I’m going to forward it to the hosts of some podcasts I listen to, including Ezra Klein. (I already nominated you as a guest :)
To me you are a role model, a voice of reason and compassion. I continue to be grateful for you and the rest of the Informed Dissent crew, and I’m looking forward to your book.
Oh my gosh, Lisa. You stopped me in my tracks. The teen and adolescent suicide myth was lifted and manipulated straight from the adults in the Dutch protocol who were unhappy with how poorly they passed and became suicidal. 💡
In terms of the Protocol, I submitted this comment to Ben Ryan's substack:
"I listened to all podcasts. I wondered about a couple of editing decisions:
1. In terms of the Dutch Protocol studied cohort, one died after receiving vaginoplasty. The podcast did not go into much detail at all about that. I mention it since the death is directly attributable to the micro penis that result from young males taking puberty blockers, necessitating the use of additional tissue to line the neo-vagina. And in this case, tissue from the colon not properly sterilized was used.
2. In one episode, the one about the US?, toward the very end, you hear the voice of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito reading briefly from the Cass Review to Chase Strangio, lawyer arguing against Skrmetti. But it unfortunately leaves out that stunning moment when Strangio admits that there were rarely any actual completed suicides. Given how often the phrase "life saving", etc came up, this would have been a refreshing note.
In other notes, I read this morning Erin Reed's delight that the series included an interview with the very first patient to undergo these procedures, and how much of a regular guy he now is. But Reed, in typical Reed fashion, totally omits his remarks which clearly show his suspicion that much of what's going on today in gender world is a fad, like "Goth".
Lisa, there is a just-published shocking story from NZ about an autistic and anorexic teenager who died because her trans identity was the focus of the professionals. Everyone should know about this horrendous outcome of ideological medicine.
It is hard to succinctly describe what they got wrong. Omissions, false statements, lopsided reporting....it's a decoy report. The idea appears to be to convince everyone that yes, there is a controversy--that the controversy is between those who follow WPATH and those who are less cautious. There. Now we understand the controversy about gender medicine....
So people will think they have the story. But they don't. They have the story that the authors of the Endocrine Society and WPATH recommendations want you to hear, the authors of those recommendations which are based on....well...what a lot of clinicians really feel is true. [let's just ignore all the problems with these recommendations that you have been detailing for years and let's not mention the recommendations which are not messed up like these are....]
The NYT has been pushing this angle for years. It's inaccurate but I believe readers now think they understand the issue and the solution. It's a decoy.
Unbelievable. Did the authors of the podcast not understand the situation or do they just want to mislead us...?
People will think they have the whole story and stop looking. (It's not like nothing else is going on right now...)
Yes, I worry about exactly this.
Fortunately, trans activists have excoriated this podcast, so lots of people won't listen anyway.
Well, I needn't have posted my comment. You already nailed it with the term "decoy report!"
As, usual, well done, Lisa!
I have only one nitpicking suggestion: in your sentence "and families that lost custody of kids or whose relationships were damaged by the insistence that a lack of affirmation equals harm." [add that these families were not accused of mere "harm," but "abuse!"]
Also, as I began reading, here was my worry (I'm really good at worrying, so take this with a grain of salt from a person ignorant of the publishing game):
What if these bloviating fools' latest re-packaging of their usual bullshittery into this slickly-produced podcast series is enough to suck all the oxygen out of the room? We need a sufficiently-informed public in order to gain broad enough support for what must be done to fully de-legitimize these practices and clear out from our healthcare systems (as much as practically possible) all of the "true believers" who will not be dissuaded from continuing to offer them. But what if the uninformed masses that we need to fully understand this Medical Scandal gobble up this latest NYT-crafted snow job, leaving them with no remaining appetite for a more accurate story? In short, will this crowd your book out of the market? Steal your thunder?
I mean, for generations the defenders of Communism have used the old excuse "Well, they just did it wrong! But just go along with our communist revolution and we'll get it right and finally eradicate inequality and poverty and usher in a brave new world! Trust us!" It's an easy argument to make, especially when most people don't know the first thing about what actually happens when people actually have tried to implement communist theory in real life . . . because the ideologues distort the historical record. Is Gender Affirming Care going to persist for decades more under the label "new and improved"?
Should we all pray for a whistleblower to emerge from the staff who worked on this carefully crafted piece of propaganda passing itself off as ethical and well-balanced journalism?
It's terrifying to see how tribal everything is now. The NYT will not investigate the failures of so-called expertise, because the people who write for the Times believe they are the expert class.
This should not surprise us. The same thing happened with the war in Vietnam. The same thing happened when Times star reporter Judith Miller allowed herself to be used by the Bush administration to push the lie of WMDs in Iraq after 9/11/2001. There will be no apologies from the NYT--just a growing retrospective acknowledgement that pediatric sex changes were the Recovered Memory Syndrome of the 2010s and 2020s.
Johanna Olson-Kennedy's (or JOKe, as I think of her) clinic is closing down next month at CHLA. Those in the thrall of the cult will insist this is "killing trans children," but my sense is that hospital administrators and the legal team are deeply relieved that the Trump administration is playing the bad cop now.
JOKe! I love it!
I was most struck by the discrepancy between the way Reed and Bowers were characterized.
In episode 4, the podcast featured that mom yelling at Reed for including in her affidavit something Reed had not personally witnessed. That is a fair criticism, and indeed one Ghorayshi made in previous reporting. Fine.
However, Marci Bowers, she of the only-one-side argument, was never asked what she thought of the WPATH files. You'd think it would be important for listeners to hear about a member of the Biden administration strong-arming WPATH to change its world-famous standards of care. As a former WPATH president, surely Bowers had *something* relevant to say about this incident.
It was clear to me, therefore, that "The Protocol" was out to discredit Reed in a way it did not attempt with Bowers, or with anyone else, for that matter--Bowers wasn't the only one who got the kid-gloves treatment. There was no mention of the detransitioner suing Joanna Olson-Kennedy, or the medical records that Olson-Kennedy lost because they were paper only and lost to water damage. I had hoped for better from Ghorayshi.
I couldn't stand to listen to it, so very glad to know impressions and thoughts. It's disappointing and painful to hear. To learn from you that they completely omitted ANY reporting about desisters and detransitioners is beyond "egregious." Denying the experience and implying the non-existence of so many people harmed is heinous and harmful journalism. And it sounds like a new shift of activism on this topic disguised as reporting. It's a message to soothe progressives confused on the topic, a message they were FORCED to craft because of incontrovertible evidence such as that brought forth by Jamie Reed. Another "cancel my NYT subscription" moment. Just like the spell check on this post I am typing indicates, "the D words" underlined in red apparently are not even real words, and thus not real people. They are real, the harm done to them and their families matters. I am looking forward to reading your book.
Ironic given how the trans activists complain about others “erasing” trans people.
I listened too and felt it did not remotely do justice to the issue. As usual, they were trying to have it both ways. They want to say, “see, we gave it a thorough investigation. We worked on it for two whole years!” They are probably just hoping not to get too much blowback from either side. Btw, I only found it in the online edition because I knew about it and did a search. I wonder if the average reader gave it a listen.
Yes, when it was first released I had trouble finding it on the NYT audio page. Maybe that's a good thing.
Thank you, Lisa, for an excellent critique. Sadly, I agree with what you say here (and I believe you have no need to apologize):
"They took two years to do a podcast on the youth gender culture war, and didn’t feature a single young person hurt by it. They didn’t feature a single young person who lost body parts only to find out later that they were just gay, or autistic, or depressed. I’m sorry. I was willing to give this podcast a chance—grateful, even, that finally the Times-worshipping people in my neighborhood would understand the issue better. But they won’t."
Looking forward to your book!
I appreciate your writing about the NYT "The Protocol". I could not bear to listen; mostly because of Marci Bowers and the omissions I suspected by the NYT of any balance in reporting. After reading several of your articles I am very interested in your book. Keep up the good work.
It's not because of politics. It's because medical concerns arose. And the clinicians pushing the interventions ignored them. And the NYT continues to do so.
I listened to the whole thing, and I appreciate your pointing out the ommissions. You're right. I also thought they were trying to make Jamie sound bad with that audio of her talking to the mom, but she actually came across to me as very compassionate and thoughtful. The mother was nuts.
I agree with these criticisms 100%, but I actually came away from "The Protocol" feeling a bit more positive about the effect it might have. Broadview readers have absorbed so much information that we might forget how much of this series is stuff that most normies have never heard-- and it's coming from the New York Times.
Yes it got a LOT wrong, but it does address many of the issues that I was shocked to discover when I first went down the gender rabbit hole circa 2020 and kept asking "why isn't this being reported in the US?" Even though it's about 10 years too late, I think it could really help get more people to start questioning the narrative.
SO well-explained, Lisa—thank you for this! My husband is in the midst of listening to The Protocol; I will tell him he needs to read your critique next.
I’m going to forward it to the hosts of some podcasts I listen to, including Ezra Klein. (I already nominated you as a guest :)
To me you are a role model, a voice of reason and compassion. I continue to be grateful for you and the rest of the Informed Dissent crew, and I’m looking forward to your book.
Oh my gosh, Lisa. You stopped me in my tracks. The teen and adolescent suicide myth was lifted and manipulated straight from the adults in the Dutch protocol who were unhappy with how poorly they passed and became suicidal. 💡
In terms of the Protocol, I submitted this comment to Ben Ryan's substack:
"I listened to all podcasts. I wondered about a couple of editing decisions:
1. In terms of the Dutch Protocol studied cohort, one died after receiving vaginoplasty. The podcast did not go into much detail at all about that. I mention it since the death is directly attributable to the micro penis that result from young males taking puberty blockers, necessitating the use of additional tissue to line the neo-vagina. And in this case, tissue from the colon not properly sterilized was used.
2. In one episode, the one about the US?, toward the very end, you hear the voice of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito reading briefly from the Cass Review to Chase Strangio, lawyer arguing against Skrmetti. But it unfortunately leaves out that stunning moment when Strangio admits that there were rarely any actual completed suicides. Given how often the phrase "life saving", etc came up, this would have been a refreshing note.
In other notes, I read this morning Erin Reed's delight that the series included an interview with the very first patient to undergo these procedures, and how much of a regular guy he now is. But Reed, in typical Reed fashion, totally omits his remarks which clearly show his suspicion that much of what's going on today in gender world is a fad, like "Goth".
Lisa, there is a just-published shocking story from NZ about an autistic and anorexic teenager who died because her trans identity was the focus of the professionals. Everyone should know about this horrendous outcome of ideological medicine.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/563855/teenager-starves-to-death-alone-in-emergency-accommodation
I believe there are one or two detranitioners in the last episode, in a medley of anonymous voices discussing their experiences.