Why It's So Hard for the Mainstream Media to Get This Story Right

The making of misinformation

Note to readers: If you have submitted an op-ed, letter to the editor, correction, or article pitch to The New York Times about youth gender medicine that was rejected, please drop me a line. I’d like to compile a comprehensive list. And if you’ve like to publish it here, please let me know.

Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash

In the past few years, I’ve probably sent out three dozen pitches, essays, and op-eds to mainstream media outlets—and have helped others with editing and submitting a couple of dozen pieces of their own. Our words have been, for the most part, rejected by any publication that doesn’t have a right-wing editor in charge of the section pitched (Boston Globe and SF Chronicle excepted). Often these rejections come with a note, the likes of which I had never seen before I decided to report more honestly about youth gender psychology and medicine: “We’re not allowing freelancers to report on this issue.”

There may be practical reasons for that policy. After all, no subject inspires more ire and pushback, and media admins likely want to be able to protect, and have faith in, whoever is penning the piece on it. But the policy also contributes to the continued poor reporting and distortion of the issue, resulting in the misinforming of half the country.

One problem with the staff-only policy is that some freelancers (ahem) understand this complex issue better than most staff writers do, especially if they’ve been in the business for a while. As staffers at illustrious outfits like The New York Times skew younger, and arrive there after stints at places like Buzzfeed or Vice, they likely haven’t developed the muscles to push back. They believe they know the story, and their job is to expose it. When people raised on social media, who see the world as black and white, begin reporting, they bring that lens with them. The stories have good guys and bad guys, rather than good intentions and bad outcomes.*

This lens, this tendency, was exacerbated a thousand fold by Trump derangement syndrome and the criticism of “bothsidesism.” If one side is behaving deeply inappropriately or is batshit nuts, it’s hard to weigh it evenly against the other. That said, most mainstream media paints those pushing back against gender identity as the batshit side, requiring far more evidence to support its arguments, and accepts those upholding it as believable, no matter how circular and unscientific their arguments.

It might not be entirely the fault of those young people. It’s really about the zeitgeist under which they were raised. Many grew up with both the idea of “gender identity” and the transgender child as facts. If you’re of a certain age, you’ve likely never heard of either concept. And if you were raised to memorize every line of Free to Be You and Me—the gender stereotype-busting anthem album of the 1970s—you’ll find newfangled gender identity concepts butting up against the messages that you took to heart: your sex need not limit what kind of girl or boy you grow up to be. The more current thinking is: What kind of girl or boy you are determines your gender. Gender isn’t a system of sex-based stereotypes but a deeply held internal feeling that must be manifested as reality. That’s a foreign concept to me, but for younger folks, it’s held up as objective—or really, subjective—truth.

Because the issue is so fraught, many people with stories to tell—about gender identity or trans kids or medical or psychological harm—are cagey about interview requests. They want to know where you stand on the matter before they share their tale. Just as trans-identified young folks want to control how others think of them by controlling how others talk about them, potential subjects want to control how they’ll be portrayed. Since the unofficial tagline of the pro-youth gender medicine movement is “No debate,” these folks don’t want to be featured in any article that prompts critical thinking on the subject. They don’t want to be part of a debate. They want to be on the right side, and pitched to the world as such. I’ve also had some more cautious gender doctors tell me they don’t want to appear in articles with the hardcore zealots of the affirmation model. Nobody wants to be sullied by appearing next to anyone who’s not morally pure. And yet I very much want to talk to people who transitioned as minors and are now adults, and continue to feel it was the right choice—especially if they were carefully evaluated.

That sometimes goes for the people vehemently against youth gender medicine, too. They abhor any hint of nuance on the subject, dismissing the entire industry as conceived by maniacal doctors with malicious intent, rather than by Christian clinicians trying to ease suffering. They feel that way with good reason: such stories interrupt the project of exposing what’s gone horribly wrong with the institutionalization of ideas about gender and identity and medicine. But if they don’t share their stories, that project will never advance.

I want people—especially people in my liberal bubble—to have all the information that I have, so that they can make up their own minds. But in order to do that well, I have to know what they’ve been told, and how they make sense of it.

How I personally feel about young people identifying out of their sex category and/or changing their bodies is not supposed to matter. I should be able to tell the story either way, to acknowledge my biases and set them aside. In theory, if interviewees are confident about their side of the story, they don’t have to worry about being featured alongside those with dissenting points of view. But this is a war of words, fought by the generations that believe language is violence and objectivity is white supremacy. A reporter has no chance at a neutral stance.

Nowhere is that clearer than in what words we use to describe the people and the procedures associated with gender identity. Is this healthcare for transgender youth? Or cosmetic surgery for people with gender-related distress? Are we treating gender dysphoria or affirming trans identities? If you use sex-based pronouns, you’re a bigot. If you use preferred pronouns, you’ve been captured. Biological sex? Not favored by style guides. Assigned sex? A term used by American father of transgender medicine, Harry Benjamin, but only appropriate in the few cases where the recorded sex of a person with an intersex condition proved to be wrong.

Every word is laden with cultural meaning far beyond what it describes, or what a writer intends it to describe. There can be no “just the facts” in a post-truth era.

So instead of truth we have ideological consensus. One example: after the fallout at The New York Times’ Opinion section, due to the publication of an op-ed by Tom Cotton that staffers deeply disliked, the mood changed. No longer was diversity of opinion valued or allowed. The editorials started reflecting the opinions of a small elite group of staffers, not Americans at large.

That’s a good metaphor for our entire situation. A psychological and medical protocol conceived and designed for a tiny population has expanded and been mapped onto a population it was never intended for. We institutionalized an obscure belief system about gender and mapped it onto the entire society though education and law. The exceptions are now the rule, the edge cases centralized. And we call anyone in the majority who objects to that imposed belief system a traitor.

Once you report honestly on the situation, you’re tainted, pushed out of reporting and relegated to opinion, because telling a more scientific and accurate side of the story is somehow now an opinion. Even then, good luck getting that “opinion” into the kinds of publications that most desperately need honest reporting.

In this censorious world, youth gender psychology, education, law, and medicine is so hard to get inside of, to hold up and look at from multiple angles. It took me a long time to feel like I had a handle on the information—and I learn more every day. It’s an issue that requires us to ask ourselves, with every new story or bit of information, “Is there something I am wrong about?” It requires us to wrestle with our biases, to try to set them aside. In other words, to do journalism, as it was once known.

My hope is that we head in that direction of better journalism someday again.

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(* I used to write this way myself, and I don’t have that excuse. I just thought liberals were right.)