Is the New York Times turning against the trans lobby?

Is liberal America finally rousing itself from its trans-rights fever dream? One hopeful sign is the recent publication in the New York Times of an excoriating critique of the trans lobby’s attempt to defend ‘gender-affirming healthcare for children’ in the US Supreme Court.

The case followed a 2023 law in Tennessee, enforced by the state’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, which made it a criminal offence to prescribe puberty blockers to adolescents. The case was brought by Nashville family Samantha and Brian Williams, and their 15-year-old trans teenager. They were later joined by Joe Biden’s Department of Justice. United States v Skrmetti finally reached America’s highest court in December last year – just as Donald Trump was ordering gold leaf for the Oval Office in preparation for moving in. The Supreme Court then delivered its ruling last month, upholding Tennessee’s ban – a decision that means 25 other American states that have criminalised the effective sterilisation of children can continue to do so.

The pivotal moment in the hearing came when Chase Strangio – the lawyer for the civil-rights group the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), one of the plaintiffs in the case – was pressed by the Supreme Court on her assertion that the administration of puberty blockers prevented suicide. This dodgy claim has underpinned the LGBTQ+ lobby’s advocacy of medicalising children who think they are trans (or whose status-conscious parents have convinced them to believe they are) for more than two decades. Yet under questioning, Strangio – a woman who ‘identifies’ as a man – was forced to admit that suicide among supposedly trans adolescents is so rare that it is nearly impossible to comprehensively research. In other words, one of the main reasons cited by trans campaigners to medicalise children is a lie.

The tone of the New York Times’s summary of the case is worth mentioning. In the past, it had treated Strangio reverentially. Yet this article positively revels in the absurdity of statements she has made over the years – including her belief that ‘a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for… [a] woman.’ In other words, it was the first sign, after years of blind loyalty, that liberal America may be moving away from the closely held beliefs of the trans movement.

Strangio was ridiculed again in the New York Times in a guest essay by gay-rights icon Andrew Sullivan. In a magisterial denunciation of the LGBTQ+ lobby, he highlighted its creepy obsession with children and its love of provocation for its own sake. The popularity of Sullivan’s article with readers suggests there may be a silent majority within liberal America that yearns to leave behind the performative grandstanding on ‘trans rights’ that characterised the Biden-Harris era. Certainly, polls show a majority of Democratic voters support Trump’s ban on males in women’s and girls’ sport.

Nonetheless, a New York Times subscriber could be forgiven for being startled when reading Sullivan’s essay or its reporting of the Skrmetti farce. For years the New York Times has relentlessly banged the drum for the trans lobby. Indeed, its own analysis before the Supreme Court verdict will have left readers with the impression that the ACLU’s case was fairly strong. As for the claim puberty blockers save lives, the New York Times has published countless articles asserting just that, including an op-ed by none other than Chase Strangio, days before the hearing (there have been some notable brave exceptions in its coverage).

Just how deeply in thrall the New York Times has been to trans activism was reinforced after the publication of the Cass Review in the UK last year. Incredibly, one of its headlines described this comprehensive review of the medical research as ‘A strange report fueling the war on trans kids’. This sentiment was echoed by AG Sulzberger, chairman of the company that publishes the New York Times, in a speech to the Reuters Institute last year. Sulzberger defended his paper from criticism by the trans lobby, which lambasted it for publishing articles that merely questioned the risks of puberty blockers. Sulzberger sought to reassure the offended that these represented only a tiny proportion of its otherwise voluminous pro-trans content – ‘perhaps a dozen out of many hundreds of pieces’.

More recent coverage suggests Sulzenberger has a point – the trans lobby’s grip has not been lost entirely. Last month, the New York Times featured an interview with trans congressman Sarah McBride, who was allowed to paint himself as a moderate voice in the gender wars. Reading the interview, you would never have guessed that McBride was the driving force at Human Rights Campaign (HRC) – a major LGBTQ+ lobby group that has been a strident opponent of single-sex spaces. Indeed, McBride liked to post pictures of himself in women’s toilets as part of the HRC’s ‘advocacy’. He also tried to get academics fired if they disagreed with the trans lobby’s agenda. Quite the moderate.

Many of the readers’ comments under Sullivan’s essay point out a simple truth: the Democratic Party will never win another national election until it dumps its association with the trans lobby – with its advocacy of child harm and profound misogyny. But for that to happen, liberal media need to serve their readers and viewers better.

‘To give the news impartially, without fear or favour, regardless of any party, sect, or interest involved’, has long been the motto of the New York Times. It’s time it started to heed it.

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.