Column: Cartooning The New York Times as ‘Anti-Trans’

If you need a table-pounding laugh, check out the radical-left activists who have accused The New York Times of horrible right-wing bias. GLAAD – which is best described as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Debate – sent a truck around Times Square claiming The Times “prioritizes anti-LGBTQ voices over the voices of transgender people and medical experts.”

The truck also carried the message “Dear New York Times: Stop questioning trans people’s right to exist and access to medical care.” There’s a word for this critique: Nuts.

Anyone who thinks this paper is prioritizing or boosting the religious right should submit to a Breathalyzer test. They’re just upset that allowing any debate “undermined support for trans youth.” By allowing a fraction of democracy in their pages, The New York Times is suddenly the “enemy of the people”!

In coordination with GLAAD, a group of over 370 Times contributors wrote their own letter complaining about Times stories, kookily lamenting the paper would “follow the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation.”

They cited a front-page story on January 23 by reporter Katie J.M. Baker headlined “Parents and Schools Clash on Gender Identity.” The contributors complained it “misframed the battle over children’s right to safely transition.” 

What these radicals obviously resent is that the article framed a reality. There are parents — some of them liberals — filing lawsuits and forcing debates about their right to be notified about what’s going on at school. But these media critics believe children’s rights are absolute, and any argument for parents’ rights is somehow a “punitive” “hate group” concept that should not be “platformed.”

“The piece fails to make clear that court cases brought by parents who want schools to out their trans children [to their parents!] are part of a legal strategy pursued by anti-trans hate groups,” the contributors claimed. “These groups have identified trans people as an ‘existential threat to society’ and seek to replace the American public education system with Christian homeschooling, key context Baker did not provide to Times readers.”

The people obliterating the context here are the radical leftists. Advocating school choice for religious families is not “replacing” the public school system. Following the link on the “existential threat” reveals the Alliance Defending Freedom actually wrote that “confusing a generation about biological reality is an existential threat to society.”

In the world of reality, the Baker article included a dig at the ADF-aligned Child and Parental Rights Campaign: “Its president has spoken at conferences about the ‘existential threat to our culture’ posed by the ‘transgender movement.’”

The contributors also complained about what writer Tom Scocca called a “laboriously even-handed story” by Emily Bazelon in The New York Times Magazine. Anyone who thinks Ms. Bazelon is a right-wing tool is crazy. They were upset she referred to a “Patient Zero” of puberty blockers, “which vilifies transness as a disease to be feared.”

But the right-wingers were typically demonized. Bazelon wrote therapists “were deeply troubled when right-wing politicians grasped the unsettled nature of these matters — which barely registered for most Americans 10 years ago — and turned them into political dynamite.”

Bazelon bemoaned the “bans” on transgender “care” for children in red states, “fueled by anti-trans vitriol.” The only conservative quoted in this 11,000-word piece was two words from Tucker Carlson: “chemical castration.”  

These letters demonstrate that leftist media outlets can only avoid criticism from their left by “deplatforming” the right. These censorious radicals openly declare the “news” media must “frame” conservatives outside of the picture.