In 2022, we’re seeing another “transgender tipping point” (credit to a 2014 TIME magazine cover for over-optimistically coining the term), but instead of nice pictures of Laverne Cox, this time it looks like hundreds of bills in state legislatures to ban or restrict trans youth. The existence, importance, and legitimacy of trans people has been a topic of debate for liberal institutions like The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and notable figures within the Democratic Party.
This should come as no surprise, given the increasing power and influence of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, or TERFism, a theory which itself came out of East Coast college women’s studies departments – easily considered some of the most “liberal” places in America – in the late 1970s. Now the ideology is being promoted everywhere from the Twitter account of J.K. Rowling to, repeatedly, the pages of the Times.
I am reluctant to engage in these discussions on the terms of bad faith actors, which these publications and others have proven themselves to be. As journalist Shon Faye, author of The Trans Issue – released in 2021 in the UK and forthcoming stateside from Verso this fall – wrote in her book’s introduction, “Such debates are time-consuming, exhausting distractions from what we should really be focusing on: the material ways in which we are oppressed.” Faye recalls an anecdote about the late author Toni Morrison speaking at a university in 1975 on distraction as the “very serious function” of racism.
You’re likely familiar with what the typical “distractions” are, reducing trans existence to, as Faye puts it, “a handful of repetitive talking points: whether nonbinary people exist and whether gender neutral pronouns are reasonable; whether trans children living with dysphoria should be allowed to start their transition; whether trans women will dominate women’s events in the Olympics; and the endless debate over toilets and changing rooms.” They distract from myriad dilemmas, not least of which includes the legal precedent created in the Supreme Court overturning Roe, which has already been used in a brief filed by the Alabama attorney general calling for a reinstatement of the state's ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
But unfortunately, these acts of bad faith have material consequences, so we are forced back onto their playing field – if only temporarily, to raise the alarm, if you weren’t already hearing it.
In early July, the Times ran an essay by recently-appointed opinion columnist Pamela Paul, which was promptly ripped apart by anyone online with a basic familiarity with reality. Her argument claims “the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.” The basis for this, according to Paul, is gender-inclusive language around pregnancy.
Reproductive rights are at stake, but don’t blame the Supreme Court that ended them or the conservative cis white women who lobbied for it for decades — blame trans people! It’s not even original: Here’s a 2015 version of the same tired argument in The Nation.
As Them contributor James Factora pointed out in his response to Paul’s op-ed, the premise is “an almost self-parodic invocation of the ‘both sides’ fallacy to which the Times remains so devoted.” This “bothsiderism” is a liberal tenet; hearing all sides to an argument, in theory, is a nice idea. In reality, it’s often malpractice — and it’s something that trans writers and advocates have been calling the media out over for years. Here’s The Daily Beast in 2018: “[Outlets] present quotes from anti-transgender voices without providing the necessary information to assess the claims being made therein. They give equal weight to the opinions of anti-LGBT groups and to the positions of major medical associations, or the conclusions of independent studies.”
Little has changed in the Times’s approach to both opinion pieces and reportage around trans healthcare and rights. In June 2022, reporter Emily Bazelon, who is cis, was the subject of significant critique after she wrote about gender-affirming care for teens while citing a group that supports detransitioning for trans youth. (The Times defended the piece in a statement to LGBTQ+ outlet PinkNews as “deeply-researched” and “newsworthy.”)
Per noted ACLU attorney and trans advocate Chase Strangio, that piece was referenced in an expert report filed by the state of Texas justifying its “child welfare policy” of investigating parents of trans youth. Strangio is working with Texas families impacted by the policy. “There is a direct line from the discourse to these policies,” he tweeted.
Here’s the same poorly substantiated talking points — and puff pieces framing those who perpetuate such falsehoods as “victims” — published in 2015, 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2022. “Just asking questions,” but over and over again. The tone calls to mind the well-documented homophobic tone of the paper throughout the twentieth century, such as when the opinion desk published William F. Buckley Jr. in 1986 proposing that all AIDS patients be tattooed with a marker on the “upper forearm” and “buttocks,” and sterilized. Here’s a news story from 1963 referring to the “homosexual problem.”
We can allow for the conventions of the era to justify some of this truly egregious bigotry, but that doesn’t justify the paper of record, which indubitably helps set those conventions, engaging in regurgitation of similar rhetoric to stigmatize trans people. As “respectable” transphobia is sown into right-wing boilerplates to be easily copied into state-level bills, the “respectable” Times is expanding the overton window of discourse to make transphobia permissible and normal.
In 2021, GLAAD “failed” the Times, alongside Newsweek and CNN, for coverage of the Equality Act, which would federally enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people (and largely looks dead). In their ranking, GLAAD noted that the Times included zero quotes from LGBTQ community members besides one directly involved in the bill; no trans voices; and that the Times’s coverage “gives lengthy space to inaccurate, transphobic rhetoric from several elected officials without countering or contextualizing as false.”
Trans healthcare is not actually a debate, and anti-trans laws are not, as trans historian Jules Gill-Peterson argues and Death Panel’s Beatrice Adler-Bolton explains for The New Inquiry, “moral issues at play in a culture war” but instead “echoes of eugenics policymaking.” Adler-Bolton, in conversation with Gill-Peterson, defines “eugenics policymaking” as deciding “what kinds of life are acceptable, which should be promoted, and which should be subject to what abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘organized abandonment,’ in which the state makes itself through policing, surveillance, and denial of the resources people need to survive.” Another word for this is necropolitics.
Maddeningly, this playbook was taken straight from the U.K., where the media’s treatment of trans women in particular has contributed to suicide in at least one case.
This is not to absolve U.S. media of the same: In 2014, a report from the shuttered sports site Grantland about, of all things, golf clubs by a cis journalist led to the outing and suicide of a trans woman. Editor in chief Bill Simmons apologized after public outcry, admitting to the staff’s “collective ignorance about the issues facing the transgender community in general, as well as our biggest mistake: not educating ourselves on that front before seriously considering whether to run the piece.”
Back to the U.K.: In The Transgender Issue, Faye cites a 2011 analysis from a UK media watchdog group, which examined the role that media outlets play in trans discourse and issued recommendations: “The defence the press uses in situations such as these is that they are simply reflecting public unease – downplaying its role in creating and shaping that unease to begin with,” the watchdog group’s report reads.
Does this sound like it was from 11 years ago? I might’ve written this today. Clearly, no one in the U.K. was listening; just this month, they announced a ban on gender-neutral bathrooms in new government buildings. This feels especially stinging for me in the wake of the violent attack on 20-year-old trans man Noah Ruiz in Camden, Ohio, who was instructed to use women’s toilets then jumped by three men upon exiting, leading to Ruiz’s arrest – over the exact same weekend as the UK’s bathroom announcement. You read that right: A trans man was instructed to use the wrong bathroom for his gender, was physically attacked by men over it, then arrested by police after being attacked. According to Them’s reporting, the police report confirms Ruiz’s account of events, while misgendering him throughout.
Another Times piece that ran last month took the same tack as Paul’s story but perhaps more egregiously ran it as straight reporting, claiming “‘pregnant people’ and ‘birthing people’ have elbowed aside ‘pregnant women.’” (There’s quite a bit of bias in the usage of “elbowed aside” alone.) Again the Times fixates and self-congratulates on its “bothsiderism,” but mostly includes sources critical of gender-inclusive language. The only trans voice quoted is from a 2014 Everyday Feminism piece – which is to say, the Times seemingly did not speak to a trans person for this piece, or if they did, chose not to include it in the final copy. It’s a recurring theme, opining on transness without including trans perspectives, and the Times isn’t alone in it. This Ohio state lawmaker admitted to backing legislation that would prohibit gender-affirming healthcare for minors, including some mental health services, and hamstring the medical and insurance systems that provide such care – without ever talking to a trans person.
Times reporter Michael Powell writes that one of the academics interviewed questioned the reproductive movement “discard[ing] its base and core sexual identity,” a thing that, firstly, is not happening, but is secondly repeated credulously in the Times’s institutional voice, one that brooks no argument. I am trans, I am neither a cis woman or trans man, I am on birth control, and I may someday need an abortion. It’s about being accurate, something that the Times clearly has no concern for when it comes to trans life.
As Quispe Lopez wrote for Them, reproductive healthcare is trans healthcare, and denying that is what creates the unsafe healthcare trap trans people are already stuck in, with 28% of respondents to the 2012 National Transgender Discrimination Survey postponing care out of fear of mistreatment. Lopez spoke to Dr. Quinn Jackson, a family physician and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, who told them, “You cannot think about one without thinking about the other. Anti-abortion legislation and anti-trans legislation are both rooted in this fundamentalist, white supremacist value system that really has no place in medicine.”
Liberals do not want to be called white supremacists, and strain to distance themselves from Christian nationalists who spent decades sowing Roe’s overturning. But if you’re criticizing trans people for wanting coverage of reproductive rights to accurately reflect a trans-inclusive movement that already exists, perhaps you are not actually invested in fighting white supremacy or Christian nationalism, or fighting for reproductive justice – because you can’t do these things separately. Some liberals would rather throw their lot in with the same people they spent the whole Trump administration calling the scourge of the earth than take a moral stance for trans people.
It’s particularly frustrating given that the heavily white-cis women reproductive movement that held back true reproductive justice over the last decades is still siloing those that reproductive justice would serve. This failure to build coalitions across struggles is the pathway to fascism, as The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant wrote in her response to the Pamela Paul Times op-ed: “Roughly half the people in America, many of them reeling from being robbed of something they were told was their birthright, were told by one rarefied columnist at the country’s most powerful newspaper that trans women are set to replace them. Some may call that fascist. I do.” Same.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), in a rare but needed show of solidarity from cis women, tweeted in support of Strangio and criticizing the Times. “During escalating assaults on trans people & trans rights nationwide, the New York Times is featuring writers debating whether trans people should even exist and scapegoating this already-marginalized community.” Tlaib launched a page for others to sign on to call for the Times to stop platforming transphobia and provide more space instead to trans writers. What Tlaib is doing is taking a side by supporting those being oppressed, even though she is cis — what we could call solidarity across difference.
The Times and other “bothsiderist” coverage of trans issues might think they’re not picking a side, but in not standing with trans people, they’ve already chosen. And while many liberals throw their lot in with the wrong team, and hem and haw over the same tired arguments, queer and trans people are afraid to go outside. A January 2022 poll found that 85% of trans and nonbinary youth and 66% of all LGBTQ+ youth said their mental health was negatively impacted by anti-LGBTQ bills. There are queer and trans young people in my life among them. There are queer and trans adults in my life among them — hell, myself included.
“The demand for true trans liberation echoes and overlaps with the demands of workers, socialists, feminists, anti-racists and queer people. They are radical demands in that they go to the root of what our society is and what it could be,” Faye wrote in The Trans Issue. “For this reason, the existence of trans people is a source of constant anxiety for many who are either invested in the status quo or fearful about what would replace it.” Liberals do not want to admit they are in this camp, even while we watch them wave from it.
So if liberalism cannot be an alternative to fascism, what will?