Erik Wemple has an interesting story up today taking a 2nd look at the left-wing backlash to the NY Times‘ trans coverage. If you’re not familiar with Wemple, he’s the Washington Post‘s media critic and while I think he sometimes misses the mark he’s also sometimes the only reporter at any national outlet willing to bring up an awkward question like: How do reporters who promoted the Steele Dossier feel about it now? He’s not a conservative voice but he has often been an independent one which is pretty rare these days.

As you may be aware there was a big backlash to some of the Times’ coverage of issues like gender affirming care, medicalization, top surgery, etc. Some of it was just unhinged like this:

🎯 The @nytimes is jeopardizing trans folks' lives for click bait.

I'm sorry if your paper isn't doing well, but have some dignity and morals. Don't try to increase sales on our backs. We already have too much to carry. https://t.co/F4oTYPpRim

— Evan Minton t(he)y (@EvanMMinton) February 17, 2023

Eventually a group of contributors and Times’ staffers released a letter which attacked the coverage as an “eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language…that omits relevant information about its sources.” (I wrote about the letter at the time.) But as Wemple points out today, the letter and the national activists groups behind the backlash (GLAAD released it’s own letter the same day) don’t actually seem to have much to complain about.

While critics argue that the newspaper is advancing an anti-trans agenda by “just asking questions” and otherwise elevating doubts about treatment, it’s actually quoting the concerns of people in the field with long track records of working in the interests of trans children — such that the broadsides aimed at the newspaper have a shoot-the-messenger flavor to them…

The story on puberty blockers, for instance, conveyed the concerns of pediatric endocrinologist Catherine Gordon, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, among others. Bazelon’s story filtered the discussion of trans youth treatment standards through Scott Leibowitz, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with a deep résumé on LGBTQ+ issues, among other experts. And Ghorayshi’s story on “top surgery” looked to researcher Kinnon MacKinnon of York University in Toronto…

The contributors [to the anti-Times letter] took aim at Bazelon’s story, claiming that she “quoted multiple expert sources who have since expressed regret over their work’s misrepresentation” — a salvo that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. The letter linked to a nearly 80-minute podcast featuring commentary from historian and scholar Jules Gill-Peterson. Though Gill-Peterson said Bazelon interviewed her, the story never mentioned or quoted her, raising questions as to how Bazelon mischaracterized her work. When the Erik Wemple Blog pointed out this disconnect, the letter writers responded that the podcast made clear that Bazelon’s story “rests on a factually incorrect framing of Jules Gill-Peterson’s work.”…

The contributors’ letter also knocked Bazelon for using the term “patient zero” — long associated with the HIV/AIDS epidemic — in reference to a child who received gender-affirming care in the 1980s. (Silverstein told us the source had used the term to identify himself and that the magazine failed to couch it in quotation marks. In March, the magazine appended an editor’s note to the piece addressing the matter.)…

Perhaps the most withering charge in the contributors’ letter claimed that the Times was publishing “pseudoscience” on this topic. We asked the co-authors to provide examples of such errors. They replied with one: the “patient zero” formulation…

When we asked GLAAD’s Ellis to cite particular objections to Bazelon’s piece, for example, she paused before saying, “I think the overall framing of it, truly. I think you’re asking for a little more detail than I can give at this moment.” (A GLAAD spokesperson later sent along concerns that largely mirrored those of the contributors’ letter.)

There’s a lot more to the piece, part of which involves the fact that, just in terms of word count, the overwhelming majority of the Times‘ coverage of trans issues is positive. I’m sure that’s true which is one reason the articles criticizing some elements of the current care standard seem like an admission against interest, one the activists would rather the Times not make at all. In fact according to a spokesperson for the Times, Dr. Madeline Deutsch, who is the president of USPATH—the organization that sets standards of care in the US, “said that she did not want news coverage that examined questions within the field of medical treatment of transgender youth because it would be used by those seeking to ban the treatment.” The spokesperson added, “She said she preferred there be no coverage of this at all.”

Dr. Deutsch claimed she didn’t mean no coverage at all but the Times didn’t back off it’s account of what she said. In this case, I don’t have a hard time believing that account. The proponents of gender affirming care don’t want to have it discussed by the hoi polloi, they would rather continue setting the rules that other people are expected to live by without any feedback from the real world.