NY Times Criticizes Pro-Transgender Clinic

A person performs during The TransFest 2023 in the Queens borough of New York City on July
LEONARDO MUNOZ/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

The New York Times is distancing itself from the transgender ideology amid growing public opposition to transgender advocacy, and much evidence of irreparable harm to many children.

The paper’s skepticism comes after the public has rejected transgenderism, but it immediately caused protests from groups that push Democrats to accept the transgender ideology.

On August 23, for example, GLAAD complained about the Times‘ even-handed coverage of Jamie Reed, a nurse who denounced the transgender clinic where she worked:

The @nytimes is at it again, with yet another biased, anti-trans piece. This morning’s story about trans healthcare pushes debunked lies from [Reed] an anti-trans extremist, lacks context, and ignores the science of healthcare for transgender people.

The next day, GLAAD parked a billboard van outside the newspaper:

Critics of transgenderism scoffed at GLAAD’s complaint.

GLAAD’s “interpretation is so misleading that it’s tempting to suspect the GLAAD activists didn’t bother reading the article before condemning it as heresy,” wrote Josephine Bartosch at UnHerd. “Notably, the woman [that GLAAD] labelled an ‘extremist’ has a partner who identifies as trans,” Bartosch added.

“I am confident more stories will come out about GLAAD‘s behind-the-scenes efforts to manipulate journalists and skew coverage with false and exaggerated claims,” tweeted Jesse Singal, a left-wing critic of the transgender ideology. “As an activist group, that’s their right, but it’s also our right to expose them and call them out for it.”

The New York Times pre-empted GLAAD’s focus on the witness instead of the evidence, saying:

When Ms. Reed, 43, began working at the clinic, she considered herself a fierce champion of the gender-affirming model. In her previous jobs — at Planned Parenthood, at an H.I.V. clinic and in the foster care system — she had also supported L.G.B.T.Q. young people. And her husband, a transgender man, had shown her how essential gender-affirming care could be.

The newspaper’s shift is good news because it gives more room to Democrat politicians and voters to walk away from the ideology, which has done so much damage to troubled teenagers and adults, women’s sports, science, the status of women, gays and lesbians, free speech, and Congress’s ability to help people manage their lives.

The newspaper’s article examined the evidence collected by Reed while she worked at Washington University in St. Louis:

Some of Ms. Reed’s claims could not be confirmed, and at least one included factual inaccuracies. But others were corroborated, offering a rare glimpse into one of the 100 or so clinics in the United States that have been at the center of an intensifying fight over transgender rights.

The turmoil in St. Louis underscores one of the most challenging questions in gender care for young people today: How much psychological screening should adolescents receive before they begin gender treatments?

…

The head of the clinic, Dr. Lewis, responded, adding a university administrator to the thread. “I DO think our clinic, and transgender care at large, exhibits some of the concerns mentioned,” he wrote, including being “disastrously overwhelmed.” But, he added, “No matter the approach there will be a percentage of patients that should have been started that weren’t and vice versa.”

Yet the establishment media has a long way to go before it recognizes the very visible damage done by transgenderism or admits the public’s widespread rational opposition, experts said.

“The Times’s article represents the first attempt by a major left-of-center newspaper to corroborate Reed’s claims,” wrote Leo Sapir, at the Manhattan Institute in New York, who also noted a few shortcomings in the article:

Reed documents several instances of harm suffered by patients receiving gender-transitioning care that go unmentioned in the Times piece. These include a teenage girl who experienced bleeding vaginal lacerations following testosterone injections (a known side-effect) and another girl whose clitoris got so large from taking the androgenizing hormone that it painfully chafed against her underwear when she walked. After conducting an internal investigation, in which it never bothered to interview Reed, Washington University reported that it did not find evidence of any “adverse physical reactions” among those treated at the gender clinic. Not a single case.

The media shift comes after years of pro-transgender cheerleading by the New York Times and other establishment outlets, such as the Washington Post. The support for transgenderism is driven by journalists eagerness to support progressives’ political claim to have the noble power to transform the lives of young people, regardless of biology and profit incentives.

Even when some reporters were skeptical, they dared not fairly describe the many conservative, non-political, gay, feminist, lesbian, and progressive critics of transgenderism amid their peers’ progressive rage against former President Donald Trump.

In September 2022, for example, the same New York Times reporter — Azeen Ghorayshi — also wrote an article largely defending that transgender claims are deep-seated and are not caused by teenagers’ social distress during puberty:

Young children who transition to a new gender with social changes — taking on new names, pronouns, haircuts and clothing — are likely to continue identifying as that gender five years later, according to a report published on Wednesday, the first study of its kind.

The data come from the Trans Youth Project, a well-known effort following 317 children across the United States and Canada who underwent a so-called social transition between ages of 3 and 12. Participants transitioned, on average, at age 6.5.

The vast majority of the group still identified with their new gender five years later, according to the study, and many had begun hormonal medications in adolescence to prompt biological changes to align with their gender identities. The study found that 2.5 percent of the group had reverted to identifying as the gender they were assigned at birth.

The media shift also comes after the U.S. public — and the GOP — has clearly rejected the aggressive, society-shifting demands of the transgender ideology.

 

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