Why There’s Still An Argument About NYT Coverage of Trans People

The New York Times is digging in its heels on institutional transphobia

Wildcat looks cuddly but will bite you — Helmut Stirnweis from Pixabay

Since the February 15 open letter to the New York Times criticizing the newspaper for transphobic articles, there’s been a debate over whether the Times reporting on transgender people amounts to poor “workplace conditions” for Times employees, as that’s something the writers’ union might address. Times journalists organize through the NewsGuild of New York.

It could indeed create bad workplace conditions, particularly for a journalist who is trans or who is closely connected to trans people. One colleague’s words about gender and sexuality inevitably affect their coworkers who belong to those groups.

Though NewsGuild president Susan DeCarava used the words “workplace conditions” in her own letter, she says she intended to take a different angle in her complaint. Following the New York Times letter to staff on February 16 in which editors Joe Kahn and Katie Kingsbury reiterated a “clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly,” DeCarava reminded them that they’d published Bret Stephens’ opinion “publicly attacking his colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project as ‘illogical’ and questioning the veracity of her reporting, while accusing her of disregarding facts.” The Times published Stephens’ opinion, she went on, even as Stephens himself confessed in his article that “it’s bad practice to openly criticize the work of one’s colleagues.” In other words, the Times allowed a white employee to openly criticize his Black colleague’s research on racism yet isn’t allowing employees to criticize colleagues’ transphobic articles and is disciplining those employees for signing a letter of protest. This appears, DeCarava said, to be “selective or discriminatory application of this purported policy.”

Yesterday’s update to the open letter to the New York Times (nytletter.com, February 24) says that “over 1,200 New York Times contributors and over 34,000 media workers, Times readers, and subscribers” have signed on, expressing (as per the original letter) their “serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people.”