NYT Trans Letter a Fight for Media Democracy

In a letter to New York Times leadership (2/15/23), more than 180 of the paper’s contributors (later swelling to more than 1,000) raised “serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary and gender nonconforming people.” What started as a conversation about a paper’s coverage exploded into a battle between media workers who see a problem at one of the most powerful media outlets on earth, and a media management that simply won’t listen.

“Some of us are trans, non⁠-⁠binary, or gender nonconforming, and we resent the fact that our work, but not our person, is good enough for the paper of record,” the letter declared:

Some of us are cis, and we have seen those we love discover and fight for their true selves, often swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we here protest.
The letter was organized by the Freelance Solidarity Project, a part of the National Writers Union.

A similar letter from LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD (2/15/23) and over a hundred other LGBTQ groups and leaders made three demands (summarized in a press release):

Stop printing biased anti-trans stories, immediately.
Listen to trans people: hold a meeting with trans community leaders within two months.
Hire at least four trans writers and editors within three months.
As FAIR (1/6/23) and many other progressive outlets and groups have noted, there is a campaign in state legislatures, in the courts, in the streets and in the media to roll back rights for transgender people, fomenting a moral panic about teachers and drag queens coming for America’s children. States like Florida are already banning certain types of medical care for trans people (Tampa Bay Times, 2/10/23), and other states have enacted similar laws (NBC, 2/14/23). States are even looking to restrict drag performances (Washington Post, 2/14/23).

Antisemitism Meets Transphobia
White nationalists and anti-trans feminists use the same conspiracies to target trans and Jewish folks.
BY BEN LORBER, HERON GREENESMITH APRIL 28, 2021 9:30 AM

We live in an age of conspiracy theories. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, and with movements like QAnon on the rise, it’s clear that millions across the United States subscribe to theories that a diabolical cabal of elites is secretly controlling society, and that they are willing to take violent action against these imagined enemies.

These types of conspiracy theories have long been a cornerstone of antisemitism—which insists that this cabal is Jewish—and today, they’re seeping into antitransgender activism as well. Now, more than ever, antisemitism and transphobia are becoming deeply connected, making it vital for progressives to fight both together.

On the radical right, white nationalists are obsessed with fears of “white genocide”—the imagined fast-approaching biological extinction of the “white race”—and are convinced that Jewish activism is the prime mover of this existential threat. One of the main ways they believe Jews advance “white genocide”—in addition to engineering increased immigration of Black and brown people, orchestrating racial justice movements, controlling the government and giant corporations, using space lasers to start California wildfires, and other dastardly schemes—is by liberalizing societal attitudes around gender and sexuality in colleges and universities, media, and other cultural institutions.

In order to “secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” as their slogan goes, white nationalists believe they must defend a status quo rooted in patriarchal violence—undergirded by cis-heteronormative gender roles, straight white nuclear families, a culture of warrior masculinity, and more—from Jews, who foster feminism, LGBTQ+ liberation movements, and multiculturalism to undermine this “natural order.” Movements for transgender justice, white nationalists believe, represent a key cultural front of Jewish-backed “white genocide.”