Does The New York Times Want to Eradicate Trans People?
An analysis of its coverage reveals a pattern of misrepresentations, deceptions, distortions, the exclusion of trans voices, and the endorsement of contempt.
Opinion by Billie Jean Sweeney
Is it hyperbolic when critics of The New York Times say its publisher and top editors are intent on eradicating trans people? Dozens of documented instances of bias have dogged its coverage for years, but a flurry of new and newly discovered examples reflect the outlet’s sustained determination to pursue an activist anti-trans agenda.
A review by Assigned Media of four years of news and opinion pieces, placing particular emphasis on recent revelations, shows that the Times has misrepresented the positions of medical organizations, deceived readers with misleading assertions, averted its eyes to the right-wing money powering the anti-trans movement and zealously defended a prominent bigot, JK Rowling. Its newsroom still does not hire or assign trans journalists to cover trans issues — a de facto ban that exemplifies prejudice — and it suppresses the expression of dissenting queer viewpoints internally.
As a veteran former editor on The Times’s International Desk, I’ve witnessed this campaign up close.
Though the Times produces a vast number of words about transgender people — far and away more stories than any other major news outlet so far this year, according to our tracker — it’s been three years since it has published any in-depth examination of the hard-right groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation that have driven the anti-trans movement. Newsrooms with far fewer resources, such as Mother Jones, have undertaken such efforts, revealing the way anti-trans politics underpins the right wing’s broader anti-feminist agenda, something that affects the vast majority of Americans.
Corporate spokespeople routinely defend the Times’s coverage as fair and even empathetic, but editors for both its news and opinion pages have continued to make choices that legitimize and elevate right-wing positions intended to drive trans people out of public life, denying us access to health care, public facilities, the right to freedom of movement and association and the documentation needed to vote and conduct basic societal functions.
Outright misrepresentations are characteristic of the paper’s coverage. Late last month, both the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association suggested that the Times had mischaracterized their positions in its news and opinion pages in ways that falsely implied a softening of their longtime support for gender affirming care.
Moreover, the Times’s accounts of a position statement issued by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons ellided important details about the highly politicized nature of the group's decision, which bypassed its own expert task force. Put together, the Times’s reporting on the three groups created a large-scale misportrayal of the state of medical science to serve its leaders’ own narrative that even the most politically driven questions about care are reasons to abandon long-held professional consensus.
On at least five prior occasions dating to 2022 medical groups, experts, advocacy organizations and parents themselves have taken the extraordinary step of issuing public statements saying that The Times had distorted their positions. In every case we could find, the misrepresentation went in only one direction, twisting words to fit the outlet’s political agenda against gender affirming care and more broadly against trans people themselves. In one case, the parent of a trans child said she had been cruelly deceived and manipulated by a Times reporter.
The Times has preyed upon not only trans families, but on its own readers who understandably lack a detailed understanding of trans issues and rely upon honest brokers of fact.
In an example newly uncovered by Assigned Media, the Times sweepingly declared last year that “a coalition of critics of youth gender medicine from both the right and the left have argued for banning the treatments.” But no such broad coalition existed, then or now. The text of the Times’s July 2025 story, which detailed the federal government’s judicial attacks on health care providers, offered no evidence for its bold assertion. The sole support for this claim? Two embedded links.
One link went to the “LGB Courage Coalition,” a trans-exclusionary group whose primary activity is publishing on Substack. The other went to an extremist group that calls itself “Democratic” but whose public filings provide no substantiation of any link to the party, a faction or prominent member, Assigned Media found in an investigation published last month. The website for the group, known by the initials DIAG, is replete with transphobic smears and its most prominent member is closely allied with Genspect, the anti-queer hate group.
Neither of the groups portrayed by the Times as a “coalition” cutting across the political spectrum could be fairly described as “on the left.” But few readers would ever pick up on this deception.
This deceptive misuse of terminology is years-long. In a January 2023 article, the Times labored repeatedly to call the unsupportive parents it interviewed “liberal” while somehow failing to disclose to readers that the court cases asserting the preeminence of parental rights were being brought exclusively by conservative anti-trans groups.
The Times furthers its activist campaign in other ways that are not evident to a casual reader. It has become an ardent promoter of the Charles Koch-funded Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which positions itself as an alternative to the ACLU. Among other positions, FIRE has supported the cruelly anti-queer malpractice of conversion therapy, blamed trans people as a class for “cancel culture” and has come to the aid of the shadowy anti-trans group DIAG.
While the Times sought to vilify the ACLU for defending trans people in a piece last year that mimicked the positions of the right wing hate group Alliance Defending Freedom, it has lavished FIRE with gauzy, uncritical coverage and handed its chief executive multiple guest essay opportunities on its opinion pages.
For an outlet eager to embrace anti-trans ideologues, the Times has demonstrated a years-long institutional determination to cast every trans person who dares speak up for themselves as an “activist,” to declare our every expression as unreasonable and to close off any questions about its coverage.
When hundreds of the New York Times’s own freelance contributors submitted a letter to its leadership in February 2023 noting a growing pattern of bias, a corporate spokesperson dismissed their concerns out of hand as those of “advocates.” It never followed up on their requests for a discussion.
Less known publicly was an internal effort about this time by queer newsroom staffers to document this same pattern of bias and bring it to the leadership’s attention. Within 18 months, the executive editor closed down all avenues of internal discussion, declaring “the newsroom is not a safe space” even as he created a “safe space” for himself and other top leaders.
This adversarial institutional stance has veered into outright contempt in its news pages, infecting what readers see. In one notable instance just weeks before Trump began waging his own well-telegraphed campaign to eradicate trans people, the first sentence of a New York Times news story said this: “To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism.” The story did not include a source to back up this characterization.
A trans advocate quoted in the piece issued a statement soon after to say that the Times had taken his views out of context, a complaint that runs through all of the documented instances in which experts and medical groups interviewed by the Times have felt compelled to issue their own corrective statements.
The absence of trans voices has been notable in both the Times’s coverage and in coverage throughout major media. More than two-thirds of stories all about us fail to include a single quote from even one of us.
Other major outlets have certainly campaigned against trans people. Bari Weiss’s Free Press and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News have promoted falsehoods and unabashedly fostered bigotry. The Atlantic has been a leading purveyor of anti-trans perspectives among elite outlets, such as its recent effort to scapegoat trans people in “defense of effeminate boys,” a story that didn’t bother to cite any evidence or quote any expert to support its specious premise.
But the Atlantic’s reach, with one million-plus subscribers, is dwarfed by The Times, which claims over 12 million subscribers. The Times’s news stories, many of them deeply flawed, have nonetheless been directly cited in many dozens of court briefs, government memos, state legislative initiatives and judicial rulings at the highest level, the Supreme Court.
The Times’s publisher and top editors know well that their actions carry special weight, and will directly affect the lives, safety and livelihoods of millions of trans people and their families.
So to answer the question we posed in our headline. I’m going to turn first to the publisher AG Sulzberger’s 2023 New Yorker interview with David Remnick. In it, he acknowledges that there are “all sorts of bad faith actors who are trying to undermine trans people and attack trans rights in this country.”
Is the Times, as he asserted in the interview, accurately and fairly representing what he called a debate among medical professionals? If so, why does it ignore inconvenient facts like the legislative-commissioned review in Utah that backed gender-affirming care? Why does the Times consistently misrepresent the positions of European nations? Why has it uncritically promoted a right-wing activist’s false accusations of misdeeds in Missouri? Why do medical groups keep saying the Times misportrays its positions?
Is the Times, as Sulzberger said then, committed to chronicling the rise in bigotry and prejudice? If so, why have its leaders turned a blind eye to the role of monied and influential right-wing groups in powering the anti-trans movement? Publishing roundups of mounting legislative attacks and incremental stories with some paragraphs of political context doesn't represent a top-level commitment to chronicling the roots, tactics and figures behind this historic campaign against a small vulnerable minority.
And why, at the same time, has it championed a right-wing funded “free speech” group that unabashedly promotes anti-queer positions?
Sulzberger said back in 2023 that he has talked to trans people. But who are they? Not on his staff, or among his contributors. No trans group or prominent individual has emerged publicly to say they are advising or are supportive of the Times’s coverage. In fact, trans people, their families and allies who have tried to raise critical questions have been met with resentment and animus.
“We’ve never written a story that questions whether trans people exist or should exist,” Sulzberger also stated in his 2023 interview with Remnick.
But the Times' actions have spoken ever more loudly. The company’s years-long institutional record reflects a determined willingness to deceptively tilt the scales in its representations of medical care and definitional and scientific issues, and that in turn has fueled the right wing’s explicit effort to force trans people from all aspects of public life.
The Times is an agent of this drive to eradicate trans people.
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_Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her) is a freelance editor, reporter and advocate. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an award-winning investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on young trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted and spread anti-trans disinformation._
