When I first wrote Anatomy of a moral panic in February 2024, I had only a faint glimmer of what was to come.The astronomical rise in stories about trans people that I’d collected over the previous year told a different story. This massive, messy dataset I had collected was brimming with increasingl
NYT Less Interested Than Ever in Trans Perspectives on Trans Issues
Even while feigning concern, the paper of record remains largely uninterested in centering trans people and perspectives in coverage of trans issues.
Seen but not heard: The New York Times failed to quote trans people in over 60% of 2023 stories on anti-trans legislation
A new report from Media Matters and GLAAD finds that The New York Times excluded the perspectives of trans people from two-thirds of its stories about anti-trans legislation in the year following public criticism for its handling of the topic. Media Matters previously reported that the Times helped fuel a right-wing anti-trans panic in 2022 by platforming anti-trans extremists, painting rising transgender identification as a social contagion, and fearmongering about the costs of transgender acceptance. In February 2023, the paper received two separate open letters: one from a coalition of 150+ organizations and leaders, including GLAAD, and a separate letter signed by hundreds of Times contributors that criticized the outlet's contributions to a deadly anti-LGBTQ culture war. The newspaper attempted to conflate both efforts, dismissing all criticisms of its coverage as merely “protests organized by advocacy groups.” Between February 15, 2023, when those letters were separately delivered to the Times, and February 15, 2024, the Times published at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans legislation in either their headline or lead paragraphs. We counted how often the paper quoted openly trans or gender-nonconforming sources, cited anti-trans misinformation or talking points without context or adequate fact-checking, and accurately represented the records of anti-trans figures mentioned in its stories. Our findings: 66% of the articles did not quote even one trans or gender-nonconforming person. 18% of the articles quoted misinformation from anti-trans activists without adequate fact-checking or additional context. 6 articles obscured the anti-trans background of sources, erasing histories of extremist rhetoric or actions.
The New York Times helped fuel an anti-trans panic in 2022. Will 2023 be any better?
Perhaps no mainstream publication did more in 2022 than the New York Times to shift the mainstream conversation around transgender equality away from obstacles to access in housing, employment, and health care and toward the idea that the most pressing issue facing the trans community is actually too much medical care. The paper’s venerable pages featured profile after profile that platformed anti-trans extremists, fearmongered about the price of transgender acceptance, and framed rising trans identification as a social contagion. A recent article that centers the concerns of parents calling for the forced outing of transgender students shows why in 2023, the Times must improve its coverage.
Experts Warn U.S. in Early Stages of Genocide Against Trans Americans
Genocide scholars say policies targeting transgender Americans match early warning signs of mass atrocity.This piece has been updated from its original email version.Genocide scholars are sounding the alarm over what they describe as escalating attacks targeting transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans in the United States.Experts, including two former presidents of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), warn that the nation may already be in the early stages of committ
Elon Musk's Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points
The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people.
Who's Afraid of Gender? (A Guide to Judith Butler)
Who's Afraid of Gender? (A Guide to Judith Butler)
Trans Journalists Association Stylebook and Coverage Guide
The Transgender Journalists Association’s Stylebook and Coverage Guide is a tool reporters, editors, and other journalists can use to improve news coverage of trans people and the stories that affect them.
The Anti-Trans Playbook
The current crusade against trans people imperils not just their rights but the survival of the legal doctrine built to protect all women from discrimination.
NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias—by the Numbers
The New York Times used its front-page coverage primarily to wonder whether trans people's rights and access to healthcare have gone too far.
Trans Prostitute Programmer Turns Down Sponsorship From Framework Affiliated Company
Data Feminism for AI
Attacks on women and trans people are not happening in a vacuum. Communications scholars W. Lance Bennett and Marianne Kneuer recently argued that we are witnessing the intensification of "illiberal public spheres" around the world (Bennett and Kneuer, 2023). These are characterized by a set of anti-democratic communications tactics that include the denigration and exclusion of minoritized people, targeted attacks on the press and political institutions, and transgression of norms of civil discourse. Such tactics are enabled and amplified by the social media platforms owned by Big Tech, whose business model elevates attention above all other metrics, such that they profit richly off extremism, threats, spectacle, and lies. The success of this corporate partnership with right-wing extremism is evident in the proliferation of book bans (Magnusson, 2024), the demonization of DEI and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 2022), and mob tactics to doxx, intimidate, misrepresent, and otherwise silence people that study misinformation, speak out against racial and gender violence, or rule against insurrectionists (Edmonds, 2024). At the same time, we have seen the continued work of feminists, including Latin American, Indigenous, and abolitionist feminists in the US and globally, doing the work of imagining alternate worlds (Cullors, 2021; Davis, 2022; Ricaurte, 2019; Simpson, 2017). This paper represents our own first attempt to imagine a more equitable, sustainable, feminist world for AI research.
Debunking every Anti Transgender Argument Part 1: Trans Women in Women's Sport
Fact-Checking False Claims about our Gender Identity Coverage | The New York Times Company
A recent post from Trans News Network included numerous falsehoods about New York Times stories on gender identity and maligned some of the journalists involved in the work. Our coverage is guided by…
NYT Publishes ‘Greatest Hits’ of Bad Trans Healthcare Coverage
A recent article serves as a greatest-hits album of all of the New York Times’ problematic coverage on adolescent gender-affirming care.
