NYT Hypocrisy: Outlet Criticizes Trump's Attacks On Trans People That They Helped Usher In

The New York Times Editorial Board today released an opinion piece calling Trump's attacks on transgender Americans "shameful." The paper has been influential in fueling those attacks.

Photo by Jakayla Toney on Unsplash

Today, The New York Times Editorial Board published an opinion piece decrying the state of transgender rights under the Trump administration. The article, titled “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans,” condemns the administration’s sweeping rollbacks on trans rights, from nationwide medical care bans to barriers on international travel and military service. The board goes so far as to compare these policies to past dark chapters in American history—opposition to civil rights for Black Americans, or the backlash against same-sex marriage in the early 2000s. What the piece conveniently omits, however, is the Times’ own complicity. No other major paper has done more to legitimize the very arguments fueling these attacks than The New York Times itself.

The editorial focuses most heavily on Trump’s passport and military bans—policies that are easy to denounce given their likelihood of generating the strongest public backlash. It zeroes in on the overt cruelty of Trump’s rhetoric, particularly in his military ban order, where he frames transgender identity as fundamentally incompatible with honor: “Expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service… Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” reads Trump’s order.

“Not only does this order erase the honorable service (and potentially the pensions) of soldiers who led infantry patrols in Afghanistan and flew combat missions over Syria; it attempts to deny that they exist as transgender people at all,” replies the New York Times Editorial Board.

It’s not difficult for Trump and his followers to reach such conclusions when reading the very essays published by the New York Times opinion section itself. Pamela Paul’s numerous columns, for instance, repeatedly frame being transgender as a choice—an identity that, according to her, is not truly held by many, or even most, minors. Relying on misleading and widely debunked claims, Paul argues that allowing youth to transition is dangerous due to high rates of detransition, despite research consistently showing that detransition among trans youth is rare, occurring in only 1-4% of cases. She further asserts that the concept of gender identity itself is a product of "gender ideology"—an argument that conveniently ignores the decades of medical and psychological research that recognize gender identity as a fundamental aspect of human experience.

When advocating for “talk therapy” to “relieve gender dysphoria”—a euphemism that directly parallels conversion therapy because it is conversion therapy—Paul dismissively counters in one article, “Trans activists warn that this approach is akin to the way the medical establishment wrongly treated same-sex attraction for years, as a mental illness. But then, no one ever needed to take hormones or have surgery to accept a same-sex attraction.” The implication is clear: Paul reduces gender-affirming care to an unnecessary indulgence while ignoring the overwhelming medical consensus that such care is essential and lifesaving for many transgender people.

Now, Pamela Paul is out at The New York Times, a casualty of the paper’s recent job cuts, according to Intelligencer, and the editorial board is already working to rewrite history—framing itself as an opponent of Trump’s attacks on trans rights while ignoring its own role in justifying and normalizing them. But no amount of equivocation or pearl-clutching can erase the fact that The Times's reporting has been repeatedly cited in court cases as justification for enshrining discrimination against transgender people into legal precedent. No hand-wringing over Trump’s most extreme policies can undo the reality that the paper helped lay the groundwork for them, lending credibility to the very narratives that now fuel sports bans and healthcare restrictions. These so-called “middle-ground” arguments—that a little discrimination was a reasonable compromise—were always a smokescreen for a broader campaign to eliminate trans existence from public life. Republican legislators pushing these policies made it clear from the start in a Twitter space discussion: the goal was to “end this [being trans] for everyone.” The Times just helped them get there.

Even in an article where The New York Times acknowledges that Trump’s attacks on trans people have gone too far, the paper continues to frame issues like youth healthcare and sports as “reasonable” areas for restrictions—playing directly into the very strategy that anti-trans activists designed. The paper should look to Terry Schilling, head of the American Principles Project, who made that strategy explicit: “The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about [the] transgender issue,” he admitted. Schilling’s words confirm what has long been evident—the bans were never about fairness in sports. They were always about manufacturing fear, normalizing discrimination, and laying the foundation for broader rollbacks of transgender rights. And The Times played right into it… and now there are nationwide restrictions on trans people in darts, disc golf, and even intramural chess.

The New York Times does not get to erase its role in how we got here. It laid the foundation for framing transgender existence as a debate for cisgender people to adjudicate, for portraying trans people as a threat, and for positioning our medical care as a matter for public discourse rather than a decision between patients, doctors, and—when relevant—families. It legitimized both-sides coverage of basic science and human dignity, and now, as the side that opposes both stands victorious, enacting an agenda of eradication, the editorial board sees the writing on the wall. They know they will be culpable for what follows. What happens next remains uncertain—but what is certain is that The Times cannot be allowed to rewrite its own history.