Mick Hartley

The New York Times appears to have acquired some backbone on the matter of gender ideology, notably with Pamela Paul's recent opinion piece In Defence of JK Rowling. This has not gone unnoticed by trans zealots. An open letter from GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) last week lambasted the paper’s “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people”. "It’s well past time for the Times to change", they cry, demanding a swift and immediate adoption of the full pro-trans gender program. 

As James Kirchick notes, this is a throwback to the old collective letters of denunciation that Soviet writer collectives used to issue against those who dared to deviate from the Communist cause.

Signed by over 100 “leaders” and organizations including filmmaker Judd Apatow, actress Lena Dunham, purported comedian Hannah Gadsby, and a host of state-level LGBT rights organizations, the letter is written in the language of an irate undergraduate, featuring many of that genre’s by now tiresome tics and catchphrases, such as the use of CAPITAL LETTERS to denote anger, promises to “educate” the troglodytes who hold incorrect beliefs, and instructions that they “do the work.” Among the Times’ alleged sins are its decision to give “noted cisgender heterosexual Pamela Paul space for her unfounded thoughts” on the op-ed page, where her offenses have ranged from lamenting how so-called trans-inclusive language (“pregnant people,” “menstruators,” and “bodies with vaginas”) erases women to questioning why the word “queer” has supplanted “gay” and “lesbian.”

For now, at least, the NYT editors are holding firm.

Much will depend on whether the Times upholds the principle of journalistic objectivity against those who would trash it in favor of agitprop. About few other subjects are Americans more afraid to express an opinion today than transgender issues. The chief reason for this phenomenon is the bullying which one side habitually employs—exploiting the language of emotional blackmail to intimidate skeptics into submission—whenever its shibboleths are subjected to the slightest scrutiny. Insisting that anyone who questions novel medical treatments being administered to children opposes transgender people’s very “right to exist,” citing misleading statistics to claim that gender dysphoric youth will commit suicide unless their cross-sex self-identification is instantly confirmed, and denigrating journalists who dare to report on these issues, are not the argumentative methods conducive to liberal democracy….

For all the bombast, America’s contentious debate over transgender issues has very little to do with the plight of actual transgender people, a miniscule portion of the population whom a large majority of the public supports protecting from discrimination. What we’re really arguing about are not civil rights and legal protections but, rather, a set of far more expansive propositions like whether the biological concept of sex is a construct, whether people with penises should be allowed into rape shelters and housed in women’s prisons, and whether irreversible medical interventions are appropriate for minors who express discomfort with their gender identity. For the aspiring commissars who joined the collective denunciation of the Times, the vast majority of whom are neither transgender nor medical professionals, staking an extreme position in the “trans” debate is a signifier, a means of conveying that one is on the right side of history in the way that supporting marriage equality for gay couples once did. This is why they compare, ludicrously, the paper’s careful and sensitive reporting about transgender issues to its past coverage “demonizing queers.” Like the Marxism-Leninism of yore, radical gender ideology offers its believers a sense of righteous purpose, moralistic mantras, and devious enemies to despise (with J.K. Rowling fulfilling the role of Emmanuel Goldstein).

The signatories to the open letter protesting The New York Times for its “transphobic” coverage are not the “thinkers” they presume themselves to be, but rather modern-day equivalents of Vaclav Havel’s proverbial greengrocer, the shopkeeper in a communist society who dutifully places signs in his store window asserting various party-approved slogans such as “Workers of the world, unite!”

He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life.

Describing the scale of the damage wrought at England’s Tavistock gender clinic, staff made comparisons to one of the great medical scandals of the 20th century: East Germany’s mass doping of athletes in the 1960s and ’70s. Decades from now, when we look back at our present transgender moment, the writers at the Times whom the letter condemns will be remembered for their professionalism and scrupulousness in covering a highly complex issue. Those attacking them for thought crimes will be seen as the epigones of their predecessors in the Union of Soviet Writers, as small-minded enforcers of absurdities that were bound to one day fall apart.