The NY Times' Decision to Report on Youth Gender Medicine Looks Pretty Good Right Now
Other outlets seem poised for embarrassment
A while back, the New York Times made a clear editorial decision: They were going to report on controversies in youth gender medicine. This drew the ire of activists who insisted that no controversy existed; GLAAD parked a truck outside the Times’ office declaring that “the science is settled”. Parts of the left came to believe that the Times was a right-wing paper, which is funny because…well…it’s the New York Times. It’s the tweed-jacket-wearing publication where Paul Krugman is an Alpha Male, and which has been hated by conservatives at least since Nixon started mixing uppers with scotch.
Activists singled out the Times because it was basically the only left-wing publication that went off-script. Similar news outlets dutifully copied and pasted activist language and ran misleading pieces that portrayed treatments for youth gender medicine as slightly more established than the heliocentric universe. The Times was accused of anti-science nay-saying, as if they were claiming that perhaps doctors in the ‘50s were right, and cigarettes improve your complexion and facilitate childbirth after all.
Of course — at the risk of denting your belief in trucks as a reliable source of information — the science was not settled. There remains a great deal that we don’t know about the safety and efficacy of treatments that have become common for minors with gender dysphoria. A key milestone in quantifying how much — or rather, how little — we know about these treatments just occurred: A major report for England’s National Health Service reviewed the suite of treatments commonly called “gender-affirming care”. The report found the evidence supporting those treatments to be badly lacking, and recommended “extreme caution” going forward. You may have read about the report in the New York Times (or The Atlantic), but you probably didn’t read about it in any other left-leaning publication. Activists singled out the Times as the publication that defied their dictates, and as a result, the Times might be the only publication of its type that’s not about to take a big credibility hit.