The New York Times Continues to Double Down on Biased, Inaccurate Transgender Coverage

The New York Times’ coverage of transgender people and issues has been critiqued for years by trans people, the broader LGBTQ community, and allies. Now instead of directly addressing the critiques, meeting with the community harmed by the coverage, or forthrightly fixing its errors in reporting and news gathering, the Times is deploying its most distrusted and discredited reporters in a new project designed to profit off its inaccurate and biased coverage.

The project is a multi-episode podcast on transgender health care that was repeatedly shopped around by the Times’ sales office, with “sponsorship opportunities” in the tens of thousands of dollars. The podcast promos say the episodes will explore the “political fight” around essential health care for transgender people. The promos did not say if the Times would acknowledge how Times coverage fueled the “political fight,” or how its stories are repeatedly cited to justify harmful policies and legislation that criminalizes the care and bans access to it.

Transgender contributors for the New York Times and advocacy groups have tried for years to get the Times to listen to the community it is covering and harming; to hire transgender people on its staff; and to stop its inaccurate, biased reporting. The Times continues to perpetuate the same mistakes and the same harm:

Reporters have betrayed the trust of LGBTQ families who regret speaking with the Times. The Times’ most popular podcast, The Daily, issued a call out to listeners last week asking for their experiences with transgender health care, which suggests the new podcast project did not have the audio needed from the people whose opinions matter most.
The Times continues to recycle its inaccurate and biased reporting to support preconceived notions and its fully misguided commitment to inaccurate “both sides” journalism. A recent story managed to quote transgender legal experts and medical providers (trans voices in stories about trans people are rare in the Times’ reporting), but was backfilled by several paragraphs of inaccurate previous reporting, including unchallenged anti-trans voices.
The Times’ coverage has been cited by multiple anti-LGBTQ politicians to justify legalizing discrimination and criminalizing support for transgender people, a fact the Times itself has never covered. A recent example: a wildly inaccurate and graphic Department of Justice memo seeking to criminalize health care providers included as its number one citation an inflammatory article from the New York Times boosting the debunked theory about the rise in transgender youth, alongside dubious sources including The New York Post, Fox News, and error and animus-filled documents from the Trump White House.

When there is news of legitimate research and reports that support medically necessary, mainstream care, and detail the benefits of it, the Times has failed to cover it. The Times has covered Utah’s legislative attacks against the transgender community in more than half a dozen stories, but did not cover the Utah legislature’s study finding that transgender health care benefits trans youth.
The Times leadership has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the harms and impact of its reporting. Publisher AG Sulzberger told shareholders in April that he believes the reporting has been “fair and respectful.” Spokespeople and staff have claimed it is “empathetic.” These are not words the transgender community and families use to describe the coverage, nor reflect how they feel about it.

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In 2022, The Times dedicated more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories “asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast.”

A 2024 Media Matters and GLAAD analysis found that a majority (66%) of Times news stories about trans people did not include even one trans voice. This problem continues on the Opinion page, where columnists who are not trans or queer are regularly given numerous columns to denigrate transgender youth and their right to best-practice healthcare which is supported by every major medical association.

The Times obscures sources’ identities, leading readers to believe a source is simply an “everyday person,” when they in fact are working directly with anti-trans activists and extremist organizations.

The Times leads with an outsized focus on so-called “regret” for gender-affirming healthcare, when the reality is, the regret rate for knee surgery is higher than gender-affirming care. Notably, puberty blockers, which have been used for decades in non-transgender kids, are portrayed as dangerous for transgender kids, despite being backed by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and more. The Times has interviewed Dr. Hilary Cass of the UK, amplifying the false accusation that U.S. medical associations are overly political, yet failed to challenge or note her direct cooperation with Florida Governor DeSantis’s administration and its harmful and inaccurate testimony to support state medical care bans.

Families with trans kids regret speaking to the Times. Multiple families have come forward to express their regret in speaking with the Times and call out the fact that their personal stories were spun and twisted including a family member who says the Times used their audio without their permission. One parent says the Times captured audio from them outside a courtroom, which the reporter knew was a public space and therefore fair game for the Times’ purposes, further poisoning the Times’ reputation with unwilling sources.

State lawmakers across the country continue to prop up biased, misinformation-laden Times articles as justification for laws banning healthcare for transgender people and youth. One biased, inaccurate opinion piece made it into a conservative anti-trans legal brief in Idaho within four days.

On February 15, 2023, after years of unsuccessful behind-the-scenes conversations with Times journalists, a coalition of more than 100 LGBTQ organizations, leaders, and notables, sent an open letter to the Times calling out the paper’s coverage of trans people for what it is: biased and inaccurate. The coalition letter called for the paper to stop printing biased stories immediately, meet with leaders from the trans community within two months, and hire four trans journalists within six months. Two years later, the coalition has yet to directly hear from the Times, and none of the asks have been met. The Times has not found just 30 minutes in the past two years to simply speak with trans leaders. The coalition has offered multiple times to set up the meeting. In 2024, the Times hired one transgender columnist at the Opinion page.

That same day in 2023, in a wholly separate effort, more than 180 of the Times’ own freelance contributors signed on to a separate letter, imploring the Times to change course with its biased trans reporting. As news of the contributors’ letter grew, more than 1,200 Times contributors, and even Times staffers, in addition to 34,000 media workers signed on too. It was reported that at least some of these journalists were reprimanded by the Times after publicly critiquing the coverage.

The coalition of 100+ LGBTQ organizations, leaders, and notables continues to call out biased, inaccurate coverage of transgender people, regularly speaking out on social and earned media, as well as via mobile billboards in front of the Times’ headquarters. In 2024, the largest LGBTQ organization in Missouri issued an Action Alert warning community members to not speak to the New York Times, highlighting the regret local families felt after speaking to Times reporter Azeen Ghorayshi.

In 2025, the documentary Heightened Scrutiny continues to call out the Times’ biased, inaccurate coverage of transgender people. Premiering at Sundance this year, the film includes interviews with journalists who are transgender and journalists who are not transgender, including Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. The documentary features Chase Strangio of the ACLU, the first out transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court, in a case now before the Court that will determine whether Tennessee’s ban on essential health care should continue—despite the same care prescribed to cisgender (non-transgender) patients without limitation. Strangio describes the new and alarming practice of inaccurate news coverage being used as citations in legal documents and briefs, including the most harmful coverage of the New York Times.

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