New York Times promo for an upcoming podcast on how “medical treatment for transgender young people, and how the care got pulled into a political fight.”
As Pride month kicks off, the New York Times is releasing a new six-part podcast about medical care for trans youth—a subject on which Times coverage has been shameful.
Reporting on the issue is of critical importance at the moment, given the breathtaking assault on trans rights by the Trump administration, which has issued at least six anti-trans executive orders in its first months. Across the country, 920 bills aimed at trans people have been introduced in the first half of 2025, and the Supreme Court is poised to issue a decision in the Skrmetti case that may legitimize restrictions on gender-affirming care.
But in light of the Times‘ documented anti-trans bias—and the fact that reporter Azeen Ghorayshi, responsible for much of their previous problematic coverage (FAIR.org, 8/30/23, 7/19/24), is centrally involved in the podcast—trans activists are girding for the worst. Ghorayshi has been criticized for misreporting the experiences of trans minors and their families, misrepresenting study findings, and promoting unsubstantiated claims that contributed in part to the closure of a St. Louis youth gender clinic.
FAIR described an article by the New York Times‘ Azeen Ghorayshi (8/23/23) as “a greatest-hits album of all of the Times’ problematic coverage on adolescent gender-affirming care, filled with familiar tropes and tactics the paper of record has used to distort the issue.”
The podcast teaser offers a glimpse of what’s to come: back-and-forth quotes from trans people and those seeking to take away trans kids’ health care, plus some troubling quotes like this one:
If the treatment is barred, some kids will suffer because they can’t access the treatment. If the treatment is allowed, some kids will suffer who get the treatment and later wish they hadn’t. And then the question becomes, how does the court choose which group?
It’s not clear who the speaker is, but the sense the listener gets is that these are equal harms. The reality is that regret over gender-affirming care is extremely low (Medium, 3/24/23), and such care has been shown to greatly reduce the alarmingly high suicide rates among trans youth (HCPLive, 3/8/22).
It’s worth noting that standards for gender-affirming care for youth do not even recommend surgery for children under the age of 18 except in extreme cases. Instead, treatment typically begins—after screenings from both mental health and medical professionals—with entirely reversible puberty blockers.
A voice later in the teaser remarks:
Conservative states want to just, you know, be done with trans people altogether. And when reports come out that show this, you know, two-sided thing and the skepticism and the fact there’s no evidence, this just adds fuel to their fire.
Sign at the Transexual Menace protest at the New York Times (photo: Tyler Albertario).
The claim that “there’s no evidence” to support the value of gender-affirming care is not a fact, but a myth (Psychology Today, 1/24/22)—one promoted by credulous reporting of the British government’s Cass Review by the Times‘ Ghorayshi (FAIR.org, 7/19/24).
The teaser frames the story as one in which “the medicine and the politics have become impossibly entangled.” As media critic Parker Molloy (Present Age, 6/4/25) observes:
Transgender healthcare didn’t get “pulled into” a political fight—it became the target of a coordinated campaign by anti-trans activists and Republican politicians. But the Times‘ language suggests this is some kind of natural, inevitable conflict rather than a deliberate assault on medical care.
The Transexual Menace, a group of trans rights activists, is picketing New York Times offices today. “For years now, the New York Times‘ reporting on trans healthcare has given undue credence to anecdotes offered by bigots,” spokesperson Anabel Ruggiero said in a statement. The group is demanding “an end to the Times’ deliberate anti-transgender bias.”
Research Assistance: Wilson Korik
This post was originally published on FAIR.