Nearly a full year after The New York Times refused to take accountability for its pattern of coverage on trans issues, the paper once again finds itself embroiled in controversy over that coverage. Following a February 2 op-ed on detransitioners from columnist Pamela Paul, the Times is drawing plaudits from right-wing media for continuing this pattern and disregarding criticism from within its ranks and beyond.

Paul’s 4,500-word opinion piece is rooted in a growing intrigue in the detransitioner movement among both mainstream and right-wing media. Using the stories of a handful of detransitioners to frame her argument, Paul draws from a bevy of dubious sources, including right-wing websites, anti-trans organizations, and skeptical mental health professionals — at least one of whom has endorsed methods of conversion therapy like subjecting trans youth to acupuncture to “see how they like having needles put in them.” Accordingly, Paul espouses the social contagion theory of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” and reports misleadingly inflated rates of desistance (or returning to a cisgender identity) among trans youth, weaponizing two common anti-trans myths.

The column was met with swift criticism from prominent transgender journalists, including Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart, who debunked Paul’s misinformation and raised concerns about the quality control of The New York Times’ opinion section in two separate pieces. Paul then published a response branding them as “activists,” seemingly to diminish their credibility, as the Times has done to trans journalists in the past. Reed and Urquhart, in turn, co-authored a rebuke that the paper declined to publish.

The same day Paul published her follow-up, media critic Erik Wemple of The Washington Post reported on X (formerly Twitter) that The New York Times had deleted internal messages of dissent from a Slack channel for the company’s LGBTQ employee resource group. Wemple reported that the Times was enforcing a policy against criticism singling out a lone employee, though at least one of the deleted messages criticized leadership broadly for publishing anti-trans perspectives and creating a hostile working environment for LGBTQ employees. 

As the Times faces internal and external criticism, right-wing media embraced and promoted Paul's column and the conflict that ensued: 

• The National Review highlighted The New York Times’ internal skirmish, noting that Times staffers were “once again up in arms over the paper’s coverage of the trans issue.” The outlet also published a piece headlined “Better Late Than Never,” claiming that, until recently, the paper had been “exclusively publishing activist propaganda.”
• Fox News described aggrieved LGBTQ employees of the Times as merely “annoyed” and called the criticism “harsh.”
• The Daily Wire reported that Paul’s article “calls for pumping the brakes” on affirming trans youth, thereby striking “a different tone” compared to the Times' previous coverage of the issue. 
• The Daily Caller lauded the paper for “calling out its own readers for being insane.” It claimed the column “addresses virtually every conservative concern” and “chastises the radical left for its role in fomenting the hysteria.”
• Newsbusters snarked, “Leave it to the New York Times to come out with what they think is riveting and groundbreaking content years after we came to the same conclusion.” 
• Unherd claimed the Times’ previous coverage would be “utterly unremarkable” if it were on any other subject, but described Paul’s column as “a deeply moving piece that goes much further in its implications than anything the New York Times has run before.”

Right-wing media have even used Paul’s piece to prop up other coverage. Fox News and BizPac Review cited her column in yet more pieces bolstering the detransitioner movement, while The Daily Wire wielded it as supposed evidence against the scientific support for gender-affirming care. 

Much of this has played out in the same way it did last February, when The New York Times was confronted by GLAAD, as well as its own contributors, in two public letters addressing the paper’s record of anti-trans coverage.



One of the explicit criticisms the contributors’ letter posed was that the Times’ coverage had been leveraged in support of anti-trans legislation and lawsuits. Just four days after Paul’s column was published earlier this month, the Alliance Defending Freedom cited it in a lawsuit supporting Idaho’s ban on gender-affirming care for youth.