The New York Times remains appalled by the Trump administration’s stand for science when it comes to defining people in biological terms as either males or females. The news coverage was pitched to a panicky tone in Tuesday’s Times, “At Rallies and Online, Transgender People Say They #WontBeErased.”
The online headline to Sarah Mervosh and Christine Hauser’s story showed how eagerly the paper latches on to any left-wing anti-Trump action it can scrounge up: “Demonstrators gathered outside the White House to oppose an unreleased Trump administration memo that proposes a strict definition of gender and would roll back transgender rights”:
L.G.B.T. activists mobilized a fast and fierce campaign that included a protest outside the White House on Monday to say transgender people cannot be expunged from society, in response to an unreleased Trump administration memo that proposes a strict definition of gender based on a person’s genitalia at birth.
Who is “expunging” transgender people from society? They will still be around and freely protesting louder than ever.
The paper again went hysterical in attributing an eliminationist stance to the Trump administration:
The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.
“You saw such a massive response because this attack on the trans community is essentially trying to erase the trans community from the face of this country and we’re not going to stand for that,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of Glaad, a media advocacy group for L.G.B.T. people.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said, “This is a really intrusive policy that doesn’t make any sense scientifically.”
Ms. Keisling said she and her staff woke up on Sunday to the news of the memo and quickly planned a response. The hashtag #WontBeErased felt appropriate to them. “What this feels like to transgender people is trying to make us invisible, trying to say that we don’t exist, trying to say that we are nothing,” she said.
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The #WontBeErased hashtag took off on social media, as people posted photos of themselves or family members to show the faces of transgender people -- who, they noted, would continue to exist regardless of the government’s definition of gender.
Wait a minute: If transgenders will continue to in fact exist, government definition of not -- then what is it with the paper’s overwrought headlines this week?
Also on Tuesday, reporter Denise Grady tried to take a science-based approach, assuring discomfited readers that “Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender, Experts Say”: “Defining gender as a condition determined strictly by a person’s genitals is based on a notion that doctors and scientists abandoned long ago as oversimplified and often medically meaningless.”
On Wednesday, reporter Liam Stack found the pro-Democratic political angle: “Two Weeks Before Midterms, Transgender People Say They Feel like ‘Pawns’”:
Under the terms of a proposal reported by The New York Times on Sunday, the administration would adopt a narrow definition of gender as an unchangeable biological condition -- either male or female -- that is determined by genitalia at birth. Such a move would not only roll back protections for transgender people: It could also legally negate their very existence.
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Even without the proposed definition of gender, many transgender people said they had felt the impact of the Trump administration’s stance on L.G.B.T. issues in their daily lives. They said things had gotten harder.
In New York City, Dubbs Weinblatt, an educational trainer at a Jewish organization, reported being harassed on the street and subjected to homophobic slurs more frequently. In Madison, Wis., Dany Seiler said vandals had attacked a local gay bar and the office of an L.G.B.T magazine, smashing windows and spray painting slurs on the walls.
The paper is very tied to the transgender issue, as shown in a recent profile of an actor by over-excitable Times writer George Gene Gustines:
“Supergirl” will be gaining a new ally -- TV’s first transgender superhero -- when her series returns on Sunday. That night viewers will meet Nia Nal, who is a reporter in training working alongside Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist), the civilian guise of the title hero. As the season progresses, Nia will be revealed to be the superheroine Dreamer. The character will be played by Nicole Maines, an actress and activist who is also transgender....Ms. Maines is heroic herself: In 2014, she successfully sued her school district after being denied access to the girl’s restroom at her school....
The definition of “heroic” is quite wide these days.
