Are Readers Served by Confusing NYT Coverage of the Texas Care Ban?
The first responsibility of reporting should be to ensuring that readers fully understand the events being reported.
by Evan Urquhart
On Friday, Texas Governor Greg Abbot signed into law a bill that will ban medical treatment for young people with gender dysphoria, effective Sept. 1. The New York Times covered the ban on Saturday, with an article noting the ban, outlining its effects, explaining that there is opposition to it in the trans community, and situating the ban within national GOP politics. At times misleading, the article provides a window into what the NYT currently views as a neutral, objective treatment of the issues involved in bans on treatment for gender dysphoria.
The article seems to stretch to present the ban in terms the GOP would approve of, by leaving out parts of the law that make it less defensible and summarizing misleading claims within the bill without clarifying the external reality for NYT readers. Here are the first three paragraphs, with the third highlighted:
screenshot from the New York Times
The third paragraph summarizes the law’s own language, describing which procedures and medications are impacted. However, it leaves out the fact that the text of the law itself makes room for every medication and procedure to continue to be used for cisgender youth, and youth with intersex conditions. In other words, puberty blockers continue to be allowed in Texas for every other application, as do synthetic hormones. Likewise the banned surgeries (which are vanishingly rare for trans youth under 18), continue to be allowed for youth with intersex conditions, and for cisgender youth. The “healthy tissue” of a cisgender boy with gynecomastia (a condition causing breast development in boys) can be removed at any age, it’s only trans boys who can’t access this option. This is a problem because readers who aren’t unfamiliar with the issue may not understand that these treatments have applications outside of gender-affirming care, or that the law explicitly allows doctors to employ these treatments in all other contexts.
The article also fails to offer any information about how common these interventions are, and what their effects are on fertility. Such information does exist. For example, a study conducted by Reuters found, in the entire country, only a couple hundred mastectomies are performed on gender dysphoric youth each year, while other surgeries are almost unheard of for young people. While the GOP has focused on the risks to patient’s fertility in their rhetoric and in the bill, the vast majority of youth impacted will be losing access to puberty blockers and hormones, treatments that don’t have any permanent impact on fertility. By not including this sort of context the NYT allows readers unfamiliar with the procedures to be confused by the GOP’s misleading framing of the bill’s aims and impact as primarily being about preserving fertility for young people.
Perhaps even more bizarrely, the article misleads readers about the NYT’s own previous reporting. Linking to this article about a debate among medical professionals over how much therapy is needed before allowing adolescents access to medical treatment, the reporter summarizes it, incorrectly, as saying the debate concerns what age adolescents should be able to access treatment.
screenshot from the New York Times
This is a truly bizarre oversight, for an NYT reporter to summarize a prior piece of NYT reporting incorrectly. It is difficult to understand how such an error could occur, unless the author’s own biases and/or lack of knowledge about gender-affirming care are showing.
Taken as a whole, the article is an important sign of how mainstream coverage is treating the attacks on trans rights by the Republican establishment. In order to avoid accusations of bias (or perhaps out of genuine ignorance), facts are massaged to make bans on treatment for gender dysphoria sound as reasonable as possible. Context within and outside the text of the law that might lead readers to understand the arbitrary and discriminatory nature of these laws is ommitted, and reasonable sounding concerns are created by reporters out of whole cloth, with links not backing up the substance of what’s being claimed about them.
