Farewell, Pamela Paul
Insiders say Pamela Paul is soon to be out of the New York Times’ Opinion section… so let’s talk about all of the awful stuff she wrote about trans people!
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Let’s talk about Pamela Paul.
Paul is an American journalist who got her start in the late 1990s, contributing to a handful of outlets like Time, The Atlantic and The Washington Post. According to the bio on her own website, she is also the author and editor of eight nonfiction books, and a columnist at The New York Times’ Opinion section.
Or, well… she was, until last week.
Pending ongoing exit negotiations, it appears Pamela Paul is out at The Gray Lady, that most prestigious paper of record, whom we hold in the highest regard. Naturally. It’s unclear exactly why Paul has been ousted, though Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury told New York Magazine that “any insinuation I make staffing or editorial decisions based solely on political viewpoints is false.”
An important disclaimer that Kingsbury has to make because, of course, Paul has earned herself no small amount of infamy in the last few years for her reactionary work at the Times. Most relevant to us, of course, is her staunch stance against the trans community, about whom she has written many, many, many times. Often Paul wrote about us with baseless authority, presenting her op-eds as factual, even though she has never been a reporter and holds no credentials as a science writer.
We’ve spoken publicly about Paul’s work before, and reported on her dangerous and biased anti-trans articles published at the Times. More than once, actually, alongside trans journalist Erin Reed. Suffice to say, we strongly condemn her transphobic opinion pieces and (even though we don’t have high hopes that the Times will suddenly walk back its long standing evident bias against the trans community), and will be glad to see her depart from the publication.
Just for posterity’s sake, though… let’s see if we can list every time Pamela Paul wrote disparagingly about trans people (or in praise of a transphobe) for the Times’ Opinion section, shall we? Before we begin, though, honorable mention to her April 2022 article entitled The Limits of Lived Experience, in which Paul opines that her being a “Gen X white woman” shouldn’t keep her from writing about other people’s lived experiences.
A bit on the nose when it comes to signs of things to come, I think.
An auspicious start: In June of 2022, Paul wrote for (as best we can tell) the very first time about transgender people at the Times by discussing outrage sparked by transphobic novel The Men by Sandra Newman. She laments the evils of “transgender activists” who wanted to deny Newman the right to “imagine her own universe.” A universe, by the way, in which transgender women are teleported to hell and tortured, naked, alongside cisgender men.
In July of 2022, Paul wrote about that classic early transphobic tell, “unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people’, ‘menstruators’, ‘and bodies with vaginas’.” Again, she decries “transgender activists” for this dystopian censorship of woman-centric language, as well as “the far left”... whatever that is.
Later in July, Paul spoke out against the supposed censorship of Abigail Shreir’s deeply transphobic book Irreversible Damage.
After a short break, in October of 2022 Paul lamented an introduction video by the new president of the Human Rights Campaign, Kelley Robinson, for mentioning transgender people and saying the word queer but not the words gay, lesbian or bisexual. You’ve got some explaining to do, Kelley…
Then, on the 16th of February, 2023, came the article that would cement her position squarely in the anti-trans activist camp: a spirited defense of JK Rowling. She characterizes the discussion about Rowling’s transphobia as a “campaign” that is “dangerous” and “absurd,” and suggests that the accusations of transphobia are unfounded because she was simply defending the rights of biological women, of course. Make no mistake, by 2023 Rowling’s position against the trans community was impossible to deny, and in truth had been plain for all to see for years. This was no naive mistake on Paul’s part.
In terms of articles at the Times, Paul kept her head down for nearly a calendar year, until in February of 2024 she penned her next great bombshell: a disingenuous story about detransitioners. Do these people follow some sort of roadmap? She trots out her well worn hatred of “transgender activists” yet again to say that we “pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years,” even though… I mean, do I even need to say it at this point? She draws an explicit link between childhood sexual abuse and supposedly false feelings of gender dysphoria, though she fails to mention where she earned her medical degree or what clinical experience she has treating transgender youth. It’s a very weak, predictable piece of faux-journalism that, frankly, Jesse Singal already wrote six years earlier.
Just a few days after her article about detransitioners, Paul responded to public critique from Erin Reed and Assigned with yet more baseless opinions about trans people and gender dysphoria that have no basis in reality or the “lived experience” she’s never put much stock in. It’s a short column entitled The Courage to Admit You Didn’t Know, which is a rather disingenuous headline considering we know that vanishingly few regret transition, most of those who detransition do so for reasons that don’t involve no longer being transgender, and many outspoken detransitioners still experience gender dysphoria.
In April of 2024, she wrote a column in support of the Cass Report. Need I say more?
In July of 2024, Paul praised the Cass Report once more, this time also baselessly and wrongly insisting gender-affirming care doesn’t work.
In November of 2024, she wrote an article stating that voters simply want “common sense” on “transgender issues,” suggesting that an expansion of the rights of the trans community would be complicated. She suggests, in a very roundabout way, that Harris’ and the Democrats’ alleged commitment to trans issues may have lost them the race, which is not true, and that “much of Europe” has changed its mind about gender-affirming care, which is also not true.
That may have been Pamela Paul’s final piece about trans people in The New York Times… thank goodness. And while Kathleen Kingsbury says they don’t let people go for ideological reasons (or, not just ideological reasons), Intelligencer’s quote from a Times staffer about Paul suggests plenty: “It is a rarity inside the Times for someone to manage to make enemies on every desk they touch; Pamela is indeed a rarity,” the newsroom employee told New York Magazine. “She should have spent time making allies if she was going to be as divisive a figure as she was internally. But she didn’t put the time in there, or at least did not have the interest.”
Best of luck at your next gig, Pamela!
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
