Major U. S. news outlets devoted substantial resources to covering the Supreme Court decision on transgender athletes last week, with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR each running three or more stories on the topic, according to Assigned Media’s 2026 Trans News Tracker. The coverage provides a revealing case study into how the New York Times diverges from industry norms in its trans coverage.
Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia vs BPJ that neither Title IX nor equal protection doctrine applies to trans girls and women seeking to play women’s sports. This decision by Brett Kavanaugh was made regardless of whether trans girls seeking to play women’s sports have an athletic advantage over cis women. The young plaintiff in one case, Becky Pepper-Jackson, had been on hormone therapy from a young age, negating any possible athletic benefit from testosterone.
Our tracking project closely follows print coverage of the trans community in 8 mainstream national news outlets (NYT, WaPo, AP, NPR, WSJ, NBC, CBS, and ABC) and two left-leaning publications (Mother Jones and the 19th). Of these outlets, each ran at least one story on last week’s court ruling. The Associated Press, Mother Jones, and the 19th each ran one story only, while the New York Times led the pack, publishing five separate stories on BPJ to their main website (our tracker leaves out any additional coverage by the Athletic, a sports news site acquired by the Times in 2022 whose coverage requires a separate subscription to access).
Despite leading the pack in number of stories, the Times stands out as the only news outlet to run more than three stories on the court decision without quoting a person identified in the copy as transgender or as the representative of a transgender rights organization. This continues a pattern seen in the first three months of our tracker, which found the Times wrote about trans issues the most frequently during that period, while being the least likely to include trans sources in their coverage.
In other outlets’ coverage, we found that news stories straightforwardly reporting the decision often omitted any transgender sources. Stories of this type typically included one or more quotes from Joshua Block, the ACLU lawyer representing the trans athletes, alongside quotes from Justice Kavanaugh’s decision and from the dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The Associated Press’ single story on the decision is representative of this pattern. Though the AP ran a profile of plaintiff Becky Pepper-Jackson in April, they did not quote Pepper-Jackson in their single June 30 story on the decision.
Likewise, although our tracker has found the 19th to be the most likely to include trans voices in their stories, in their story on the decision they quoted representatives of LGBTQ+ groups such as HRC’s Kelley Robinson alongside Block of the ACLU, but not transgender advocates specifically.
However, outlets who devoted significant reporting resources to the story, as evidenced by publishing three or more stories with multiple bylines represented, almost uniformly included trans sources at least once in their coverage. Included in the four stories by NPR there was an interview with a trans boy and his mother, as well as one with Chris Mosier, a trans athlete who has written a book on trans athletes. (For outlets for whom print is not the main focus we track print stories and stories where a full transcript is available.)
Other outlets to devote significant resources included the Washington Post, which quoted trans perspectives in all three of their stories on the case, and CBS, who included trans perspectives in one of four stories. In contrast, even in a Times story headlined “‘Heartbreaking’ Ruling Leaves Trans Advocates Crestfallen” the quotes include Block’s characterization of the response by trans young people including his plaintiff, but does not directly quote anyone identified in the copy as transgender or as the representative of a transgender rights focused organization.
Despite growing criticisms, the Times’ has consistently held their trans coverage is empathetic and fully in line with industry standards, dismissing its critics as activists. In one recent statement to the Advocate for a story on bias in the Times’ trans coverage, Senior Vice President of Communications Danielle Rhoades Ha directly addressed the finding that the Times quotes transgender people less frequently than other outlets. The Advocate quotes her as saying, “When a story is focused on trans issues and people, we include the perspectives of trans people and always try to have their voices quoted in the piece. However, stories that briefly mention a topic may not have a voice from a specific group.”
Assigned Media also reached out to the Times for comment Sunday evening. In a response just before our publication deadline, Ms. Roades Ha wrote “Our coverage of gender identity often quotes transgender people along with other voices who help our audience understand the issues at hand. Regarding these court-related stories, our coverage quotes a lawyer, advocate or elected official advocating for Ms. Pepper-Jackson or against bans on trans athletes with the exception of the article explaining her athletic accomplishments. Three of the stories quote the person Ms. Pepper-Jackson chose as her legal representative. Also, your list of stories omits an article we published when the case was argued, in which Ms. Pepper-Jackson is interviewed and quoted extensively.”
Giving an honest hearing to all sides of a story is one of journalism’s bedrock principles. Why exactly the Times is diverging from best practices when it comes to their coverage of the transgender community has been a matter of widespread speculation. Some reporting suggests that Times leadership has played a role in the direction of recent coverage. What is increasingly hard to deny, however, is that the paper of record treats trans news coverage very differently than their closest competitors in American media.
