An Inside View of Why NYT's Trans Coverage Has Been So Bad

Julie Hollar

Trans News Network (1/1/26): Billie Jean Sweeney, a former New York Times editor, "witnessed the highest echelons of the paper's management increasingly push anti-trans bigotry and disinformation."

For several years, the New York Times has baffled journalism watchdogs as well as trans activists with its fearmongering, pseudo-scientific, anti-trans coverage (see, e.g., FAIR.org, 6/23/22, 12/16/22, 7/14/25). A former Times editor has now shed light on the source of the bias, which, she says, comes directly from the top.

In an interview with Trans News Network (1/1/26), Billie Jean Sweeney, a Times veteran who served as the day assignment editor at the international desk prior to her retirement in mid-2024, traced an ideological change in coverage to the 2022 changing of the guard at the paper.

That's when Dean Baquet, who had been named executive editor by then-publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in 2014, stepped down. Sulzberger's son, A.G. Sulzberger—who took over as publisher in 2018—picked second-in-command Joe Kahn to replace Baquet, and elevated Carolyn Ryan to co-helm Kahn's former post of managing editor.

Shortly afterwards, Sweeney explained, the paper published

a series of stories that in hindsight, looking back, were intended to win prizes. It had all the hallmarks of a series of stories that's intended to make a campaign to win a Pulitzer or whatever they had in mind…a series of stories that challenged every aspect of being trans.

Other observers noticed the shift, too—to the extent that both GLAAD (2/15/23) and more than 180 Times contributors (2/15/23) separately wrote letters to Times leadership to raise concerns about the bias they were witnessing. Kahn responded by essentially declaring war on those who would criticize the paper's coverage on the issue (FAIR.org, 2/17/23), warning its own writers that he "will not tolerate" their participation in such criticism, and defending the coverage as "important, deeply reported and sensitively written."

'Internal PR campaign'

The New York Times (4/9/24) framed the anti-trans Cass Review as part of a "big shift in Europe"—but when reports from other European countries, like Germany and France, came out in support of gender-affirming care, the Times ignored it.

FAIR (5/11/23) conducted a study of Times coverage from April 2022 through March 2023. We found that, unlike the Washington Post, most of its front-page trans-related coverage cast gender-affirming care as either risky or forced on unwitting youth, or else cast trans people as a threat to others—at a time when trans people had become the focus of a nationwide GOP-led assault on their basic rights.

Sweeney said she wrote Sulzberger "a series of notes…that was focused on the coverage and the lack of trans reporters, and the lack of any trans involvement, input even, in the coverage." She described the Times leadership's response to the pressure from her and other trans Times staffers as little more than an "internal public relations campaign" that ended after two meetings that produced no changes.

When the English National Health Service in 2024 released the Cass Review—a report on best practices for medical care for trans youth that was heavily criticized by experts—Sweeney said the international desk assigned a UK reporter to the story. The draft article "put it in the context of being this very contentious, very political sort of document." But once the New York editors saw it, Sweeney said, they killed it, reassigning the piece to science reporter Azeen Ghorayshi, who had worked on many of the paper's anti-trans articles. (The Times claims Sweeney's account is "false.")

The next day (4/9/24), the piece was published with a very different slant from the one Sweeney described seeing: "Youth Gender Medications Limited in England, Part of Big Shift in Europe." As Sweeney pointed out, Ghorayshi used examples like Finland and Denmark—which did not, in fact, reject gender-affirming care the way Cass did—to frame the Cass Review as part of a broader trend.

And when country reports emerged soon after that were supportive of gender-affirming care for youth—from France, and from Germany, Austria and Switzerland—in opposition to Cass, the Times simply didn't cover them.

'Conventional wisdom among non-experts'

Utah state medical experts concluded that "overall, there were positive mental health and psychosocial functioning outcomes” from gender-affirming care (Salt Lake Tribune, 5/22/25). The New York Times didn't find this newsworthy.

Sweeney also pointed to a report out of Utah, where a 2023 bill that placed a moratorium on gender-affirming medical care for youth had also commissioned an independent study by the Drug Regimen Review Center of the University of Utah on the impacts of such care. The more than 1,000-page report was released in May 2025, and its conclusions were striking. They began:

The conventional wisdom among non-experts has long been that there are limited data on the use of GAHT [gender affirming hormone therapy]  in pediatric patients with GD [gender dysphoria]. However, results from our exhaustive literature searches have led us to the opposite conclusion.

And they ended:

It is our expert opinion that policies to prevent access to and use of GAHT for treatment of GD in pediatric patients cannot be justified based on the quantity or quality of medical science findings or concerns about potential regret in the future, and that high-quality guidelines are available to guide qualified providers in treating pediatric patients who meet diagnostic criteria.

Finding those conclusions inconvenient, Utah lawmakers ignored the report—as did the New York Times. But if a review of gender-affirming medical care for youth from another country was important enough to warrant an article, a 2,300-word interview and several prominent subsequent mentions in the Times, why does the review from a US state merit not a single mention in the paper?

If the Times is truly interested in "the facts," no matter where they point, why do they consistently highlight the minority of European countries that have restricted—not banned—gender-affirming care for youth, rather than acknowledge that the majority allow access to both puberty blockers and hormones?

'Acknowledged the uncertain evidence'

The New York Times (6/18/25) cherry-picks the medical reviews it likes to defend a ruling that Clarence Thomas saw as justified by Times reporting. 

Less than a full month after the Utah report was released, the US Supreme Court ruled in US v. Skrmetti in favor of Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors. As one piece of its coverage, the Times published an article by Ghorayshi (6/18/25) purporting to provide context for this anti-trans ruling, under the headline "What Has Medical Research Found on Gender Treatments for Trans Youth?"

Certainly the recent Utah review would seem to be relevant, but Ghorayshi only told readers that "systematic reviews commissioned by international health bodies have consistently found that the evidence of the benefits of the treatments is weak, as is the evidence on the potential harms."

She pointed to four countries across the Atlantic that "have limited the treatments to extreme cases or allowed them only in clinical trials," and only one—Germany—that "recently acknowledged the uncertain evidence but cautiously endorsed the treatments." (Notice she offered no such qualification regarding the restrictions, though they also acknowledged "uncertain evidence.")

As trans journalist Erin Reed (Erin in the Morning, 6/19/25) pointed out, Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in the Skrmetti ruling cites the Times seven times. The right has repeatedly used the paper's reporting to support its legislation and legal cases against trans rights.

Not true, not important

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger (CJR, 5/15/23) rejects the view that "when journalists report information that makes a negative outcome more likely, they are complicit in that outcome." As Tom Lehrer sang: "That's not my department! says Wernher von Braun."

Sulzberger, in an essay in the media review CJR (5/15/23; FAIR.org, 5/19/23), scoffed at those who would say that is evidence of the harm the Times' journalism is causing:

In general, independent reporters and editors should ask, “Is it true? Is it important?” If the answer to both questions is yes, journalists should be profoundly skeptical of any argument that favors censoring or skewing what they’ve learned based on a subjective view about whether it may yield a damaging outcome.

Of course, as FAIR (5/19/23, 5/28/24) and other critics have extensively documented over and over, the paper's most prominent coverage is telling neither "true" nor "important" stories about trans people. It's telling stories that paint a highly skewed picture of the dangers of transition and prioritizing the perspectives of those who wish to exclude trans people over those of trans people themselves, whose rights and very existence are under attack.

It has always felt clear that such coverage, which deviates markedly from typical centrist media coverage of trans people, is a very deliberate choice by Times leadership. Sweeney's account gives new insight into that choice.