In a report that might delight Andrew Sullivan, who has had a few rants about the news and editorial rooms at The New York Times concerning transgender and other issues related to wokeness, Erik Wemple of the eponymous blog (WaPo) notes:
The New York Times is racked with internal dissent over internal dissent — a development stemming from multiple open letters sent last week to newspaper management taking issue with the paper’s recent coverage of transgender youth. The uproar reflects the pressures of managing coverage of a sensitive topic at a time when media criticism is flourishing everywhere.
“As thinkers, we are disappointed to see the New York Times follow the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation,” reads one of those open letters, from multiple Times contributors and five employees. The polemic slams the Times for spilling much ink on trans youth even though it has published “no rapt reporting on the thousands of parents who simply love and support their children, or on the hardworking professionals at the New York Times enduring a workplace made hostile by bias.” (GLAAD and other organizations wrote another letter expressing similar objections.)
Note the use of apparent exaggeration as a tactic in attempting to bully Times editorial into toeing the woke line by claiming the Times is a right-wing rag. I don’t have a Times sub, so I cannot speak directly to their reporting – but I can infer from editorial’s response:
In response, New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn and Opinions chief Kathleen Kingsbury defended the coverage and deplored staffers’ involvement in the protest: “We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums,” their letter reads.
Which suggests that Editorial does not agree with the critique that the Times, infamous to the right for its leftward lean, is following the right’s lead in its reporting.
All of which is consistent with my observations that trans-advocates do not wish to engage in debate on any aspect of the transgender issue, responding with incoherent screams of bigot! to such personages as Professor Richard Dawkins, author J. K. Rowling, and author Margaret Atwood when challenged with calls to debate, formal or informal. Indeed, I’ve even seen it said that simply making such challenges damages the psyches of transgenders.
If the “thinkers” writing this letter to their employer, the Times, agree with such an assertion, we’ll have to strike thinkers from their collective resumes. I do not state this as a careless insult, but as a thoughtful aside:
- Critique and debate are not insults;
- Critique and debate are not dangerous attacks, and to suggest otherwise is to imply an emotional imbalance of transgenders, and of an insulting nature;
- Critique and debate are, in fact, the primary tools for improving the intellectual facet of a healthy society by marking bad reasoning as Dead End, correcting false information, and debating whether information is false or true, a sometimes difficult subject;
- Finally, it’s worth noting that the interests of the transgender cannot outweigh the interests of society-at-large without debate.
This tempest may be indicative that transgender advocacy is beginning to founder in its own abrogation of a primary tenet of liberal democracy, that tenet being the failure to debate a substantially new issue, publicly and honestly. The contradictions indulged in by these advocates have offended half the country, and makes them appear to be autocrat-wannabes.
And that cannot be good for those who are truly transgender.
