Jude Doyle knocks it out of the park yet again with an incisive analysis of the increasingly poisonous New York Times:

“Transphobia has been an unacknowledged norm of “objective” journalism for a very long time. It’s been an unacknowledged cultural norm for much longer. Yet it is still transphobia—still bigotry, still lethal—no matter how unconscious it may be. In 2023, when trans people are at the red-hot centre of a culture war and trans healthcare is being attacked in dozens of state legislatures across the nation, it is not a form of ignorance that any journalist can afford.”

The superb If Books Could Kill podcast has just published an episode about the same thing, and comes to very similar conclusions about the polite bigotry of the paper of record.

You could write a very similar article or episode about the UK.

As Doyle also writes – and this is something that’s widely known among trans people who pay attention to the media, but still utterly shocking to see when it’s stated so baldly – “It’s a tough topic, media transphobia. It’s complex. It’s nuanced. You can almost forget that top editor Ian Katz — formerly the deputy editor of the Guardian, then the editor of BBC’s Newsnight, now head of programming for Channel 4 — was, until quite recently, married to Justine Roberts, co-founder of TERF forum Mumsnet, and that they were together for twenty-five years.”

The links between Mumsnet, the so-called Gender Critical movement and their cheerleaders in the press and broadcast media would make a great Private Eye piece. Or at least it would if Private Eye weren’t part of the same incestuous bubble of bigotry.