A New York Times Podcast on Youth Trans Care Leaves Out the Patients
Something must be wrong, they keep suggesting, but they can’t tell us what it is. And they didn’t uplift the stories of the trans youths whose care is under threat.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
The Protocol, the New York Times’ new podcast on the history of gender-affirming care for youth, largely excludes the voices of trans youth receiving that care.. The narrative, as in previous Times coverage, is that something has gone wrong with youth gender care in the United States.
The podcast’s creators continue to create smoke around gender-affirming care while suggesting there must be fire, a pattern consistent in Times coverage. Starting in 2022, the paper has published repeated stories raising questions and concerns about aspects of these treatments. It’s a remarkable (and remarkably one-sided) focus for the paper of record to concern itself with the minutiae of healthcare impacting fewer than 0.1 percent of American children. This has been highlighted repeatedly, by Parker Molloy for The Objective, numerous LGBTQ+ organizations, and even many of the Times’s own contributors.
Throughout The Protocol, trans people’s supposed experiences with healthcare in the U.S. are relayed through the prism of medical providers’ perspectives in lengthy interviews, while our own voices are relegated to brief, contextless clips in the final episode.
The podcast makes time for F.G., a 50-year-old Dutch trans man, to voice his opinion that younger trans people are participating in a fad. But it makes no room for young trans people to answer back. They don’t get to tell Times listeners that a life of fear and hiding is no longer good enough, or that times have changed.
While the first two episodes feature interviews with trans adults from the Netherlands who were early recipients of puberty blockers, the podcast only briefly returns to the experiences of patients.
The only included full-length interviews with trans people who received care were recorded in the Netherlands, not the U.S.
“I think it's telling that Ghorayshi apparently couldn’t secure on record interviews with American families who’ve had positive experiences with gender-affirming care — those families absolutely exist,” Molloy told Assigned Media. “After years of watching their stories get twisted or used as political ammunition, many transgender families have understandably become wary of participating in major media projects, especially from outlets with the Times’ track record on trans issues,” Molloy told Assigned Media.
Instead, a jumble of clips in the final episode features scattershot voices from members of the trans community, parents of trans youth, and detransitioners. That is the only point, save one, where the podcast turns its focus away from medical personnel and toward the human beings whose care is being discussed.
The one other place where listeners hear from an American whose life has been affected by the care in question comes in episode 4, “The Whistleblower.” It features Heidi (unnamed in the podcast), the mother of a trans girl, confronting a former gender clinic staffer who now works with the far-right to ban care. In the clip, Heidi confronts the staffer and says she misrepresented her child’s medical history in order to promote her cause, referring to herself and her family repeatedly as “collateral damage.”
It’s a powerful moment of anger at a provider who betrayed the trust of patients she was duty-bound to help, and also one included over the strong and repeated objections of Heidi herself.
Why was this the only example of a parent’s reaction to Reed that The Protocol chooses to feature? If affirming care provided in America has supposedly failed, it’s hard to know how when the reporter behind the show, Azeen Ghorayshi, isn’t heard speaking to a single patient or family who’s been affected by it.
Reached for comment, New York Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said Azeen and Austin spoke with many trans and nonbinary young people and their families in the United States, “in addition to interviews with doctors who were instrumental in establishing this field of pediatrics and the patients who were the first to receive this care.”
The Daily publicly solicited listeners to call in and share their stories on May 23.
“Listeners hear a multitude of experiences from trans people and their families during and at the end of the series, including from those interviews,” Rhoades Ha said.
But missing from The Protocol are an array of stories that could’ve been included to nuance the conversation about gender-affirming care: trans youth who feel their care went smoothly, young people who have detransitioned, and trans and detrans youth who feel that overly intensive assessments work against patients’ interests.
One provider interviewed for the podcast, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, mentioned concerns in the field that assessments aimed at deciding who is and is not a good candidate for care encourage fear and mistrust toward providers and discourage youth from honestly speaking up about their fears or doubts. Yet the podcast was devoid of at least one young person who experienced an assessment this way telling their own story.
And The Protocol also fails to provide evidence for the alleged harms caused by gender-affirming care. In a voiceover, producer Austin Mitchell mentions detransition, the decision to return to living as a member of a person’s birth sex, saying it impacts between one to ten percent of those receiving gender-affirming care — though these numbers aren’t given a clear source. Regret over receiving treatment is mentioned repeatedly as a potential harm, without any numbers or estimates at all.
Research has shown that fewer than half of people who have stopped or paused a gender transition do not express regret. They typically oppose bans on gender-affirming care, but many feel the care that they received could be improved. But stories from those young people are similarly absent from The Protocol.
The Times has often left trans voices out of its coverage of the community in the past. According to Media Matters, two-thirds of its stories on trans issues failed to quote a single trans person in 2023. The Protocol’s dodge— including clips of scattered voices, rather than full interviews or in-depth reporting — is similar in flavor, treating trans and detrans youth voices as an afterthought or a check-box rather than central figures to the story the podcast is trying to tell.
“The focus of the series is on the history and evolution of the medical care, how it changed lives, and the questions and legal and political debates around it,” Rhoades Ha said of The Protocol.
That’s true, but in the hands of The Protocol’s creators it’s told with a frame that’s more interested in the stakes for guideline writers and researchers than for those receiving care.
In reality, it’s always the patients who have the most at stake, not just when their health care is banned, but also when it falls short. Trans youth and their parents have everything to lose and nothing to gain if something has gone wrong in youth gender-affirming care. As the Supreme Court is poised to decide the legality of this healthcare — a decision that will disproportionately impact trans youth in red states — a podcast that sidesteps the experiences of patients provides nothing of substance to the national debate.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.