NYT Credulously Repeats Parents’ Rights Nonsense
The article by Katie J. M. Baker fails to provide an accurate picture of either the parents’ rights movements or the reason some schools have policies protecting the privacy of transgender youth.
by Evan Urquhart
Parents’ rights advocates today succeeded in placing a puff-piece in the New York Times. The article, headlined “When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know” is provides the perspective of liberal parents who feel uncomfortable about their children having socially transitioned at school without their having been informed or asked for their consent. Although it bills itself as investgative reporting, it does very little other than amplifying these specific parents’ concerns.
Assigned has written before that a good starting place for the question of allowing young people to social transition is to ask how schools approach similar situations when gender identity is not involved. For instance, situations where a child is changing their presentation by sneaking makeup or clothing prohibited by their parents, but within the dress code for the school. Or, situations where a child prefers to use a nickname at school that their parents don’t like. In such cases parents are neither informed about nor allowed a veto on their children’s schooltime behavior. Children follow school rules at school, and home rules at home. This isn’t even confined to public school: A child who isn’t Catholic can attend a Catholic private school, but while they’re there they have to wear a Catholic school uniform and receive instruction on Catholic beliefs. This is just how going to a school, any school, actually works.
It ought to be on opponents to explain why social transition, which is not a medical treatment, is different and why trans youth should be a special case. To do that they’d need some evidence that parental involvement in these decisions leads to better results for childen, but of course the opposite is true. Parental support is highly associated with better outcomes for transgender youth, but in the absense of familial support school and peer support provides some protection against the harm unsupportive families do. Of course, such research is not included in the New York Times article. Instead the story takes it as a given that parents would normally be consulted and that schools are doing something extraordinary by not doing so.
This was reporter Katie J. M. Baker’s first story for the NYT after having previously been a senior reporter for BuzzFeed. Baker’s investigative work has been highly praised for its ability to wrestle with tough cultural questions, allowing people with very different views the room to present their side. That’s what Baker did in a 2022 feature for BuzzFeed about the sexual assault allegations against the former Attorney General for New York, Eric Schneiderman. The article gives Schneiderman’s perspective, but it also delves deeply into harm done by abusive men. It sparks tough questions about whether restorative justice models offer a workable alternative to the criminal justice system in such cases, or if they only seem to.
The complicated relationships between young trans youth, their families, and the public schools would surely benefit from a deep and honest an examination as well. After all, these are far from easy questions: While the research clearly indicates that trans youth benefit from having supportive families, many families aren’t supportive or are only hesitantly or partially supportive of such kids. What will help a child in such a family is often highly individual. When possible, helping reluctant family members to grow in their willingness to support their child may be the most powerful thing a supportive adult can do. Sometimes, though, that’s just not possible. Telling the parents in those cases may put a child at risk of abuse. It’s tricky, there are no easy answers, and people with the best of intentions often wind up doing harm to vulnerable youth.
So, why didn’t Baker give us that nuanced, careful look? A passage at the top of the NYT article describes extensive research Baker conducted for the piece:
screenshot from the New York Times
Considering the work she did it’s hard to understand why so little of the article is spent explaining how and why public schools have developed policies allowing youth to socially transition without informing or asking consent from parents. Instead, she offers paragraphs briefly summarizing the opinions of unnamed “detractors” while devoting most of the article to skeptical parents’ feelings and thoughts.
screenshot from the New York Times
Who are these detractors? How many of these groups want to ban gender-affirming care for minors? Have any of the groups taken a clear stand against that? What’s this about calling transgender advocates “groomers” and is it, perhaps, an incredibly dangerous smear that likens all trans adults to pedophiles, paving the way for violence and, perhaps, a return to having laws against cross dressing which would make being trans a crime? Baker doesn’t say. The piece seems entirely uninterested in the thoughts, feelings, or motivations of people who support allowing young people to socially transition at school, including only the shallowest of quotes from that perspective before returning to the parents’ side.
The longest Baker spends on the trans affirming side is in a couple paragraphs about a 19-year-old, Clementine Morales, who is grateful to have been supported at school when they lacked support at home. Zero details are given about Morales’ family or the details of their experience, about why they felt they couldn’t come out to their parents, what their relationship is with their family now, or literally anything that would allow the reader to understand why they felt they needed the information withheld from their family and whether the decision of the school to help them was right.
screenshot from the New York Times
Some of these words and phrases, such as when the teacher mentions kids who “need protection from their own parents,” or when Morales says they needed “parental figures… who were not my parents” suggests Morales may have feared or actually experienced parental abuse. But there’s no way to know for sure, because Baker doesn’t say. In fact, the article only uses the word abuse once, in one of many passages concerned with how the parents feel.
screenshot from the New York Times
OK, so it doesn’t give much room to the perspective of the schools, But even as an article about parents’ rights advocates feelings around gender transitions at school, this article falls hilariously short. The anecdote used to frame the story concerns a family who is currently supportive of their transgender son, a child who seems not to have been harmed (and was perhaps helped) by having space to explore social transition at school after being rebuffed when he tried to come out at home. It’s a very mild story where it feels like things would have worked out fine whether the parents had been informed or not.
All of the parents quoted seem similarly mild. The article doesn’t quote a single parent saying transphobic things, or quote a parent who wants to ban gender affirming care for gender dysphoric youth, or even (as far as I could tell) quote any parent who is a Republican. The article describes a group of mostly politically liberal parents while admitting that all of the parents who have decided to pursue lawsuits are conservatives. In fact, it fails to provide a deeper picture of parents’ rights activism or the parents’ rights movement at all, instead quoting liberal parents mild expressions of concern.
None of this describes what the movement for parents’ rights is or who its political supporters are. Instead it collects the sort of quotes and anecdotes a person who wanted to portray that movement as much more liberal, more reasonable, and less transphobic than it really is would cherry pick, in order to present a misleading picture to readers and confuse them about the issue and its stakes.
The New York Times is once again doubling down on transphobia, providing distortions and half-truths. An in-depth investigative look into the parents’ rights movement would have been eye-opening, but this isn’t that. Likewise, an honest examination of the question of why some public schools decided that the best interests of children are served by allowing youth to socially transition regardless of their parents’ wishes would be useful and illuminating, and of course including parents’ reactions would be necessary there. But this isn’t that either. Instead it is a misleading, one-sided picture that will leave the Times’ readers less informed, and more primed to participate in the ongoing moral panic about transgender youth.