‘Power and Dominance’: Atlantic and Times Champion Transphobia
The genocidal campaign against trans people is not being led by right-leaning news outlets, our analysis shows. Two elite media institutions are leading the charge.
by Billie Jean Sweeney
The activist anti-trans campaign in American media is driven in large part by two elite institutions, The Atlantic and The New York Times, who draw from a remarkably limited and often cross-pollinating pool of writers and viewpoints, an analysis by Assigned Media has found.
Though often seen in the popular imagination as liberal or centrist, the two publications have produced a fast-flowing stream of reactionary stories that has only intensified in the past three months — at just the moment trans people face a historic governmental attack that experts describe as the beginning of genocide.
The Times, whose history of biased coverage has been well documented by Assigned Media and others, has produced far more news and opinion stories on trans people than any other major US media outlet since Jan. 1, according to our news tracker.
The 149 articles, podcasts and other editorial products published by The Times this year dominate the mainstream media landscape, our tracker shows. The Associated Press has published the next-highest total, 90, while competitors such as The Wall Street Journal (28), The Washington Post (76) and CBS (46) have published even fewer.
The Times’s intense focus has been accompanied by an ever-stronger determination to push an anti-trans political narrative. Two major medical groups, the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, have complained that the Times misrepresented their positions in a flurry of news and opinion pieces in February that misleadingly claimed they were backing away from support for gender affirming care.
Last week, the AMA publicly sought a formal correction, and was harshly rebuffed by the Times. Since 2022, no fewer than six medical groups, experts, family members and advocates have felt compelled to issue their own public correctives after the Times misinterpreted or distorted their views, our research shows. Though disagreements between sources and news organizations are typically handled out of the public limelight, the Times has compiled a lengthy record of intransigence when confronted with questions about its trans coverage.
‘Highbrow Clickbait’
The Atlantic, which deals mainly in opinion, is not included in our tracker of major news outlets, and its one million-plus subscription base is small compared to The Times’s 12 million-plus. But the magazine has long positioned itself as a driver of elite opinion, and its coverage has reflected a determined anti-trans bias in the past, a pattern which has continued thus far this year. Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis, a longtime anti-trans ideologue, devotes most of her thousands of words to anti-trans messaging.
One piece by Lewis, ostensibly saying President Trump was going too far in his transphobic hatred, nonetheless said his policies “may be defensible in substance,” referred to trans women as “males,” and argued that more research would finally uncover the “harms” of gender affirming care that had somehow been suppressed by experts for decades.
Long-winded sophistry is a trademark of the Atlantic.
The Times and the Atlantic share other institutional biases, notably their devotion to attacks on Zohran Mamdani, who was elected mayor of New York City last fall. The manipulative tactics each publication has used against Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and Muslim, are striking in similarity to the methods that they have used against the trans community. In fact, some of the same people are responsible.
Michael Powell, whose recent work at the Atlantic has been devoted almost entirely to anti-Mamdani pieces, was once employed at the New York Times, where he played a key role in the rollout of the paper’s anti-trans campaign four years ago. He and his editors once produced a story on the imagined harms of gender inclusive language without speaking with a trans person.
Jesse Singal, who built a career on seeding politically-driven doubt about gender affirming care after writing a piece in the Atlantic eight years ago, popped up in The Times just last month to reprise virtually the same message. (In between, Singal wrote an uncritical New York Times review of a book by Helen Lewis. Unsurprisingly, their “gender critical” positions aligned quite closely.)
Another gender ideologue whose work has been published in The Atlantic and the Times, Benjamin Ryan, was the author of a vacuous, racially inspired hit-piece on Mamdani in the Times in which he relied on a eugenicist as his source. Ryan withheld the name of the source, Jordan Lasker, and misled readers by falsely describing him as an “academic.”
Is all this starting to sound like a lot of the same people rehashing the same warmed-over biases?
Broadly, for both publications the coverage of Mamdani and trans people represents “an exercise in power and dominance,” the writer and physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a critic of their coverage, said in an interview with Assigned Media.
At the Atlantic, generating clicks has a lot to do with it. In a 2024 piece, Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the progressive outlet Current Affairs, called The Atlantic’s tactics “highbrow clickbait” that had dangerous consequences.
“When the Atlantic creates a misleading impression about how many people ‘detransition’ or stop identifying as transgender, it provides fodder for demagogues who want to pass hideous anti-trans legislation on the basis of a theory that trans children are not really trans but are being turned trans (by Democrats, librarians, ‘groomers,’ etc.),” Robinson wrote.
Though The Atlantic and The Times share broad aims Prescod-Weinstein sees subtle differences in their tactics: “The Atlantic’s strategy is keyed in on what will cause people to be at each other's throats.” Likening the Times’s approach to an alma mater, Harvard, Prescod-Weinstein said, “Harvard’s whole thing is governing the world. I think the New York Times is trying to govern.”
The Atlantic’s coverage, in fact, has often been characterized by efforts to invent divisions within marginalized groups. In a February piece it attacked gender-affirming care in a contorted “defense of effeminate boys”
The journalist Michael Hobbes noted, “The author did not speak to a single medical professional and the article does not contain a shred of evidence that effeminate gay boys are being bamboozled into thinking they're trans… The idea that thousands of kids were pushed into gender-affirming surgeries because the left shuts down debate is a laughable conspiracy theory. The overwhelming social pressure is to be cis, not trans!”
The Atlantic has published five stories about trans people since Jan. 1, three of which explicitly promoted anti-trans themes. But perhaps most telling is what’s absent from its coverage. Since last summer, the Atlantic has not published a trans person’s voice or perspective, nor has it run any significant piece defending trans rights.
A Limited Worldview
The New York Times has published 27 opinion pieces, podcasts and other editorial products involving transgender people since Jan. 1, our tracker shows. Eight have promoted anti-trans positions, and four defended trans people against attacks on our civil rights.
Singal’s opinion piece trod a well-worn path for him, seeking to plant doubt about medical consensus on the safety and benefits of gender affirming care, and repeating the news department’s flat-out misrepresentations of the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association positions.
Another longtime anti-trans ideologue, Louise Perry, was summoned to defend the bigoted UK author JK Rowling, a favorite project of the opinion department for years. This time, critics of Rowling had somehow failed to uphold “liberalism,” Perry wrote, or least Rowling’s intolerant version of it.
Most commonly, the opinion pages attacked Democrats for supporting trans people’s civil rights. The opinion contributor Thomas Edsall called support for trans inclusion “far out,” a deeply unserious assertion oblivious to the decades of negotiation in which trans people have engaged to gain entry to society.
Missing since Jan. 1, as they typically are in the Time’s news pages as well, are the perspectives of trans people as they undergo a dramatic, wide-reaching loss of rights under the second Trump administration.
Of course, what’s missing and what’s emphasized in any publication ultimately reflect the will of its leaders.
The stories that are chosen, how they are framed, the angles pursued, the language used, the sources selected and those ignored will determine what readers see. The Times and The Atlantic have chosen to limit the perspectives they provide to readers, no more so than in their coverage of trans people and Mamdani.
And in those coverage areas the two publications employ strikingly similar tactics. The Atlantic has asserted Mandani has “refused to moderate” on Israel while providing no substantive evidence to support this highly charged claim.
In its most recent tendentious critique of Mamdani, the Times went after his “cautious” and “carefully worded” response after two men invoking the Islamic State had been charged with a suspected terror attack.
“One day the NYT's editors will read these stories again and be ashamed of themselves,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Center at Columbia University, said on Bluesky. “Mamdani called the attack "heinous," "criminal," "reprehensible," "terrorism," and "the antithesis of who we are." The insinuation that he's conflicted about this is disgraceful.”
Journalist Parker Molloy pointed to parallels in the Times’s coverage of trans people — “decisions about who gets interviewed for stories, whose stories get lifted up, how it gets framed, the language used.”
“You see this in stories about trans issues where they'll interview Brianna Wu, who is there to be a trans person willing to shit on other trans people. It makes biased reporters go, "See? I was fair! I included one!" when really they specifically sought out someone who repeats their own beliefs.”
Wu has, in fact, been a favored, repeat source for the Times, though she is hardly representative of trans people. Many dozens of trans academics, business leaders, authors, clerics, politicians and journalists would make for compelling spokespeople if these institutional leaders were genuinely interested in an honest portrayal of America.
That these trans voices are almost entirely excluded speaks to the prejudice of their institutional leadership and their determination to promote bias no matter the human cost.
About our news tracker: On a daily basis, Assigned Media monitors coverage about trans people in eight large-circulation mainstream outlets: The Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, ABC, The Washington Post, NPR and The Associated Press.
About the author: Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her) is a freelance editor, reporter and advocate. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an award-winning investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on young trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted and spread anti-trans disinformation.