One NYT Opinion writer vs. gender-affirming youth care

Opinions are ubiquitous. Everyone has one. The New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul is full of them, as her job demands. 

Since joining the Times' Opinion pages in 2022, Paul has received formidable resistance from the trans community for a series of columns that have been called a "long line of … transphobic opinion pieces," said the Human Rights Campaign in a press release. 

The latest, published this month, was a sprawling, nearly 5,000-word, two-page spread about youth and gender-affirming care, with a focus on people who received gender-affirming care while in their teens and then later detransitioned. The trans community responded in force. 

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Where gender meets politics

"Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress," said Paul in the article, titled "Gender Dysphoric Kids Deserve Better Care" in the print edition of the Times. 

Paul interviewed experts and drew profiles of individuals who gender-transitioned while young and have since detransitioned, that is, reversed their gender to its previous iteration. It is "easy … for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology," she said. 

Trans people, particularly people who have transitioned while young, have become pawns for both the left and the right, she said. "Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won't let kids be themselves," Paul said. 

Paul highlighted a handful of detransitioners to support the thesis that, done willy-nilly, gender-affirming care is not always the correct answer. One of her Opinion page kin, David French, lauded Paul's story on Threads.

A vociferous reaction

The ripostes to Paul's article and French's upvote were quick and striking. 

Post by @georgerbuchanan

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Straight people, queer people, cisgender people and trans people cried foul. It was disingenuous of Paul to trumpet a handful of detransitioners as representative of a root problem with gender-affirming care for youth, critics said. Pooled data from "numerous studies demonstrates a regret rate ranging from 0.3 percent to 3.8 percent" for people who have gender-transitioned, said Cornell University.

Trans content creator and activist Erin Reed of the Substack Erin in the Morning wrote a detailed retort, fact-checking four of Paul's claims. For example, "rapid onset gender dysphoria and transgender social contagion is not a validated theory," said Reed, and it has been "widely debunked as pseudoscience by major medical organizations." 

Paul responded in the Times, saying that detransition rates and transition regret rates are "higher than transgender advocacy groups suggest," according to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, "one of the most reliable nonpartisan organizations dedicated to the field." Reed, along with journalist Evan Urquhart, then published a piece in Los Angeles Blade that said Paul's source for the claim has ties to anti-trans extremist groups and "has received significant funding from the same sources that support the partisan Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation." 

"More detransitioners are going public with their decisions," said Paul. "They deserve our compassion." Paul's own paper, though — the news pages, not the opinion ones — has noted how rare detransitioned individuals are, and how often they are used as political pawns to reduce access to gender-affirming care. The back-and-forth shows no sign of dissipating.