I wrote this article: Why this trans person is tired of Pamela Paul’s columns (10-min read, unpaywalled friend link) She could just stop talking about us. She could talk about anything else.
More regarding her Feb 2 screed:
Jerry Coyne, of Evolution is True, acknowledged it on his blog.
In the comments, someone points out Erin Reed's critique. Coyne's first rebuttal is that it was "written by gender activists." (I do believe that pointing to the author generally constitutes a fallacious counter-rebuttal. Also, it's a circular complaint, given that "gender activist" doesn't mean anything except someone who maintains a position with which anti-trans people disagree.) OK, suppose it's his context note, rather than his rebuttal. His next rebuttal is that the person who invented the concept ROGD managed (after one retracted attempt) to submit a paper that wasn't retracted. This is a very, very low bar for deciding what is true. People publish papers about all sorts of things, and they are wrong, as Coyne, the author of a book Why Evolution Is True, ought to be well aware.
A commenter presents his theory of what a "transgender activist" is. They're either non-transgender people who believe that trans people need more rights than they currently have...
...or they're transgender people who "assume that what worked from them will work for everybody."
This is nonsense, but very telling nonsense. Trans people do need more rights than we currently have. Also, I don't know any trans person who assumes that our own transition will "work" for "everybody," whatever that means. Every person has a unique way of living out their gender, and trans people know this well. What trans people do commonly tend to believe — and it is this to which "gender-criticals" react so intensely — is that everybody should have the right to decide for themselves what to do with their own bodies. Children grow up at different speeds, adults remain on our own timelines for our advancing maturity and occasional epiphanies, and we have the right to do things in our own time, in our own way, because it's our own lives, because we want to try it, even if it might not work out. This sort of autonomy is what they feel is "radical."
What people — oh NO, the ADF — are saying
Not even a week after she published it, the ADF cites it in a court filing.
Again...who's an 'activist'?
On February 8, Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart write: "Paul has responded to our journalistic criticism directly by dismissing us as "activists," a label that does not accurately describe the work she is responding to."
Paul praised the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) as "one of the most reliable nonpartisan organizations dedicated to the field." However, Reed and Urquhart point out:
"SEGM has received significant funding from the same sources that support the partisan Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation, organizations known for drafting anti-trans legislation. SEGM is closely linked with anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ extremist groups, a connection mapped out by the SPLC’s analysis. Its founder, William Malone, was part of an anti-trans working group in 2019 where members asserted that 'god's will' is being enacted through passing trans bans. In this group, he stated, 'It might take years, but we're going to get them.' If that is not activism, what is?"
Why does the NYT publish Pamela Paul?
"Hiring Paul was clearly a decision to bring on a hired gun to take the Times‘ side in this 'culture war.'"
— Julie Hollar, "Pamela Paul’s Gender Agenda," FAIR, December 16, 2022
They make more money from paid subscriptions (people who tend to like the articles) than from random web visitors, even including those who already believe the opposite and don't intend to be persuaded but do click to see what was said. "I think you can take them [the NYT] at their word that they publish the people they publish because they think their contributions are valuable and important," says Osita Nwanevu.
"Paul’s piece made it into a conservative legal brief in Idaho within four days. Last April, the state’s Republican governor Brad Little signed House Bill 71 into law, making it a felony offense to provide gender-affirming care to trans youth. The following month, the ACLU sued Idaho on behalf of two anonymous trans teenagers, alleging that HB 71 is unconstitutional. A U.S. District Court granted a preliminary injunction against HB 71 in December 2023, meaning that the law cannot be enforced while litigation is ongoing.
In January, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the injunction to stay in place. But the state, represented by the right-wing Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom, is challenging that decision. The legal brief they filed on February 6 cites many sources as backup for their argument, and Paul’s is one of them."
— The NYT’s Latest Op-Ed on Trans Kids Has Already Been Cited in an Anti-Trans Legal Brief: The 4,500-word article has been widely criticized as misleading and misinformed. James Factora. Them. February 9, 2024
"The ability to succeed in this work" as a newspaper columnist, Hamilton Nolan assures us, "depends not on education or intelligence or good character, but on having a particular personality type that causes you to always be thinking about stuff, along with an accompanying personality deformation that causes you to want to share those thoughts with the world."
"The best columnists lean into their good ideas and minimize their output the rest of the time. Most columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery, spitting out work that is acceptable enough to fill space on a page, yet rarely worth taking the time to read. Their careers are like room temperature bowls of cream of wheat left on a table, still edible but not appetizing. Other columnists are gifted with a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad. Thomas Friedman is the Platonic Ideal of this type: taken seriously by important people and utterly full of shit. Will smart phones change the Middle East? Thomas Friedman will most certainly coin a phrase to answer that question, and his answer will be wrong. This sort of columnist is actually malicious, but hard to uproot.
* * *
Paul is often criticized for her tiresome obsession with campus politics and bad faith gender issues...and she will not stop writing until her fan base is exclusively made up of idiots.
* * *
Bad writers with strong ideological convictions, like me, at least have a burning sense of political grievance to fuel their output. Not so with Paul. Decades ensconced in bourgeois antechambers have drained her of the ability to access true anger at the state of the world. This is always a dangerous affliction for elite columnists, who tend to live not in the normal world but instead in a world of nice offices and speaking gigs and Atlantic Ideas Festivals and therefore have a very hard time imagining what sort of complaints regular people might have. Hence the omnipresent spectacle of well-paid columnists fuming about airline delays and the annoyances of social media."
"The existence of these uninspired and uninspiring people occupying the very best jobs in their industry is evidence of the limits of the ideals that liberal society purports to value." More specifically: "There is no reason for there to be even one shitty New York Times columnist. They can hire anybody they want. Anybody. The existence of shitty New York Times columnists," Nolan continues, exposes "the myths of meritocracy. The most self-assured liberal institutions are in some ways more profoundly corrupt than some of the more raffish institutions that they look down on."
The NYT chooses what narratives to publish
Example: Joe Biden ran for U.S. Senator in Delaware. The year was 1972. He was almost too young, but he turned the minimum age of 30 between the election and the beginning of his Senate term. His age has been known since then. He was elected President in 2020.
On February 11, 2024, the NYT pretended to have suddenly discovered that the president is 81.
President Biden's age is a non-story.
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