New York, New York
It’s About Time - Thank the New York Times
On Friday, February 2, the New York Times and opinion writer Pamela Paul published a groundbreaking op-ed, “As Kids They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.” This same piece ran in the Sunday, February 4th print edition as “Gender Dysphoric Kids Deserve Better Care” with a two-page spread in the Sunday Times. This deeply investigated piece profiles three detransitioners, as well as clinicians speaking out about the reckless practice of so-called “gender-affirming care” for children and adolescents.
This article represents a significant milestone for the New York Times to finally acknowledge and report upon the ongoing cultural and medical scandal of pediatric gender medicine in the United States and Canada. The article also highlights Aaron Kimberly, one of the LGBT-CC Leadership Team, and the online version links to our Substack!
Please take a few minutes to write the New York Times and thank them for their courage to run this OpEd. Both Pamela Paul and the newspaper itself have taken a lot of heat for publishing it. While many of us may feel it is long, long overdue, it is a huge step in the right direction, and a potential watershed moment for reaching everyday liberals who until now have only heard the activist narrative of this story.
Write your email to: letters@nytimes.com
Here is a sample outline of what you could write:
I am a _______ (mother, lesbian, transgender adult, teacher, etc) and I am writing to thank you for publishing Pamela Paul’s piece on detransitioners
Like Paul, I too believe gender dysphoric kids deserve better care
Add your reasons why you care, why you are concerned, and any important points you want to make about the article or the topic itself
End with a statement about how this article is a step in the right direction, and that you hope the NYT will continue to show courage in supporting journalists and writers to do true investigative work on this issue - you may highlight any area where you want to see them do more reporting and investigation
As always, if you submit a letter, please leave us a note in the comments! Share the inspiration with others to help it ripple out.
I submitted the following:
As a gay man in his 40s, I'm no stranger to painfully slogging through a world that largely and often misunderstands individual realities that don't match its collective norm. So it's no great shock to learn that I'm a hard-earned liberal who believes people should be supported as they are. Not everyone has to warmly include us in their everyday actions, but they don't have to. It's enough for any barriers they would erect against our equal treatment be denied. The rest will shake itself out.
But just because I'm a liberal doesn't mean I've lost all my common sense, and that includes the trans sphere. Now I certainly believe that there genuinely are trans people. Having lived my own minority journey, I believe those people should be supported, protected from predation and discrimination, and treated with respect. End of story. Every one of those people were probably also gender-dysphoric kids; I can't imagine that struggle (mine were hard enough).
But a vocal and vociferous extremist segment of the left would have us believe that young kids who think they might be trans should simply and unceremoniously be transitioned, no questions asked. In fact, to ask any questions at all would be to elicit a violent rhetorical response. I think this is dangerous and irresponsible. While some of those kids may actually grow up to be trans, these are CHILDREN. Children with underdeveloped psyches and grossly incomplete concepts of who they are and what they might become. Children who are capriciously moved by the whims of social media, their peers, entertainment, societal pressures, and the internal currents of their own weird and wacky brains. And now we're just going to completely turn over the reins to their physical evolution because their nascent, mercurial identities have an IDEA? When they're playing the tuba one week and wanting to scuba dive the next?
That's why it was so refreshing to read Pamela Paul's op-ed in your paper. The extremist wing of the liberal continuum has silenced any and all discussion of this issue through shame and bullying. Anyone daring to pose a question or raise a caution is immediately excoriated—and that includes many of us (like myself) who not only are allies but also active, vested participants in this cluster of issues. It's madness.
Questioning kids who become adults have every right to make those decisions for themselves. But there are so many issues that could potentially contribute to thoughts of alternate identities that have nothing to do with actually being trans: trauma-induced self-loathing, social anxiety, abuse, and any number of unrelated mental disorders (note I am NOT saying actually being trans is a mental disorder). Changing the destiny of our physical avatars BEFORE WE KNOW FOR SURE just seems like a setup for disaster for some of these people, who will end up making irrevocable alterations to the only bodies they will ever have.
We can't even rely on kids' answers about what they want to eat or if they have to go to the bathroom. Now we're blithely trusting them to know what sexual organs they want, to consent to all repercussions of the transitioning process, and to agree to engage in the lifelong consequences of eventual reassignment surgery? That sounds insane, and someone has to say it.
Thank you for providing a crack in the door to that conversation, even (and especially) as a large majority of your readers is liberal. Just as many on the right are extreme in their views on this issue, so are the fringes on the other end of the spectrum.
Sincerely,
JMA
Here is what I wrote:
Dear New York Times
I am a mother of a gender confused daughter who has been diagnosed with pre-adoption trauma and other mental health disorders related to said trauma. I wish to thank you for publishing Pamela Paul’s piece on detransitioners.
I agree with Paul that gender dysphoric kids deserve better care. Our daughter went from boy crazy to bisexual to lesbian to trans in a span of 6 weeks. Her friends who also identified as trans convinced her that she was born in the wrong body. And from there her mental health spiraled downward and thrust her into a dark pace. For the first 6 months we had therapists who only affirmed her male identity, which made everything much worse. It wasn't until we found a psychologist who specializes in body dysmorphia that things began to turn around. Our daughter's emotional health is much better and she has reconnected with us. We see her desistig from the male identity. Her friends, however, have gone on to hormones and mastectomies, and one of them is in a wheelchair because the combination of breast binding for 5 years and the muscle mass produced by testosterone has compromised her delicate skeletal structure.
Don't get me wrong. I am a lifelong Democrat who believes that transsexuals deserve respect and compassion. However, the spike in people - especially young people - identifying as trans should give us pause for concern about how they are being treated, and why their underlying mental comorbidities are being discounted.
As a decades long subscriber to the NYT who more than once considered ending the subscription, I am heartened by this piece and sincerely hope that the NYT will continue to show courage in supporting journalists like Paul. We need writers to do true investigative work on this issue. There are currently 11 lawsuits filed by detransitioners in the US and more are coming. Please don't let the vocal minority continue to kick detransitioners to the curb. They too deserve our respect and compassion.
Sincerely,
KHD