Business News Uncategorized
Protesting NY Times’ LGBTQ coverage
By Gray Fuller
Standing on the sweltering sidewalk at the entrance to The New York Times, a group aggrieved by the paper’s coverage of transgender people spelled out their complaint: Gray Lady Lies Trans People Die. In the bottom corners of the white poster board bearing those words, two handprints were pressed in red paint.
Taped onto the sides of two beverage coolers were sheets of white paper, with the red handprints and another message: NYT: Will write for trans blood.
“We’ve been gunning for The New York Times since before our group’s revival,” said Annabel Ruggiero, one of the five sidewalk demonstrators from The Transexual Menace.
Before entering a 23-year hiatus, The Transexual Menace held vigils for murdered transgender people across the country, mourning a person every couple of months. In February, resuming its activism, the group publicly protested the Trump Administration for removing the T in LGBTQ+ from the official website of the Stonewall National Monument. It commemorates the 1969 uprising of gay and lesbian protestors of a police raid at that Greenwich Village bar.
What prompted the Menace’s picket on that summer afternoon was the Times planned airing of a six-part podcast about transgender health care for youth. Based on what they’d gathered from the trailer, the picketers had decided it wouldn’t have been any good.
Standing outside the Times, Ruggiero said that an editor from the Times—some “normal, presumably white cis dude”—greeted the protesters and asked them to “come into it with an open mind.” But Ruggiero didn’t want more reporting from the Times, and instead preferred that the paper “just shut up about trans issues.”
Standing with Ruggerio in the afternoon sun, picketer Hannah McCarty repeatedly referred to the institution across from her as “the paper of record.” She decried it for being, in her opinion, centrist and biased. Yet, when she was studying journalism at SUNY Purchase, reading the Times’ front page was the easiest way to pass quizzes. “Because,” she said, “they’re the paper of record.”
“They say they’re out there just asking questions,” McCarty said., “They say they’re out there just trying to look at both sides, but they’re not giving a fair shake to trans stories.”
(The New York Times’ communication team did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
Two years ago, over a thousand of the Times’ own contributors wrote to its publisher “with serious concerns about editorial bias” against transgender people. They noted how lawmakers cited Times news reports to craft legislation restricting transgender health care.
Ruggiero felt the Gray Lady was “putting their thumb on the scale, influencing people to pass laws that are striking out against our community.” Ruggiero said the paper reports on a debate about trans people as if two sides have equally valid stances.
Rather, Ruggiero argued, it’s “the scientific community versus some people who can’t get over the fact that gender is far more complicated than they actually think it is.”
As the demonstration ended, the picketers attracted glances from passersby, some of whom had New York Times badges hooked on their waists. One pedestrian accepted a pamphlet from a picketer. “The Transexual Menace NYC,” it read, “refuses to tolerate any longer the constant deluge of journalistic hit jobs directed at our community.”
Then, he passed through the glass doors and the key-carded security gates and stepped inside an elevator.
Outside the Times, an aquamarine Subaru pulled curbside. The picketers got inside. The front passenger door was the last to close.
The contested podcast aired that evening. The next morning, McCarty was unhappy with the Times’ choice of quotes in the first episode; Ruggiero hadn’t heard the series yet, but planned to listen. She wanted to have a full frame of reference ahead of another protest in front of the Times, scheduled for the next week.