Context
Trans News Network rang in the new year with a trenchant interview of Billie Jean Sweeney, former New York Times editor at the international desk. In it, Sweeney described to interviewer David Forbes how the media giant pushed increasingly inaccurate anti-trans views during her time at the publication and willfully ignored the voices of trans women like her. The NYT has previously received criticism from human rights groups, transgender journalists, and over 10,000 readers about the damaging nature of their trans coverage.
The New York Times responded yesterday, attempting to impugn TNN’s reporting and claiming Sweeney’s account contains “wholly invented conspiracy theories.”
I’m fact-checking their response, so you don’t have to.
Editor’s note: This fact-check is a synthesis of the publicly available information at the time of publication. I did not contact The New York Times for comment, so I’ve made sure to link directly to all cited sources, including their coverage. They are a massive media company; I’m an unemployed queer on my couch. They’ll be fine.
Claims vs. Reality
Claim: The NYT’s post is a fact-check. (The full title is “Fact-Checking False Claims About Our Gender Identity Coverage.”)
Reality: The NYT’s post isn’t a fact check; it’s a PR response. Industry standards and the NYT’s own history of fact-checking make this clear.
Post-hoc fact checking is a common journalistic practice with a long tradition at the Times and elsewhere. However, fact-checking is usually done by a third party when there are misleading claims made by powerful people. (See this recent example of Politifact tackling Donald Trump’s lies about the US’ attack on Venezuela.)
The NYT has an absolute right to respond to bad press. But it’s out of sync with journalistic norms to position their response as a fact-check, which creates the illusion of impartiality and distances them from the subject matter.
Claim: The NYT’s work “has deeply and accurately covered the lives of trans people and the bigotry they face.”
Reality: According to a Media Matters & GLAAD report, 2/3 of New York Times stories about anti-trans legislation failed to quote a trans person. How do you deeply and accurately cover trans people without speaking to us? (You can’t.)
The Times has also repeatedly amplified transphobic talking points.
Claim: There are “fiercely contested medical and legal debates about interventions for [transgender] adolescents.”
Reality: Gender-affirming care, AKA medical interventions, are universally supported by medical boards in the US, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Medical literature on gender-affirming care shows a strong consensus about positive results; a Cornell literature review of peer-reviewed studies showed 93% of studies found gender transition improves wellbeing. None of those studies found any negative impacts.
Further, the NYT ignores its own role in stoking controversy around transgender issues, especially in legal matters. Their reporting was cited 29 times in the Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision, which kneecapped the rights of transgender youths to access life-saving care.
According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, there was a 97% increase in anti-trans legislation from 2015 to 2025. This increase coincided with increasing trans visibility, but also with the New York Times’ turn from occasional human-interest centric trans narratives to near-constant, ahistorical coverage of how the transgender rights movement has gone too far.
Claim: The interview “claims multiple times without evidence, including in the headline, that upper leadership at The Times issued directives to attack trans people. This is false.”
Reality: There is evidence that this occurred. Sweeney was in an editorial role at the Times where she would’ve been privy to conversations and choices around content, and it’s hard to imagine a trans woman and international journalist not being aware of the Cass Report. One can also look at the NYT’s ultimate coverage to gain insight about this claim.
Claim: The interview “claims these stories were done to please the Trump administration. This, too, is false.”
Reality: Editorial decisions around what stories get told are complex and multi-faceted.
This statement, though, does seem to belie a fundamental misunderstanding of Sweeney’s claims in the interview. Sweeney is not alleging there was a dark-alley meeting between NYT editors and the Trump admin where they traded editorial integrity for transphobia. She’s saying the NYT’s owners looked at the Trump admin’s litigious, authoritarian history and complied in advance.
Claim: The interview claims “a 2023 article about parental rights did not directly quote the young person at the center of the story. This is false.”
Reality: Sweeney wasn’t claiming the NYT literally never quoted the story’s subject. Prior to the NYT’s response, TNN added a note to the interview clarifying that Sweeney was speaking hyperbolically about how little the student’s voice was referenced in the piece compared to the voices of others, not making the factually incorrect assertion he was never quoted at all.
Correction: Initially, I’d labelled this as a “true-ish” statement that had been subsequently clarified by TNN after the NYT response, but Forbes reached out to me to let me know they’d added a note to prevent misinterpretation before the NYT posted their response. The NYT misinterpreted it anyway.
The 2023 article referenced quotes the student twice. His mother is quoted four times. The majority of the voices quoted in the piece are cisgender parents. Additionally, framing the story as being about parental rights is fundamentally dishonest. What the story’s truly about is the rights of trans kids to not be outed to their parents by their teachers, something becoming more and more difficult by the day.
Claim: “The Times responded to a protest by publishing an Opinion column the next day. This is false. Columnists voice their own opinions, and their columns are generally written and scheduled days in advance, as this one was.”
Reality: The column was responsive to the protest of nearly 1,000 NYT journalists and contributors in February of 2023. The protest was explicitly regarding the bulk of NYT’s anti-trans coverage. The day after it began, they published the column, entitled “In Defense of J.K. Rowling.”
News is a dynamic environment. The New York Times is a massive media company with vast resources. They could have rescheduled this piece. Instead, they ran it.
TL;DR : If you don’t want it read as a response, maybe give it more than a day.
Claim: “No UK correspondent was assigned or drafted a story about the Cass report. The Science and London teams had discussed and coordinated coverage of the Cass report in the weeks before its expected release, and had agreed that the news would be covered by science.”
Reality: The details of the NYT’s editorial decisions around the Cass review are difficult to confirm. However, in Billie Jean Sweeney’s capacity as an editor at the international desk, she would’ve been privy to these decisions, and ultimately, the coverage was published by the Science desk. To this day, it contains a misleading headline implying the Cass report was part of a trend of anti-trans scientific findings, when in fact, it was a uniquely partisan study that falls apart easily under scrutiny.
Claim: “The article also falsely says that the first person quoted in a 2024 story about transgender activists was J.K. Rowling.”
Reality: Technically correct, I guess? J.K. Rowling is the first substantive quote in the body of the story. The subheading of the story quotes a transgender activist (who has since responded by saying he was taken out of context and condemned the ultimate message of the story.)
Verdict (and Why It Matters)
The NYT’s response to the reporting of Trans News Network nitpicks slight inaccuracies and subjective characterizations about events that occurred over a year ago, but ultimately fails to respond meaningfully to the core of the accusations being levied by Sweeney: that transgender journalists sounded the alarm at the New York Times, but they continued to knowingly publish anti-trans reporting that hurt real people. Now, we sit in a society where genocide experts warn we are in the early days of a genocide of transgender people in the US.
I wonder if one day, the editors of The Times will look back and remember how they treated us. Will they regret their hand in the suicides of our youth, the murders of our elders? The erosion of our rights? I don’t know. I doubt it, honestly.
But as I write this, I remember the mornings when I’d open my email to headlines that called my very existence as a trans person into question. I remember the strange ritual, half self-flagellation and half-comfort, as I read the stories aloud to my partner on the couch. I remember scrolling to search for voices like mine in the pages among the miasma of misinformation. I remember my father telling me after I came out to him that I could never change my name. I remember the isolation, the fear, the tears.
And I remember deciding enough is enough.
Developing Coverage: This section highlights previous stories where there are still critical questions that remain unanswered.
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