on the NYT

In New York City today, it’s 63 degrees Fahrenheit. The early February hazmat spill in East Palestine, caused in part by the deregulation of the shipping industry and the Biden administration’s crushing of last year’s railroad workers’ strike, has “basically nuked” the Ohio town. There was another mass shooting yesterday at Michigan State University (survived by a student who was already a survivor of Sandy Hook, by the way). On May 11, the Biden administration intends to end the COVID public health emergency.

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These are real problems facing our country, some of them with global, even existential, implications. And yet, to hear the New York Times tell it, the youngest and most vulnerable members of a tiny minority group—trans children—receiving healthcare they need to survive poses some kind of threat that climate catastrophe, crumbling infrastructure, labor exploitation, stochastic gun violence, and a mass-disabling and -impoverishing event do not. The Times has demonstrated its investment in the production of the cis state, as Jules Gill-Peterson calls it, and the country’s broader white supremacist fascism. Along with “conservative” news media, like Fox New, stoking a sex panic around LITERAL CHILDREN is their preferred mode of accomplishing that.

This morning, a group of almost 200 journalists and writers released an open letter addressed to the Times regarding the newspaper’s editorial bias against trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people. (GLAAD also published a similar letter today.) I signed it and you can, too, right here.

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