Trans journalist Samantha Riedel came out swinging at The New York Times this weekend in an op-ed following the Supreme Court’s decision endorsing Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth in U.S. v. Skrmetti.

Riedel said the fact that Clarence Thomas’s concurrence cited The Times in seven instances was evidence of “irresponsible” coverage of transgender issues by “the paper of record.”

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The court’s ruling is “a decision tailor-made to inflict the kind of harm that conservative goons and grifters have dreamed of for years — and one of the major parties we can thank is The New York Times,” she wrote.

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The Times’ coverage of trans issues is an effort to “portray conservative transphobia as reasoned opposition,” she asserted.

“Times staff routinely ignore trans voices altogether,” Riedel claimed, while accusing the paper of giving “free reign” to editorial writers like Pamela Paul, perhaps the op-ed page’s most conservative voice, “to repeatedly accuse trans activists of being “misogynistic” while lionizing transphobic public figures like J.K. Rowling.”

“When more than 200 journalists penned an open letter denouncing the paper’s misleading coverage in 2023, including some Times writers and contributors, Times leadership falsely conflated it with another open letter published by GLAAD to dismiss them both as contrary to its ‘journalistic mission,’” Riedel wrote. “Behind the scenes, leadership warned Times employees and contributors who signed the first letter that further ‘attacks’ on the paper would not be tolerated.”

“But you don’t have to be a pinko like me to recognize that, despite Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s insistence that his paper’s coverage is both true and important, in reality it is neither,” she said.

“The Times is, rather, in the business of legitimizing far-right propaganda by presenting naked fascism as a reasonable counterweight to left-leaning activism, grasping sweatily at its pearls to speculate about whether the ‘transgender craze’ might really be ‘seducing our children.'”

Riedel laid blame on the Times, their writers, and the paper’s coverage of the spectrum of viewpoints around trans issues for “enabling Skrmetti.”

The writer’s sense of betrayal may be rooted in a (perhaps naive) belief she held while growing up, that “the Times was unimpeachably neutral in all respects.” But as she notes herself, the paper hasn’t always been on the right side of history as it unfolds, from early coverage of the AIDS crisis to the Iraq War. Now, she says, Times editors are working “overtime to misrepresent the modern crisis of transphobia,” while still finding time “to recklessly manufacture consent,” as she characterizes it, for Israel’s ongoing, U.S.-backed destruction of Gaza.

Riedel says the Times’ essentially claims its “breathless devotion to supposed ‘neutrality,'” necessitates the anti-trans coverage, as the op-ed page is host to a range of ideological views from far-left to far-right.

In the end, the blame for the Skrmetti decision lies at the feet of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, including Thomas, who cherry-picked “the facts” used to bolster his concurrence, including Times writer Azeen Ghorayshi’s anodyne reporting that “[t]he number of people who detransition or discontinue gender treatments is not precisely known.”

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