The New York Times helped turn trans rights into political controversy, analysis finds

A new data investigation argues that The New York Times sharply changed the way it covers transgender people beginning in 2022, moving from rights-based framing toward more skeptical, conflict-driven coverage that elevated opponents of transgender rights and gave less prominence to transgender people themselves.

Related: A mom asked the NYT publisher about harm from trans coverage. He defended the process instead

A shift in the paper of record

The analysis, published Friday by civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo in The Dissident, reviewed 3,242 Times articles published between 2014 and early 2026. Caraballo also published an accompanying data site, where readers can review the findings and methodology.

“This isn’t about any individual story,” Caraballo, who said the project took her two months to complete, told The Advocate in an interview Monday. “This is about the whole corpus of how they’ve covered trans issues over time.”

The New York Times did not initially respond to The Advocate’s request for comment. After this story was published, the paper rejected the analysis and denied that its coverage is biased or anti-trans. In a statement to The Advocate, Danielle Rhoades Ha, the Times’ senior vice president of communications, said the paper’s role is “to report accurate, fact-based information on all aspects of a story to help the public understand vital issues better.”

Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, said she undertook the project because years of criticism from transgender writers, journalists, and advocacy groups had often been met by the Times with defenses of individual stories. The problem, she said, was not always factual error, but the cumulative effect of framing, story selection, and prominence.

“It is harder on the individual level because there isn’t anything usually factually wrong with their stories,” Caraballo said. “But part of the problem is the framing, what they choose to highlight, and how much priority they give certain stories.”

How the analysis worked

Caraballo said she used The New York Times’ own public databases to identify stories about transgender issues, including articles the paper had tagged under transgender-related subjects. She then retrieved the text of most of those stories from archived web pages and analyzed them using the same set of questions for each article. Three different AI models reviewed the stories for patterns in framing, tone, and sourcing, and Caraballo said she also used a traditional text analysis tool to check the results.

“This wasn’t just that I asked ChatGPT to tell me how biased The New York Times is,” Caraballo said. “That’s not what happened here.”

Related: The New York Times rarely quotes transgender people in trans stories

The 2022 turning point

The analysis identifies three broad eras in Times coverage: a “tipping point” period from 2014 to 2017, a quieter and more neutral period from 2018 to 2021, and a marked shift beginning in 2022, when coverage of transgender issues increased and became more centered on medical skepticism, youth gender-affirming care, and political conflict, Caraballo explained.

She said the Times’ coverage of transgender youth and gender-affirming care became the clearest example of the change. She pointed to the 2022 New York Times Magazine story titled “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” subsequent reporting on puberty blockers, and health and science coverage as key in the shift.

“What you end up having is this disparity where the legislation that gets passed, hundreds and hundreds of bills across dozens of states, just gets pushed to the back of the newspaper, doesn’t get push notifications, barely gets any really major coverage,” Caraballo said. “And then the front page, the stuff that gets push notifications, the stuff that’s all at the top, that’s the stuff questioning gender-affirming care for trans youth, which is what they were mostly trying to ban in all these states.”

The data site says the analysis found four major changes. Protective framing fell, opponents of transgender rights became more prominent, conflict framing increased, and coverage of health care changed most sharply, according to Caraballo’s analysis.

Related: New York Times continues to fail on trans issues one year after demands made

The Times rejects the criticism

In a statement to The Advocate, Rhoades Ha said the paper has “reported deeply for years on the prejudice and attacks that transgender people face” while also helping readers understand “the questions and debates over trans rights and medical care.”

“We reject any suggestion that our coverage is biased or anti-trans; we report on gender identity and related issues fully and fairly and approach our coverage with curiosity and sensitivity, as we do with every story,” Rhoades Ha said.

She said Caraballo’s analysis “shows a fundamental misunderstanding of our journalism and how it works,” arguing that such studies “sample words, sentences, and headlines in isolation and ignore the expertise, facts, and context that journalists and editors bring to each story.”

Rhoades Ha also disputed criticism that the Times fails to include transgender voices in its coverage.

“When a story is focused on trans issues and people, we include the perspectives of trans people and always try to have their voices quoted in the piece,” she said. “However, stories that briefly mention a topic may not have a voice from a specific group.”

She said the volume of Times coverage reflects real-world developments, “such as legal issues, medical studies and proposed legislation.”

“Ours is the work of reporters, not advocates,” Rhoades Ha said. “Each week our newsroom publishes more than 2,000 original pieces of journalism. Journalism, when it is rigorously independent and fair-minded, can provide an antidote to the misinformation on which intolerance thrives. Readers can see for themselves the depth of our coverage on gender identity.”

Rhoades Ha also pointed The Advocate to several recent Times stories as examples of that coverage, including reporting on a Kansas lawsuit over transgender people’s driver’s licenses, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear transgender sports cases, Colorado’s response to Trump administration pressure over gender-affirming care, and the Trump administration’s withholding of paychecks from transgender service members affected by the military ban.

Trans voices pushed aside

Caraballo's findings build on years of criticism from LGBTQ+ advocates, transgender journalists, and media watchdogs who say the Times often writes about transgender people without centering them as sources.

As The Advocate reported in May, an Assigned Media analysis found that the Times produced more transgender-related coverage than any other outlet examined but was the least likely to quote transgender people or trans advocacy organizations in stories primarily focused on transgender issues. The report reviewed coverage from January 1 to April 25 across 10 major news outlets. Assigned Media found that the Times published 60 news stories centered mainly on transgender issues during that period, but only 12 included quotes from transgender people or representatives of transgender advocacy organizations, a rate of 20 percent.

The Assigned Media report found that the Times published 214 print stories that included one of the project’s transgender-related keywords, compared with 130 by The Associated Press and 110 by The Washington Post. When Assigned Media narrowed its review to news stories whose main subject concerned transgender issues, the Times still led with 60 stories. But it ranked last among the outlets reviewed in the percentage of those stories that quoted a transgender person.

“Among the major news outlets we tracked, the Times had by far the most stories mentioning the trans community, and the lowest percentage of stories that quoted a trans person,” Assigned Media editor Evan Urquhart wrote.

The pattern mirrors findings from a 2024 analysis by GLAAD and Media Matters, which The Advocate previously reported on. This analysis found that the Times failed to quote any out transgender person in 66 percent of its articles on anti-trans legislation over a one-year period. The report reviewed Times stories from February 15, 2023, to February 15, 2024, and found at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans legislation in their headlines or lead paragraphs. It also found that 18 percent of those stories included anti-trans misinformation in quotes without adequate fact-checking or context.

“The paper of record has an obligation to present its readers with the full human toll of the anti-trans legislative assault,” Ari Drennen, LGBTQ program director at Media Matters, told The Advocate at the time. “Trans people are more than theoretical curiosities to be debated from afar. Each and every anti-trans bill affects living, breathing people whose voices deserve to be heard and whose stories deserve to be told.”

Related: For a trans California senior, it’s a track meet. For The New York Times, it’s a debate

GLAAD says the harm continues

GLAAD said Caraballo’s findings confirm what the organization has argued for years: that the Times’ coverage has not merely failed to include transgender people, but has elevated anti-trans sources without sufficient context.

“The analysis confirms a demonstrable shift in The Times’ coverage of transgender people and topics that falsely legitimized anti-trans pseudoscience groups and inaccurately equated them as on par with medical expertise and lived experience of transgender people and families,” a GLAAD spokesperson told The Advocate on Tuesday. “The Times fueled a phony conflict by failing to inform readers about sources’ anti-LGBTQ history and lack of expertise, and ginned up a fake debate that continues to spread harm.”

The spokesperson said the problem persists “in every story where the Times fails to transparently identify anti-trans pseudoscience sources” and in stories that describe gender-affirming care as “the subject of a fierce debate.”

“This statement is false,” the spokesperson said. “Health care for transgender people and youth is mainstream, best practice care supported by every major medical association.”

GLAAD also praised Caraballo’s work, calling the analysis “just the latest in a long line of work from Alejandra Caraballo that betters the trans community and all of us.”

“It’s past time for The New York Times to strengthen standards in news and opinion to ensure that relevant transgender voices, facts, and expertise are included in every Times piece about transgender people,” the spokesperson said.

Caraballo’s report argues that the issue extends beyond sourcing. It says the Times increasingly moved away from stories about transgender people’s lives, culture, arts, and ordinary experiences, and toward stories about legislation, lawsuits, medical controversies, and political conflicts.

“The kinds of things that humanize and normalize trans existence got cut down,” Caraballo said. “There are finite resources at the Times, and it is an either-or for how they prioritize things.”

Related: Instead of reporting on actual news, the New York Times goes after trans people again

The Times has defended its coverage

The Times has previously defended its coverage. During the company’s annual shareholders meeting in April, The Advocate reported, a parent of a transgender teenager asked publisher A.G. Sulzberger what responsibility the paper bears when its reporting is cited to justify laws and policies targeting transgender people.

“This reporting is deeply concerning to me as the mom of a trans teen,” the parent said. “What steps are you taking to be accountable to concerns of the trans community, readers, and shareholders?”

Sulzberger responded that newsroom leaders had engaged extensively with critics and concluded the paper’s coverage “has indeed been fair and comprehensive,” a view he said he shares. He described the coverage as “incredibly rigorously reported and edited” and “respectful of the people we’re covering and sensitive to the moment.” He also argued that readers “couldn’t read any of that and think that The New York Times is anti-trans.”

A spokesperson later told The Advocate that Sulzberger had “addressed [the mother’s] question fully.”

GLAAD told The Advocate then that the Times had failed to take responsibility for coverage that the organization said had been cited by the Trump administration, the Supreme Court, and lawmakers seeking restrictions on transgender rights.

Why the framing matters

The paper’s coverage has appeared in legal and political fights over transgender rights. In United States v. Skrmetti, where the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors in June 2025, Justice Clarence Thomas cited Times reporting in a concurring opinion, arguing that courts should be skeptical of medical consensus on the subject. Times reporting has also appeared in amicus briefs and legal filings from the right-wing Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a coalition of Republican-led states in the 11th Circuit, and the Family Research Council.

Caraballo said that influence is precisely why the shift matters.

“The Times coverage doesn’t stay on the page,” she said. “It affects society.”

Related: New York Times fails to include trans voices in coverage, say GLAAD, Media Matters

Caraballo acknowledged limits to the analysis. She said LLM classifiers should not be treated as definitive judgments of any individual story. The strength of the project, she argued, is in the pattern across thousands of stories and three separate models.

“I’m not looking at any individual story,” she said. “I’m looking at the aggregate, and the trend lines are clear.”

She said the broader pattern shows editorial choices that shaped how readers understood transgender rights at the same time Republican lawmakers and conservative legal groups escalated attacks on transgender health care, school inclusion, and public life.

“When the first articles were passed, like ‘The Battle Over Gender Therapy’ in 2022 with Emily Bazelon, at the time, I think there were five states that had banned gender-affirming care,” Caraballo said. “Now there are 27 that have bans, and the Trump administration is basically waging a whole-of-government effort to go after these kids.”

Caraballo said better coverage would require more attention to power, money, and organized political strategy behind anti-trans campaigns, not just the surface-level appearance of two sides in conflict. She also said newsrooms should publish more stories in which transgender people are not treated as a problem to be solved, but as people living ordinary lives.

“I don’t view it as a question of being biased toward trans people,” Caraballo said. “I think it’s being biased toward having values-driven journalism that is rooted in liberal democracy.”

Editor’s note: After this story was published, a spokesperson for The New York Times sent a statement reacting to the piece. The article has been updated to include the paper's response.