Study claims New York Times helped create political controversy over trans rights

A new data analysis has claimed that coverage of trans issues from the New York Times helped to create the political controversy surrounding trans people and their rights.

The study was penned by civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo and published in The Dissident on 19 June. It analysed 3,242 articles that were published between 2014 and 2026 by the New York Times.

“The New York Times changed how it covers trans people,” Caraballo wrote in her analysis. “It covers us very differently than it did a decade ago, not in what it reports but in how. For years I believed that and couldn’t prove it.

“So I analysed 12 years of the paper’s coverage on transgender issues, every article I could find, and scored all of it the same way,” she continued. “The change in coverage is real, and you can check it yourself.”

Caraballo shared that she used the publisher’s own public database to search for stories about trans issues and retrieved the text from archived web pages. She then used three different AI models to analyse the stories and identify patterns in framing, tone and sourcing.

“This wasn’t just that I asked ChatGPT to tell me how biased The New York Times is,” she told The Advocate on 22 June. “That’s not what happened here.”

Caraballo found four key changes in the results: protective framing fell, with coverage drifting towards neutral and then negative; voices traded places, with more and more trans voices being replaced by opponents; language around controversy increased; and stories drifted more towards medical issues.

In her research, Caraballo identified a “tipping point” in trans coverage from 2018 to 2021. Then the news source moved away from rights-based framing in 2022 towards stories that were more sceptical of the trans community, like with their coverage of gender-affirming care for trans youths.

The new style of coverage stirred up conflict and controversy, and gave less prominence to trans people as individuals.

“This isn’t about any individual story,” Caraballo said. “This is about the whole corpus of how they’ve covered trans issues over time.”

She said she took on the project because the Times had repeatedly defended its coverage of trans issues after years of criticism from trans writers, journalists and advocacy groups.

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

Caraballo also identified a key shift in coverage, which came in 2022 with a story from the New York Times Magazine titled ‘The Battle Over Gender Therapy’, before subsequent reporting on puberty blockers, health and science.

“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 told The Advocate.

“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 New York Times has denied that its coverage is either anti-trans or biased.

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