One Major Issue with the NYT Trans Coverage

The New York Time's article on schools reporting gender identity suffers from a major flaw

In 2010 a Seattle high school health clinic gave a 15-yr-old student a pass to leave and arranged a taxi for her to get an abortion. The mother was irate and spoke to the press. But under Washington law what the school did was perfectly legal. It’s one of several states that don’t require parental notification or consent for minors to get abortions.

This context of schools already concealing major medical decisions from parents was left out of the New York Times’ recent story about kids transitioning in school and parents not being notified. They erroneously framed the issue. “Courts have ruled that under the Fourteenth Amendment, parents get to make medical and mental health decisions for their children…” they wrote.

Unfortunately, because of this framing many will interpret the NYT article as having caught schools secretly transitioning children. It’s the opposite of what’s happening, however.

Minors can consent to treatment for things like substance abuse, pregnancy, mental health and STI’s without parental consent or notification. And schools conceal these matters from parents.

In New Jersey a minor 13 and above can be receiving full-blown medical treatment for HIV without the doctor even notifying parents let alone getting their consent. In California it’s 12 years old. Schools could conceal this from parents if they knew.

In Alamaba, state law, “allows a minor of any age to consent to services for problems related to alcohol or drugs without parental consent.” A13-yr-old child could be using cocaine in Alabama, and by law, parents wouldn’t be notified, either by counselors or school officials.

The New York Times wrote in their piece, “…The judge acknowledged that ‘it is disconcerting’ that school administrators might ‘actively hide information from parents about something of importance regarding their child.’”

This sounds alarming if you don’t already know that schools routinely hide important information from parents. The reader would see this issue differently if they knew schools hid student drug use, mental health, pregnancy or STIs. But the New York Times completely leaves this context out.

The article opens with, “Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name scrawled at the top.”

Another alarmist framing of the issue given our current climate. It spins critics into a frenzy. How could schools hide this! How DARE they? What is the LGBTQ agenda doing to our schools!? They are grooming our kids! Thanks to the New York Times we now know their secret practices!

You have to put Jessica Bradshaw’s surprise discovery of her child’s gender in context. Her kid could be bipolar, have had an abortion, and using drugs and the school could actively hide it from her. Not revealing her child’s gender identity is merely an offshoot of current policies. Certainly, schools debate all of these policies individually and decide for themselves, but it’s not some gross aberration for schools to keep their students gender confidential.

It’s not the schools fault that a parent doesn’t know their own child is trans, or had an abortion. This has to do with parenting, not school policies that protect a students privacy.

Reporting on trans issues doesn’t happen in vacuum. There are powerful narratives that trans critical voices are waiting to embolden. “Schools secretly transitioning kids” plays right into them.

We are constantly told that what’s happening in gender medicine is markedly worse than other fields. It’s one of the biggest medical scandals of the century says Leor Sapir. There’s a hidden agenda, a terrible motive, or an evil scheme at play. Reporters should be aware of this backdrop when writing about trans issues because when the same thing happens in a related, but non-trans field there is no moral panic.

None of this is to say there aren’t valid concerns in transgender healthcare, or that schools wrestling with students gender identities shouldn’t be reported.

But when the New York Times lobs a decontextualized story like this into the world it mainly fuels conspiratorial paranoia. It’s the trans critical voices who share it widely and use it to embolden their narratives. See? We told you they are grooming our kids!

Even the title of the article, When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know feels alarmist and plays into the narrative that schools are brainwashing kids with LGBTQ propaganda.

Two ways to frame the story: Schools are secretly transitioning kids and concealing it from parents vs. Schools protect students privacy on mental health and pregnancy, and now grapple with gender identity.

How could the NYT leave out the wider context in which schools make similar difficult decisions about when to notify parents? It seems irresponsible.

This has nothing to do with the morality of any specific policy. You can think it’s wrong for high schools to aid students in getting abortions and conceal it from their parents. You can think all schools should inform parents when a student transitions. But this is about how the issue is reported on and what narratives it fuels by erroneously framing it.

In reality this issue is way more boring and less newsworthy than the New York Times reveals. Schools routinely hide major information from parents. Trans issues are just one of many dilemmas they’ve grappled with. And the way they’re handling it is no different or more scandalous than how they’ve dealt with parental notification of other issues of major consequence.

In conclusion, it’s not fair reporting to single out transitioning and gender identity in school as a separate, more contentious issue from what’s already occurring. Without crucial context it can be seen as a nefarious scheme by the LGBTQ movement to hide their agenda.