Trans journalist and former New York Times editor Billie Jean Sweeney recently revealed the deliberate strategy behind the paper’s tidal wave of anti-trans stories, an effort she said came all the way from the top and “legitimized” and “mainstreamed” misinformation.

In an interview with Trans News Network, she alleged the misconduct began in 2022, when Joe Kahn became executive editor. Before then, Sweeney explained, the paper didn’t have particularly great trans coverage, but there also wasn’t a “sustained, single-minded focus on promoting disinformation and legitimizing bias,” as there started to be around that time.

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When Kahn took the helm, Sweeney said the Times released a series of anti-trans stories that she now realizes were “intended to win prizes.”

They “challenged every aspect of being trans,” she said. “It even challenged small things like gender-inclusive language and somehow made a case that undermined women and abortion rights issues. Which, of course, is a stretch.”

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For example, a November 2022 cover story hinges on what the authors describe as “emerging evidence of potential harm” related to the use of puberty blockers for transgender youth. But health experts say that the data referenced in the Times‘ reporting comes to a different conclusion – which led many to question the motives behind the piece.

In January 2023, the Times posted a story about the frustrations some parents feel when their children are allowed to socially transition at school without their knowledge. In a long Instagram post, lawyer and activist Chase Strangio – who has been critical of the Times’ reporting on trans issues since at least 2016 – ripped the paper to shreds for getting so much wrong.

Sweeney didn’t take this lying down, though. She said she wrote several notes to the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, slamming both the anti-trans coverage and the fact that trans reporters and sources were rarely consulted (One 2024 report found that the paper failed to get comment from a transgender person in 66% of its stories regarding anti-transgender legislation).

And she wasn’t the only one.

In early 2023, hundreds of New York Times contributors, LGBTQ+ rights organizations, and community leaders wrote two separate open letters berating the paper’s anti-trans pieces. One letter from over 180 contributors pointed out that over a period of eight months, the Times had devoted 15,000 words of front-page coverage to debating the merits of gender-affirming care for trans youth.

“The Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources,” the letter stated.

The letter concluded, “A tiny percentage of the population is trans, and an even smaller percentage of those people face the type of conflict the Times is so intent on magnifying. There is no rapt reporting on the thousands of parents who simply love and support their children, or on the hardworking professionals at the New York Times enduring a workplace made hostile by bias—a period of forbearance that ends today.”

Sweeney said the paper’s leaders responded to the dissent by scheduling meetings with trans staffers. “In hindsight, I look at this very cynically,” she said, “but at the time, I hoped maybe this is something we can build on. You look back on these things and think you were kind of naive, that I actually thought they were genuine.”

She did not receive an invitation to the first meeting until the day it took place, and she was out of the office for the second. “Take that for what it was,” she said. “I was one of the most outspoken people.” Sweeney said she now sees these meetings as nothing more than “an internal public relations campaign” and “a way they could say that they reached out.”

But then, leadership took a series of moves that told Sweeney they had no intention of changing course.

“There was this militant anti-union group formed, within the union, that were pro-management in a lot of their opinions. Including trans coverage, which really wasn’t a strictly union issue. But they’re a small group, they’re militant about their [anti-trans] views.”

And in late 2023, the paper instituted a new policy that Sweeney said “essentially shut down all avenues for internal discussion.” It was then that she decided it was time to wrap up her time there.

“Up until that time, they didn’t like it, but they allowed people to raise questions, they allowed people to offer critical views,” she said. From there, she said things only got worse as the 2024 election ramped up and Donald Trump spearheaded one of the most anti-trans campaigns in American history.

She said Sulzberger made it clear that the Times would treat “both sides as having equal weight in terms of factual basis, in terms of their viewpoints.” In March 2024, she said he also gave a speech praising the Times for “protecting” young people with its stories on trans youth.

When the U.K. released its controversial and anti-trans Cass review, which trans health experts have denounced, Sweeney said the Times focused exclusively on its findings and ignored several other big studies from countries like France, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany that concluded the exact opposite.

All of this, Sweeney alleged, was coming from the top three people: Sulzberger, Kahn, and managing editor Carolyn Ryan.

“I think [Sulzberger] saw this as a political project, that he could take a stance that the hard right would like, that the Trump campaign might like. Whether it was an explicit agreement [with the Trump campaign], probably not, but this was coverage he knew the right wing would like.”

“And he pursued that, because he thought it was a position — spreading anti-trans discrimination, spreading anti-trans disinformation — was something he could push and most readers would say ‘well I don’t know much about it.’ He thought it was something there’d be no cost for [to the paper’s reputation]. There probably wasn’t any cost to it, from that view, except for trans people and young trans people especially.”

Sweeney said the effects of the anti-trans coverage have been huge. “I think they put a stamp of legitimacy on medical falsehoods. They also legitimized anti-trans hate, really.”

This summer, trans journalist Samantha Riedel penned an op-ed saying the Times was partly to blame for 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.”

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,” she wrote, “and one of the major parties we can thank is The New York Times.”

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