The Unraveling of the New York Times

February 16, 2025

I cancelled my New York Times subscription in 2020, after I entered a Washington DC metro station and saw a Times digital ad encouraging Harry Potter fans to “imagine their world without its creator.” At around the same time, the Times published an article with the title, “Harry Potter Fans Reimagine Their World Without Its Creator: A slice of fandom divides itself from J.K. Rowling.”

That article was published on June 12, 2020, precisely two days after an essay appeared on J.K. Rowling’s website, titled, “J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking Out on Sex and Gender Issues.” In her essay, she said:

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.

…

But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.

The Times piece about Harry Potter fans “imagining their world without its creator” quotes numerous Harry Potter fans expressing their emotions about Rowling’s alleged “transphobia.” Needless to say, they weren’t happy about it. But what they were really upset at her for was standing up for women and girls as a sex class.

Incidentally, the article contains this paragraph, which makes me laugh:

In December [2019], she made her personal views more clear when she expressed enthusiastic support for a British researcher who filed a lawsuit against her former employer, claiming that she had been discriminated against for her “gender critical” views (i.e. her stance on the fixity of one’s sex at birth).

The “British researcher” in question has a name, which as most people now know is Maya Forstater. Maya had essentially gotten herself into a heap of trouble by saying on X that sex is real and that a man who wears a dress is still a man. This, of course, was J.K. Rowling’s expression of support for those sentiments:

So by that time, I had had it with the New York Times. Cancel J.K. Rowling? I don’t think so.

However, I resubscribed at some point. I did so because the Times had started saying one or two sensible things about topics related to sex and gender.

In April of 2022, it ran an opinion piece by Ross Douthat called, “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.” That piece is a very careful and admittedly cautious attempt to offer three ways to make sense of the political discourse around “trans.” Douthat didn’t come out and take a position about any of it, but he sort-of wondered out loud where mainstream liberals stand on the topic and acknowledged that there are feminist concerns “about the possible erasure of the biological sex differences that have traditionally been the basis of feminist analysis.” He stated that “This is a practical as well as a philosophical issue, manifest in the debates about whether transgender women belong in women’s sports or women’s prisons.” He also acknowledged that there exists a leftist gay-rights objection to the idea that sex isn’t real.

Later in 2022, the Times ran an article titled, “A Vanishing Word in Abortion Debate: ‘Women’” with the subtitle, “Progressive groups and medical organizations have adopted inclusive language, which has led to terms like ‘pregnant people’ and ‘chestfeeding.’” The piece is a stinging rebuke of the trend in progressive politics to pretend that women don’t exist as a coherent category of people. It quotes Ti-Grace Atkinson, who is a staunch radical feminist from the second wave era. The author described her as being “wearied by battles over gender and language, which she said are pushed by transgender activists and eager progressives … distant from the urgent needs of women, who make up 50.8 percent of the population” and quoted her as saying, “I want to see material change. Taking away our reproductive rights is going to sharpen the battle. This is about women and our rights; it’s not a language game.”

In November that same year, it published an article about puberty blockers titled, “They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?” In it, it acknowledged that “concerns are growing among some medical professionals about the consequences of the drugs.”

None of those articles went as far as many of us would have liked, but they seemed to be steps in the right direction. Many of us thought in 2022 that perhaps the Times had seen the light and would start to report even more candidly about the many consequences of pretending that sex isn’t real.

For now, that hope is gone. Read on to learn why.

Paid-only content follows. If you are not already a paid subscriber and would like access to content that delves deeper into the movement to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex, please consider becoming one today.