Feb 14 2013
On Transgender Healthcare, NYT Reports Tree, Ignores Forest
By Julie Hollar
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/02/14/on-transgender-healthcare-nyt-reports-tree-ignores-forest/The New York Times reports that in the last few years, several elite U.S. universities have begun to cover sex reassignment surgery and/or hormones for transgender students. On the one hand, it's great that they're reporting news like this, and after years of extremely disrespectful coverage of transgender issues, it feels like a victory that their "balance" is limited to noting that "the idea still seems radical to plenty of people." On the other hand, not a single trans-identified person is quoted.
But what I really want to highlight here is how this kind of article utterly fails to connect some really big dots, leaving readers with a very narrow picture of reality.
This story as framed by the Times is, of course, extremely important to the students who will take advantage of these universities' policy changes. But the arguably much more important big-picture story here that the Times obscures is about how economic disparities get magnified in our society: Only those transgender youth privileged enough to get into schools like Princeton or Stanford will have access to full health coverage that will enable them to align their gender presentation with their gender identity–which can have important reverberations down the line for their job and life prospects.
