The Locusts & The Times

A paranoid reading

Readers of the The New York Times on September 2, 1979 were greeted with a stern warning:

The story, written with no byline, details the “strapping, powerfully built” individuals—“the largest, about 6 feet 6 inches in heels” —drawing the ire of residents and building managers at the Manhattan Plaza apartments on W 42nd Street. This “outpost of middle-class, subsidized housing” provides “a stable base for a marginal neighborhood now in transition.” But, as the Times details, this hamlet on the island has been beset by the “transvestite prostitutes rising notoriety and visibility.”

As many a grimy action movie, dimestore pulp novel, and evening news broadcast would have told you at the time, this was a Manhattan in decline but not yet fallen, still an oasis of artistic subversion and financial excess but not yet besotted by AIDS (a crisis the Times infamously ignored for years). The city’s famed debt crisis and soaring crime rates sent many of its wealthiest residents elsewhere while feeding narratives of declension and moral decline. Combined with an increasingly visible queer scene and sex industry, the city was a ripe target for pearl-clutching nightmares.

And few figures loom as large in those nightmares as the transvestites. Kay Gabriel, in her 2022 book A Queen In Bucks County, laments “the tendency of writers living and dead to use transsexuals as the window dressing for social decay, a metonym for public space seductively in crisis…dicking around in the afterimage of modernism, in which transsexuals always mean something else.” The trans sex worker is regarded by these writers as voiceless and needless, not subjects but objects.

“Let the motherfuckers further consider that their metaphor might come unsexily to life,“ writes Gabriel, “and living, need housing in that glamorous, impoverished city, and testify to something other than an origin story that could be blurbed as important.”

To what the transvestite prostitutes of the 1979 New York Times story might have testified we’ll sadly never know because the Times appears to make no effort to talk to them (meaning we also have no idea if they actually were transvestites or prostitutes, much less both). We get an idea of why the Times finds their presence newsworthy, however, from the Manhattanites disturbed by it.

“They're like locusts,” said Rodney Kirk, managing director of Manhattan Plaza, the West Side apartment complex. “They light around a car even if it's moving — four, five or six at a time.” The problem has intensified with the hot weather. It is a volatile situation, for many of these night‐prowling prostitutes are transvestites — unsettling in an area that is itself something of a new frontier

Before we’ve even reached the third paragraph, we find the Times and their interview subjects regarding these people as a pestilence. Not compared to roaches or rats—two creatures New York City has more familiarity with—but to the swarming, devouring insects of the Old Testament, faceless as individuals but holding power in their collective hunger. And like any infestation, the only solution is extermination:

The development's residents held a meeting recently with Borough President Andrew J. Stein of Manhattan, ChelseaClinton community leaders and police and city officials.

Confronted with what seemed an endemic problem, Mr. Stein said at one point: “You know what they did in China during the 50's to solve the addict problem? They just shot everyone who was an addict. Now, is there any way we could do something like that?”

caption...

The last decade of trans visibility has often felt like a marketing rollout for a new product, a rebranding effort to introduce transgender people as the bold new frontier in liberal democracy’s inevitable march forward. It’s a cliche of writing about trans people to use TIME Magazine’s 2014 declaration of a trans “tipping point” as just that—trans people’s collective coming out cotillion and turning point for discussions about us, our bodies, and our rights.

In truth, however, trans and intersex people—crossdressers, female impersonators, fairies, transvestites, transsexuals, ladyboys, bulldaggers, sissies, genderqueers, and all manner of gender outlaws—have been under public scrutiny for as long as newsprint has allowed for it. Braided with racist and xenophobic anxieties about racial demographics, reproduction, and shifting gender roles overall, gender fluidity and the people who exhibit it have a long and extensive history of inspiring outrage, fear, and mockery in the media.

A consequence of the collective amnesia obscuring the history of trans people’s existence before 2014 is the shared amnesia obscuring transphobia’s existence before 2014. The shifting politics of trans visibility caught many figures even in progressive media off-guard. Jokes, lies, and stereotypes that were widely accepted just a few years prior were pushed into a light that decided, seemingly overnight, that trans people might be deserving of some dignity after all.

Mistakes were made, apologies soon followed, and starting around 2016 the news media began to take seriously some basic guidelines about respecting trans people’s autonomy and identities. While hardly perfectly followed, stylebooks were updated to reflect a new vocabulary—ask subjects their pronouns, not the shape of their genitalia. Use the name they live with rather than the one they were born with. Out: transsexualism, sex change, born female. In: transgender, gender-affirming, assigned female at birth.

And this is how much of the news media began to encounter transgender people—not as people with needs, interests, and perspectives but as first and foremost a list of rules. Not helping matters was the paucity of trans journalists in most national newsrooms, meaning that most reporters and editors encountered trans people not as individuals deserving of subjectivity but as a swarm of criticism on Twitter. While some outlets genuinely have taken significant steps towards addressing their own biases, others just got better at hiding all the ways they were failing all along.

In the popular Netflix documentary Disclosure, a cast of transgender actors and filmmakers walk audiences through Hollywood and the entertainment industry’s own role in establishing that consensus. But that story is far, far larger than just that single cultural industry. For as long as there has been mass media, it has been used to spread the lie that trans life is impossible, and that ongoing project has found one of its boldest shields in The New York Times.

Tom Scocca at Popula has a helpful tally of the Times media coverage in just the last year inciting their readers’ concern and fear over transgender youth and their health care. WPATH and USPATH published a thorough rebuke of the Times front-page coverage of puberty blockers. Over 1,200 New York Times contributors published an open letter to the paper’s standards desk laying out their own criticisms of its recent coverage on trans rights, a major show of force to which the Times management chose to respond with all the thoughtfulness of a semi-truck’s windshield wiper smearing the corpse of a mayfly.

Most trans people, I find, are very keen media critics. A life spent navigating spaces designed around our exclusion has left many of us with a well-trained eye for language and narratives that deny us our subjectivity. We are used to our own perspectives being regarded as flawed and maybe even deceptive, forced to navigate this weaponized mistrust everywhere from the doctor’s office to interactions with law enforcement to the family Thanksgiving table. Because we challenge so much of what society tells itself about gender and identity, any word from us is regarded as a threat to the consensus—socially constructed and institutionally enforced—that assigns gender to you at birth and again and again and again across your life.

To further cloak themselves from that “threat,” institutions enforcing it learned the rules of respectability and adopted new language and symbols. But these gestures are often propaganda in their own right, assuring a cosmopolitan liberal audience that society’s progress is inevitable, that even a people as bizarre and challenged as trans people can be folded into the moral arc that surely, someday, will bend towards justice, and all you need to do to bend that arc is like and subscribe. It can take perverse forms, ranging from the rainbow bullets offered up by the Marine Corps or the recent Trans Day of Remembrance elegy from, of all people, the commissioner of the NYPD. Conservatives see these symbolic gestures and mistakenly call these institutions “captured”; I see them and call them marketing.

The Times, too, has engaged in this project. Starting around 2015, it began to educate its audiences on some of the realities of transgender life, including a timeline of trans history marking many seminal events and figures without noting their own failure to cover them as they happened or lived (One can’t help but notice these look-backs are published under the “Opinion” section, as if a basic list of who-what-when-where historical facts about us were on an equal objective footing to, say, a demand for the military to be deployed against protesters).

Take a tour, however, through the history of the Times usage of words like “transvestite,” “tranny,” and “transsexual,” and you’ll find more similarities than differences between the story it was telling about us from the 1960s forward and its coverage in the present day. Take, for example, Jane Brody’s series on the rise and fall of trans medicine in the 1970s—even then trans people seem to be spreading in alarming numbers

This was followed by a celebratory 1973 story of a “cure” for transsexuality, where the Times waits until the 16th paragraph to describe the horrifying maltreatment this case study of a 17-year-old entailed:

In this case, the boy was first conditioned to stand, walk and sit in a more masculine manner, then taught to speak with a deeper voice and less feminine inflections. The therapists then tried to change his sexual fantasies, lavishly praising the patient's successful substitution of female for male figures.

Using so‐called aversive techniques, such as mild electrical shocks, the therapists were then able to diminish his sexual response to pictures of nude men. The successive treatments were carried out over a 10‐month period.

When, in 1979, Johns Hopkins University made the decision to shutter its gender clinic based on infamously-flawed research—asserting surgeries held “no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation” and failed to magically transform their recipients into proper models of heterosexuality—the Times gave Brody’s report top billing.

Notably published just a month after the paper warned of the scourge of Manhattan’s transvestite prostitutes, Brody’s report failed to talk to a single patient or wonder what metric of “success” these doctors might be using to judge them. It was then routine practice at gender clinics to refuse care to patients based on their ability to assimilate into a heterosexual lifestyle or pass as cisgender to the subjective eye of the doctor. One wonders what this group of oft-misunderstood patients might have to say about their autonomy being thrown overboard in defense of gender norms by the medical establishment, which closed not just the Hopkins clinic but many more across the country, stunting progress for trans health and, surely, trans people for a generation.

Brody, for her part, wrote for the Times for another four decades, receiving a fond farewell last year and gratitude for “nudging us to be better.”

You’ll also find some rhyming notes in the first instance I can find of criticism against the paper on behalf of trans people, stemming from an above-the-fold 1995 feature by future Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie LeDuff graced with a headline that’s aged like a ripe carcass:

LeDuff recounts the squalid lives of homeless trans sex workers alongside a large photo of the “shantytown sorority of crack-addicted prostitutes, buried in filth and refuse on an abandoned Hudson River pier between West 12th and West 14th Streets. It is a gray mix of makeup and dollhouses, shadows and sex.” He writes of these women (misgendered throughout) as mere oddities decorating urban life, saying relatively little about their criminalization or what they might demand from local officials to improve their conditions.

A few days after this report was published, the Times printed a letter to the editor in response:

I found the July 16 article "The Shantytown of the He-She's" disturbing. Members of the transgender community do not wish to be referred to as "he-she's," and those who identify as female do not refer to themselves as "he."

In addition, I found it unfortunate that in describing the living conditions of the homeless transgender women living on the piers there was so much focus on the squalid and degrading aspects of their lives and no focus whatsoever on the bigotry and hatred with which they must cope every day.

As program manager of SafeSpace, a day program for homeless and runaway youth, I am a constant witness to the fact that our transgender clients do not have equal access to economic benefits, housing, medical treatment, substance abuse treatment and many other needed services.

CARL SICILIANO

Manhattan

True, you’ll also find in the “TimesMachine” a 1970 profile of Holly Woodlawn as a Warhol acolyte, a relatively heartfelt Styles piece on the impact of AIDS on New York City’s ballroom scene, and a feature on Riki Ann Wilchins in 1999.

Most damning from my perspective, however, is what you won’t find. You won’t find any mention of the decades of legal victories in the 20th century that rendered most of the country’s bans on crossdressing unconstitutional. You won’t find a mention of the First International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy in 1992 or the first transgender lobby day in the halls of Congress led by Phyllis Frye in 1995. Nor will you find mention of the passage of the first nondiscrimination law to cover gender identity in Minneapolis in 1975 or Minnesota’s groundbreaking statewide ordinance in 1993.

There are no obituaries following the deaths of Marsha P. Johnson, Lou Sullivan, or Connie Norman, and Sylvia Rivera’s death in 2002 is only marked by a paid notice. You won’t find coverage of the police riots at Cooper’s Donuts or Compton’s Cafeteria, and the Stonewall rebellion itself would only appear under the characteristic headline “Four Policemen Hurt in Village Raid.”

The first mention I can find of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a veteran of that time and place, is in a 2015 story about Roland Emmerich’s much-hated Stonewall film. Leslie Feinberg wouldn’t be mentioned until their death in 2014; Monica Roberts and Lorena Borjas appear nowhere in the Times archive until their deaths in 2020.

This willing participation in our mockery and selective silence on our fight for basic dignity was hardly specific to the Times—one imagines a tour through the archives of most any media institution would find a collection of as many if not worse examples. And I detail all of this not because I’m demanding anyone’s head or even an apology. I do not charge the present staff or leadership of the Times with the choices of writers and editors (perhaps) long since gone.

But institutions, absent the people within them, have a curious habit of maintaining momentum toward certain goals and practices, even over the course of decades. And what is clear is this dismissive attitude to transgender people’s perspectives or needs is no recent development attributable to new leadership or institutional capture, and the Times stands above its peers in the management’s insistence that nothing needs to change at all.

In their reaction to two separate recent letters, one from LGBTQ advocacy organizations led by GLAAD and another from a growing list of contributors and staffers, Times management has repeatedly decried the latter and its signatories as stained by the influence of “activists,” deploying the term to diminish the perspectives of anyone who challenges the institution’s credibility or questions their own incentives and influences—perhaps especially if those people are also reporters, editors, and professional colleagues with decades of experience themselves.

This use of “activists” as epithet can also be found in much of the recent Times coverage around trans rights and health care that has inspired this backlash. In the much-maligned story on puberty blockers, they cite “transgender activists” who “prodded pediatric endocrinologists to adopt the practice for their patients.” In her feature story on “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” Emily Bazelon cites unnamed “activists” throughout as somehow having undue influence on medical standards about their own health care (one wonders what she would make of Larry Kramer and ACT UP). In her glowing profile of hate groups trying to force teachers to out trans students against their will, Katie Baker notes (more than halfway through the story) “detractors have called the groups transphobic, because some want to ban gender-affirming care for minors, or have amplified the voices of people who call transgender advocates ‘groomers.’”

And we plague the opinion pages, infecting the body politic as surely as transvestite prostitutes lay siege on an upscale apartment complex. See Pamela Paul’s concern for the well-being of a billionaire IP magnate (targeted by “a number of powerful transgender rights activists”) or Pamela Paul’s concern for her ability to misgender pregnant trans people (for which she blames “a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations“) or Pamela Paul’s concern for her romanticized vision of being a queer kid in the 1970s (in which she accuses “some educators” of inventing “gender identity, gender role, gender performance, and gender expression”).

Brushed aside in most of these stories are the names of these activists or any in-depth discussion of the arguments they make, let alone the evidence they might marshall in defense of said arguments. Even a recent report speaking with trans activists about the declining state of our rights and the rise of extremist violence against us has those fears reduced to an affect, as if having our health care criminalized and being shot by Nazis was merely a matter of how we “feel.”

As the contributor letter noted, this handwaving attitude towards transgender “activists” runs parallel to the Times’ tendency to diminish the role played by other characters in their stories in the ongoing legal project to define transgender people out of existence or ban our healthcare altogether. My favorite example of this came in 2019, when the Times ran a lengthy story about the supposed dangers of chest binding, unquestioningly citing a medical organization that doesn’t, in fact, exist.

A guess at the Times working definition of “trans activist,” then, could be “anyone that challenges the transphobic status quo we helped to build, even if that challenge is rooted in their identity alone.” It’s a self-fulfilling form of derision, one meant to defend an institution from change by decrying anyone demanding change. As Times journalist Astead Herndon recently told Vanity Fair, “I’ve seen how charges of activism can be used to discredit journalists of underrepresented backgrounds who may come to the work of reporting with a different lens.”

I, by any definition, am an activist. I name a status quo and work (I hope) to challenge it. Institutions that benefit from enforcing that status quo have an incentive to portray those of us who challenge it as unworthy of subjectivity—even if that challenge is represented solely by our identity and expression of it. Inversely, anyone defending the longstanding consensus that trans lives are unlivable must, therefore, not be an activist and duly honored with subjectivity, be they a troubled doctor, concerned parent, or the newspaper itself.

I started with that 1979 story because I see its inheritance in much of the Times coverage before or since. I see the disregard for trans people’s perspectives on our own plight contrasted with the sympathy shown towards affective concerns about our presence. I see the demonization of trans bodies and the concern about our growing numbers, the deference to others over ourselves in a discussion ostensibly about ourselves, and the use of our public existence to symbolize a fraying moral fabric—in a city, a school, or the political discourse writ large.

But what of that alarming call for the mass execution of those transvestite prostitutes from Democratic Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein (who would later go on to become city council president, commit tax fraud, date Ann Coulter, endorse Donald Trump, and manages to still pop up in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal)? Surely the Times would approach such explicitly-eliminationist attitudes towards trans people with more skepticism and pushback today, right?

In December 2022, the paper made the curious decision to profile the right-wing propaganda network The Daily Wire in, of all places, the Styles section. Hosts from the company founded by Ben Shapiro (a “provocate ‘gladiator’” based on a 2017 Times profile) are leading the push on the right to more explicitly embrace anti-trans eliminationist rhetoric and policies, calling for bans on medical transition for anyone of any age and making appearances alongside governors as they sign laws aimed at doing so for trans youth. Daily Wire hosts have called for teachers and doctors that support trans youth to face the death penalty, have referred to having a trans child as “a fate worse than death,” and most recently declared “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” to a roaring crowd at CPAC.

One wonders if Times management recognizes the similarities between that invocation of “transgenderism” (rather than transgender people) and the Times’ dismissive tone towards “activists.” Both are meant to convert a kind of person into an ideology and sanitize opposition to that kind of person as opposition to an ideology—rendering that opposition a mandate for any institution with “objectivity” as its goal. Perhaps that is why the Times published a profile of these eliminationist cheerleaders asking “Can Nashville Be Hollywood for Conservatives?”

The paper has occasionally obscured these habits with relatively more sympathetic coverage and language, from the occasional profile of transgender artists to the rare (and almost universally autobiographical) op-ed written by a transgender person. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the paper soon hired a conservative transgender person as a regular columnist, similar to the Times Magazine’s decision in 1998 to hire, of all gay people, Andrew Sullivan—a defensive move disguised as an inclusive one.

They might even invite one of these disagreeable trans activists onto a marquee podcast, leaving her to ponder what about her particular brand of activism—forged in the respectability of mainstream nonprofit legal advocacy—they find so palatable.

But without a more serious change in direction, the paper is likely to continue viewing the broader project of our erasure as a fait accompli and the ongoing project of our rights and lives as a dangerous incursion. One suspects we’ll see them follow the path of media in the UK; it’s easy to imagine glowing profiles of anti-trans detransitioners, fear-mongering about the relationship between autism and gender identity, and other false narratives designed to weaken any solidarity their audiences might have with trans people ourselves while training them to deny us autonomy. Their readers will still be warned about our growing numbers, our rising influence, our risky endeavors. And we, the actual or perceived activists, will be deemed an increasingly faceless swarm, a cloud of locusts bearing down on their newsroom and their readers’ comfortable lives.

# # #