Andrea Long Chu’s ‘New York’ Cover Story About Trans Kids Is, Above All Else, Lazy

This comes across more as a trolling attempt than anything

Spending even one minute responding to Andrea Long Chu’s recent provocation feels like a defeat. It is such an ill-conceived, careless piece of writing, and one that exhibits so little genuine concern for the group it is supposedly written on behalf of — trans kids — that its own thesis statement is basically self-debunking: “We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history,” argues Chu. 

Alas, this argument wasn’t printed on some random blog, but as a cover story in New York magazine, where I worked as an online editor and writer-at-large from 2014 to 2017. Chu is given almost 8,000 words to defend her radical argument, but she just. . . doesn’t. I don’t quite understand why this article was printed, in this form, in the pages of a great magazine staffed by some of the best editors in the country. The counterarguments to her position are so blazingly obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with a child or a teenager that it’s an act of willful editorial neglect to simply ignore them entirely. The whole thing comes across much more as an act of high-profile trolling than a meaningful contribution to the discourse about trans kids. Along the way, as is Chu’s habit, she smears the work of a bunch of journalists, myself included, by cherry-picking quotes, sleazily writing that things we have written could be seen as arguing X, where X is something offensive we never would endorse, and so on. 

Andrea Long Chu won a Pulitzer for her literary criticism. Maybe she’s brilliant at it. But her attempts at actual real-world policy arguments are remarkably lazy. Her editors let her down here. 

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I’m going to respond to some of what Chu wrote, mostly ignoring her discussion of Judith Butler (Chu’s essay is partially pegged to the publication of Butler’s new book). I know it comes across as defensive when I “debunk” claims about my own work, and maybe it would be better to just skip over those parts, but I can’t resist: Chu writes in a deeply uncharitable and sloppy way about anyone she perceives as an enemy, and it leads to constant strawmanning.

Let’s start here:

In 2018, The Atlantic published a long cover story by the reporter Jesse Singal called “When Children Say They’re Trans,” focusing on the clinical disagreements over how to treat gender-questioning youth. The story provided a template for the coverage that would follow it. First, it took what was threatening to become a social issue, hence a question of rights, and turned it back into a medical issue, hence a question of evidence; it then quietly suggested that since the evidence was debatable, so were the rights. This tactic has been successful: The political center has moved significantly on trans issues. The public now appears to favor protections for trans people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public spaces in line with the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County. But a growing majority of Americans also believe gender is determined by sex at birth, and even more (almost 70 percent) oppose puberty blockers for trans kids.

This is very silly either/or framing. Of course rights questions and medical questions are intertwined. No one thinks AIDS patients have a “right” to treatments that don’t actually ameliorate AIDS or its symptoms. Moreover, Chu is simply smuggling her premise into her framing: it is widely recognized that minors do not have the same rights as adults, because, due to their incomplete development, they lack the cognitive powers adults use to make fraught decisions, or to weigh long-term consequences.

Anyway, it’s ridiculous to argue that if not for us damn journalists there would have been some sort of relatively straightforward rights debate about youth gender medicine, rather than a medical one. It was always going to be a medical debate, and therefore a debate about evidence and rights. Think about it: on the one hand, you have the small army of psychiatrists, endocrinologists, psychologists, and others who held conferences, published papers, formed professional societies, and opened clinics, all on the basis of the supposed efficacy of youth gender medicine. On the other, you have journalists who have covered this movement as it has emerged. Who do you think is more responsible for “turning this into” a medical issue? 

Chu’s gripe is that journalists have covered the controversy over youth gender medicine, full-stop — she just can’t quite say that because it’s such a silly argument, so she launches false accusation after false accusation at those journalists instead, all while giving them — us — inordinate power to influence hearts and minds. It’s effectively a conspiracy theory.

Chu then zooms out to discuss (what she sees as) the broader anti-trans movement. It consists partly of social conservative Christian types, she writes, and partly of so-called TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But the United States’ biggest anti-trans problem, naturally, is liberals: