By February 2021, Cretella was a headline panelist at the Heritage Foundation’s “Promise to America’s Children.” During the virtual meeting, she characterized gender dysphoria as a “passing phase” reflective of confusion, or more ominously, as indicative of “an underlying psychopathology.” Among her colorfully inflammatory assertions, she called gender affirming care “institutionalized child abuse” involving “toxic drugs and mutilating surgeries.”
Her group began lobbying intensively in state legislatures against gender affirming care, gaining its first big victory just two months later when Arkansas became the first state to restrict care for young people. By June of this year, the number had grown to 27, leaving 40 percent of young trans people without care, the nonpartisan health policy group KFF reported.
Cretella would leave her group in late 2021, describing feeling burned out, but the biased and highly charged lexicon she promoted had taken root with hard-right politicians and a network of influential and well-financed conservative groups.
Most notable among those groups was the Alliance Defending Freedom, which had taken the courtroom lead in bringing anti-trans litigation. It was just a short step from the ADF’s press releases and court filings to mainstream media coverage.
The ADF is the “most influential arm” of the conservative Christian movement, The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick wrote in a 2023 investigative report. The group had won a string of Supreme Court victories, most notably the overturning of Roe v Wade, but also rulings that restrict birth control and codify a right to discriminate against gay people.
In its press releases and court briefs, the ADF has crafted attacks on a broad range of civil rights, lauding, for example, the “demise” of diversity, equality and inclusion efforts. In a case reflecting both its extreme agenda and international ambitions, it went before the European Court of Human Rights to defend state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people.
This hard-right activism has often found a receptive audience in traditional conservative media like The National Review, which published a piece by one of the group’s top executives that called same-sex marriage protections in Virginia “a radical and novel gender-identity agenda.”
But more important, an Assigned Media analysis revealed, the ADF found a powerful friend in the emergent Free Press, an outlet backed by the right-wing venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and edited by the culture warrior Bari Weiss.
The Free Press helped rev up the ADF’s campaign against trans people in late 2021, when it provided the anti-trans author and staunch ADF ally Abigail Schrier a platform for a 3,500-word, grievance-filled screed against “gender ideology.” Weiss gave the ADF another big lift in spring 2023, repeatedly championing a supposed whistleblower, Jamie Reed, whose reckless claims about transgender health care were unsubstantiated and ultimately debunked.
The ripple effect was soon felt more broadly as The New York Times, whose publisher AG Sulzberger has been eager to court the same conservative audience as Weiss’s, raced to publish its own, deeply flawed version of the “whistleblower” story just months later.
Far beyond that, Assigned Media’s review has found, the Times and the ADF have struck a symbiotic relationship.
In March of this year, soon after the Times published an article that was harshly critical of Planned Parenthood, the ADF published a piece on its own site that asked, “Did The New York Times Just Make the Case for Defunding Planned Parenthood?”
The ADF-New York Times echo stretches back several years, our review found. In June 2022, for example, the Times attacked gender-inclusive language in a piece that demonized trans people, while quoting none. Just weeks later, the ADF wrote that the use of what it termed “preferred pronouns” had “vast implications for free speech.”
New York Times articles have been cited in ADF press releases and its other publications 35 times from Jan. 1, 2021, through today, nearly four times more than any other mainstream publication, our review found. Even Fox News, with six ADF citations, is far outpaced by the Times.
This close relationship with a hard-right litigant in the culture wars has pulled The New York Times ever further from journalism into a form activism itself: New York Times stories were cited 29 times in amicus briefs filed by a broad range of right-wing groups supporting Tennessee’s ban on youth gender-affirming care, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in June.
The Times rolled out an assembly line of tendentious stories in the aftermath of the ruling in the case, US v Skrimetti, but the harshest external criticism of its coverage has centered on a 11,000-word magazine story, which mimicked the ADF’s legal arguments and talking points. One passage, asserting that “the gender of a gender-fluid person might shift from hour to hour” hews closely to the complaints in an ADF piece last year of all those “new words like genderqueer and non-binary.”
More insidious, though, was the medical science disinformation the Times slipped into the piece, falsely asserting that trans health care raised “novel issues” because it could “require lifelong treatment.” The ADF used this same loaded framing in its court filings in Skrimetti.
Labeling gender affirming care “novel,” while a useful tactic for a litigant, is a false assertion that would not ordinarily slip through an unbiased new organization’s vetting process. Estrogen has been in use for gender dysphoria since the 1950s. The prescription of puberty blockers and testosterone has also been used for decades with wide medical consensus.
The recklessness of calling “lifelong treatment” a novelty has even wider ramifications in an era in which the Trump administration is undermining medical science and gutting Medicaid in ways that go far beyond transgender healthcare. The vaccines and boosters that have ensured the health of generations of Americans are under attack by the administration, while the benefits of anti-depressants have been perversely distorted.
Among the decidedly un-novel conditions that may require “lifelong care”: High blood pressure, thyroid disorders, myasthenia gravis, diabetes, heart disease, gout, perimenopause, Crohn’s disease, cholesterol, asthma, hemophilia, HIV, epilepsy, eosinophilic esophagitis, glaucoma, ADHD, immunosuppressants, organ transplant treatments and estrogen treatment for cis women.
The right wing’s campaign of pseudoscience reached a further inflection point with this month’s Federal Trade Commission workshop on the “dangers” of gender affirming care.
“It was government-sponsored disinformation,” said Baker, of Whitman-Walker. “Typically these workshops are very carefully organized so they bring together a variety of different perspectives. At this one, though, every participant was essentially a professional advocate for anti-transgender disinformation.”
It came on top of a slapdash report on gender-affirming care issued in May by the Department of Health and Human Services that broke nearly every professional standard of research – from cherry-picking evidence to support a preordained outcome to failing to disclose its authorship. “It too was a very clear example of a fringe pseudoscientific agenda being cloaked in the veneer of authority,” Baker said. (An anti-trans campaigner later disclosed that he was among the co-authors.)
State bans on gender-affirming care, Baker noted, have typically had three bias-driven carveouts: allowing the very same medications to be prescribed to cis young people; permitting nonconsensual surgeries on intersex infants and children; and restricting mental health referrals to limit what a provider can do, thus opening a door to conversion therapy.
“The idea,” Baker said, “is that you as a therapist come into the room with a predetermined outcome and you proceed to force that outcome on the patient.”
