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To say Billie Jean Sweeney's had a storied career in journalism would be an understatement. Over more than two decades of experience in the field the longtime journalist, editor and press freedom advocate has worked at the Hartford Courant, the Associated Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists and, most recently, as a volunteer editor at Assigned Media.

She also worked at The New York Times for over a decade, until her retirement in mid-2024, eventually becoming the day assignment editor at the international desk. There, as one of the Times’ few trans staffers, she witnessed the highest echelons of the paper's management increasingly push anti-trans bigotry and disinformation.

Trans communities have known, and sounded the alarm, about the NYT’s increasingly anti-trans stance for years. Sadly, too many cis people have ignored these warnings, especially as many of the details have often remained obscured behind the paper's extensive corporate hierarchy and established reputation.

No more. In this in-depth interview, Sweeney details how the NYT shifted to openly attacking trans people and why directives to do so came from the very top of the organization. She also recounts how some within the Times — including her — tried to push back, and the widespread damage done by the influential paper legitimizing hatred.

In keeping with Trans News Network's commitment to not platform bigotry, we will not link to any NYT stories in this piece. For clarity — as this interview covers a lot of ground and goes into the details of anti-trans coverage at the Times — we will note which stories Sweeney is referring to, which reporter wrote them, their publication date and particularly relevant facts about them.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

David Forbes: You've written a bit recently about how the NYT handled trans coverage, including some shocking revelations around the Cass review.

Billie Jean Sweeney: That episode came in the midst of a years-long campaign that really began back in 2022 when the new masthead was put in place by [NYT publisher A.G.] Sulzberger — [executive editor] Joe Kahn and [managing editor] Carolyn Ryan in particular — and the handling of the Cass report came as the Times was re-energizing, so to speak, its coverage of trans people that was highly biased in a conservative direction.

That brings up a really interesting point. During your time at the NYT how did you see the treatment of trans people in coverage change?

I came out in 2019. The first time I got really involved in, or very aware of things was back in 2021. At that point Dean Baquet was the editor. The coverage wasn't always great, and the Times didn't make any particular attempt to hire trans journalists, but I don't think it had that sustained, single-minded focus on promoting disinformation and legitimizing bias, really.

That came to pass with the new editor, Joe Kahn. It began really in the Spring of 2022. There was a series of stories that in hindsight, looking back, were intended to win prizes. It had all the hallmarks of a series of stores that's intended to make a campaign to win a Pulitzer or whatever they had in mind.

An anti-trans Pulitzer, as it were.

Exactly, right. There was a series of stories that challenged every aspect of being trans. It challenged the medical science of being trans. It even challenged small things like gender-inclusive language and somehow made a case that undermined women and abortion rights issues. Which, of course, is a stretch.

To put it mildly, yes.

Yes. It passed along different disinformation, like top surgery being easy to get, when of course it was never easy to get. I think it culminated in January 2023 with a story about parental rights [“When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don't Know” by Katie J.M. Baker, Jan. 22, 2023] that didn't actually quote the young individual involved directly and it cast these people who turned out to be members of a very anti-trans activist group, which the times did disclose in the story but kept calling these parents liberals. It was just a very tendentious story that just asserted the notion that parent's rights took precedence over the individual's rights. That was kind of the culmination of that.

During the midst of this, there was a staff group within the Times, it was the LGBTQ ERG [Employee Resource Group], it was very active and really pressed hard to get management to talk with us and to discuss the concerns we really had.

I wrote a series of notes to the publisher, to Sulzberger. The first one I wrote was back in 2021, but I wrote a series of notes after that to him beginning in 2022 that was focused on the coverage and the lack of trans reporters, and the lack of any trans involvement, input even, in the coverage.

There was a build-up during that time expressing internal dissent about the coverage. As that big string of anti-trans stories came to its end with the story about parental rights, you may remember there was a letter from hundreds and hundreds of Times contributors saying these stories are tendentious, it's spreading bias.

There was a protest outside the offices, and the Times’ response was to run a story defending J.K. Rowling [“In Defense of J.K. Rowling” by Pamela Paul, Feb. 16, 2023]. They ran that story the next day. That was their attitude towards it.

As you were witnessing this, what was your position at the Times?

I was there about 11 years in total, almost all of it on the international desk. I was the day assignment editor at the time. I'd been the night editor prior to that. The day assignment editor does what you might imagine: to respond to breaking news, to make sure we're covering things properly, to make sure the stories say what we think they're going to say, we're matching up the right reporters with the right editors, etc.

When that happened, from your view within a pretty key spot within the times, what did you see as the internal reaction to this dissent that was, understandably, coming up in response to their coverage?

I think, initially, there was a sense that maybe the dissent that was emerging within the paper — but also outside the paper, expressed by its own contributors — that maybe they would recognize that as a signal that they were going off the rails.

They made some attempts. In hindsight I look at this very cynically, but at the time I hoped maybe this is something we can build on. You look back on these things and think you were kind of naive, that I actually thought they were genuine. But they had a couple of meetings that were attempts at trying to talk with trans people at the Times.

With trans staffers and workers at the Times?

Yes, there weren't many. But I guess that's who they were trying to reach out to. They had two of these sessions, one of which they didn't invite me to until the day of. Take that for what it was. I was one of the most outspoken people about [the anti-trans coverage].

The second one they scheduled on a day that I was away. I don't know if that was purposeful or not, but in any case that's what happened. They had a couple of those [meetings], but I don't really think they accomplished very much. I think they were a way they could say that they reached out. I don't know how much of this was an internal public relations campaign. In hindsight I think it was almost that entirely.

I think there was some sense the Times could change course, but again that was my view at the time. I was hopeful I could persuade people. But looking back on it I think that was pretty naive, really.

This is what happens throughout 2023. After the big protest, after the expression of dissent we seem to think that maybe we can persuade them to improve things. Maybe hire trans reporters, which is something I had always advocated for and never got anywhere with. They still don't have any trans journalists covering trans news in the newsroom. They have Masha Gessen on the opinion side, but no trans news reporters.

I think there was a period there where we had some hope that maybe we could make a difference. But I think with the end of 2023, beginning into 2024 there were some pretty dark signs.

One actually came from within the Times. There was this militant anti-union group formed, within the union, that were pro-management in a lot of their opinions. Including trans coverage, which really wasn't a strictly union issue. But they're a small group, they're militant about their views.

Militant about their anti-trans views?

Exactly. In the sense that they would leak stories that would accuse the union of taking pro-trans stances.

But probably more significantly, [the Times‘ management] announced at the end of 2023 that they had a new communication policy that essentially shut down all avenues for internal discussion. That was actually a bad sign for me, and told me it was probably time for me to start winding down my time there as well.

Up until that time, they didn't like it, but they allowed people to raise questions, they allowed people to offer critical views. That is the point of these groups [the Employee Resource Groups], supposedly, to allow discussion of it. This was a management-run channel, they did have final say, but they were supposed to at least allow people to voice their opinions. They said, though, that you could no longer do that and equated that with publicly tweeting. Of course there's a big difference between posting something on an internal Slack channel and posting it on Twitter or Bluesky.

So that was a bad sign. It kind of coincided with the ramp-up of the 2024 election, where things escalated.

So there was this lull in most of 2023 and then things escalated in 2024. How did they escalate?

One of the things that happened was that Sulzberger kind of came around and gave a stump speech to every part of the paper, including the international desk. He talked for 40 minutes about how we were going to cover the election 'fairly' and that sort of thing. The international desk wasn't really that involved in the coverage of the election, so it was a little off-key for us. We were all like 'why are we talking about this?'

I call it a stump speech because he gave it to every single desk. He delivered the same message. Clearly this was going to indicate how the times was going to cover the 2024 election. It treated both sides as having equal weight in terms of factual basis, in terms of their viewpoints.

And this was in the middle of the most virulent anti-trans campaign, from one of those sides, in American history.

Exactly. Sulzberger himself, right before this episode with Cass — and this wasn't a good sign for me — gave a speech at the Reuters Foundation in March 2024. He talked about how the Times had 'protected' young people through its coverage of trans youth.

Which is a straight-up anti-trans propaganda view.

Exactly, yes. So that was a bad sign. I guess there was an awareness that the Cass report was coming up. She had put out a report a couple of years earlier. It wasn't real high on my radar at the time, but it was certainly out there. I think they — Sulzberger and his newsroom lieutenants — saw that as an opportunity to seize this and give to the right, including Trump, an issue that they could run with.

You've talked about the paper's treatment of the pretty infamous Cass report, especially from your spot at the international desk. What happened in that case?

It wasn't on my radar as much as it ought to have been. I was starting to wind down my time. I left the Times at the end of May of that year. There was an awareness that [Hilary] Cass was coming out with a report. The day before it officially came out, there was a lot of coverage in the BBC and UK media. Cass was already talking about it before its official release.

The day editor's counterparts are in Seoul and London. My counterpart in London — who was actually filling in that day, but did so on a regular basis — assigned a UK reporter to do a story.

That was standard practice, to be clear.

[Chuckling] There’s so many examples of how standard it was. She assigned it to a UK correspondent, who wrote it in the context of UK politics, talked about it being very contentious, talked about the criticisms of its findings. Cass was talking about them herself, this isn't jumping to any conclusions at that point. It really put it in the context of being this very contentious, very political sort of document.

When I saw it, because we're a few hours behind, there were 600, 700 words written. I had a pretty good sense of how the story was going to turn out. But within a few hours the story was to the top New York editors, and I don't know who exactly it was who did that. I assume it was Carolyn or her intermediary. They said ‘oh no, we want the science desk to do that,’ specifically that was Azeen [Ghorayshi], who had been a key reporter in a lot of the other anti-trans coverage.

Indeed, infamous among trans communities for how anti-trans her coverage is.

Exactly. So we stood down, that was a directive from above. It's not crazy for a science desk to do a story like this, rather than the geographic desk, in theory. But how it played out in practice was the story the Times put out in the next day's paper cast this not as a news story, but already declaring this to be part of a trend all across Europe, that was restricting care in light of new evidence.

[Note: The story was “Hilary Cass Says U.S. Doctors are 'Out of Date’ on Youth Gender Medicine, by Azeen Ghorayshi, May 13, 2024. Unusually, as Sweeney's emphasized, it was framed as “A conversation with” Cass rather than a traditional news story — D.F.]

I went back and looked at that story earlier today to refresh my memory. The first few references were to Finland in 2020 — not in 2024 — making a recommendation that adolescents should go through therapy [as part of receiving trans care]. But that's not a rejection of gender-affirming care, as Cass was.

It referred to an earlier Denmark decision, but again that was not a rejection of gender-affirming care. The references that Azeen used to support this conclusion that this was part of a trend sweeping Europe were old and not even supportive of its main premise. These were places saying 'this needs to be examined, it needs to be done in context with therapy' which had always been the case.

The story ignored, both then and later, reports that were emerging in France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany that were directly in opposition to Cass.

The science desk covered these things when it served their narrative. But when the France report came out, when the Austrian report came out, when the German report came out the science desk ignored those. The directive from above was that the international desk was to ignore it as well [Note: Sweeney clarified that these directives were pointedly communicated down from the top of the Times’ hierarchy by conversation, not via email or internal announcement].

No coverage was done, in The New York Times, about these reports that were in direct opposition to Cass.

Another example was when that Utah report was done at the behest of the legislators and they found that a review of the evidence showed that gender-affirming care has a sound basis and is grounded in the same science cited by major medical associations. They ignored that too. Azeen ignored it, though she was really doing the bidding of her bosses.

It's certainly still a choice to do that.

Oh she was absolutely along for the ride, but she was still doing their bidding.

That's an important point. You've mentioned 'a directive from above' several times now, and you've mentioned a shift around 2022. This was all coming from the very top, correct?

Oh yeah, most definitely. It was really three people: Sulzberger, Kahn, Ryan. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if any of them would be more receptive. I wrote to Sulzberger directly, because he was the one who animated this, and I still believe that.

I think he saw this as a political project, that he could take a stance that the hard right would like, that the Trump campaign might like. Whether it was an explicit agreement [with the Trump campaign], probably not, but this was coverage he knew the right wing would like.

And he pursued that, because he thought it was a position — spreading anti-trans discrimination, spreading anti-trans disinformation — was something he could push and most readers would say 'well I don't know much about it.' He thought it was something there'd be no cost for.

There probably wasn't any cost to it, from that view, except for trans people and young trans people especially.

You mean no cost for the NYT?

Exactly, and no cost to its broader reputation. For most readers, it's like 'well we don't know too much about [trans healthcare], maybe they did go too far, the Times keep telling us they did, so maybe they did.'

That brings up one of the big questions in all of this: what do you see as the wider impact of this anti-trans stance, as someone who worked at the NYT and has worked in the media world for a long time?

I think they basically legitimized, they mainstreamed disinformation. I did a story about how disinformation worked its way into the mainstream, and the Times played a big role in that, as did Bari Weiss [former NYT op-ed staff editor, currently the openly pro-Trump editor-in-chief of CBS News]. As did organizations like that phony pediatrics association that has like 700 members and was led for some time by someone who wasn't even a licensed pediatrician.

It's one thing for Bari Weiss, when she was just running the Free Press or whatever, to report this. It's another thing for The New York Times to report this. I think they put a stamp of legitimacy on medical falsehoods. They also legitimized anti-trans hate, really.

Some of the worst New York Times stories are really contemptuous. There was a story written right after the election by Jeremy Peters that just oozed with contempt. I think it was the most biased lede I ever read. I think it basically said 'trans people are too much to endure.' Well, ok, thanks for starting that off in a way that's open-minded and level-headed.

[Note: the story was “Transgender Activists Question Movement's Confrontational Approach,” by Jeremy Peters, published Nov. 26, 2024. The lede Sweeney's referring to is “To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is to endure their unsparing criticism,” stated as unchallenged fact. As anti-trans coverage in establishment media tends to, “activists” is used, in practice, to refer to all vocal trans people. — D.F.]

Crazily enough, the first person he quoted in a story about U.S. politics, was J.K Rowling.

Who is not exactly a power broker in U.S. politics.

No, and is certainly not going to give any sort of open-minded way of talking about the issue. Then there was that whole story that went after the ACLU for doing its job in the Skrmetti case [“How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost” by Nicholas Confessore, June 19, 2025]. That was a personal attack on [trans ACLU attorney Chase] Strangio. That was an outrageously contemptuous story.

The Times is basically working through a lot of these news stories to establish a narrative that trans people went too far. 'If only they hadn't gone too far, then things might be different but we just have to stand up for ourselves' is the narrative they sought to push.

Some of what you just described, that's just outright bigotry from these reporters.

Yes, but the stories are also edited too. Somebody had to approve that lede. I don't know if it was Carolyn, who was known to be directly, hands-on involved in the line editing of stories. I don't know if she was or made known her preferences. Those stories had editors.

Certainly there are plenty of reporters that were fully on board with this, and others who do it out of ambition because this is what the bosses want and they want to get ahead so they insert what the bosses want.

Acts of appeasement, as it were.

Yeah. The editor who edited most of the science desk's anti-trans coverage [Virginia Hughes] ended up getting a big promotion. She's now co-head of the investigations desk. So she got ahead, and she knew the way to get ahead was to give the bosses what they wanted.

She was Azeen's editor. And just for a behind the scenes view, I mentioned that pro-management caucus in the union. She was among the most militant members of that.

It's hard to know whether this is a convergence of belief and ambition or just ambition alone.

At a certain point, after enough time, what's the difference?

That's right.

You've laid out a pretty severe situation. You mentioned one of the things Sulzberger and the other higher-ups expect is there's not going to be a cost to this. What do you think members of the public who are against the anti-trans bigotry should do in response to this course of action by the NYT?

I think there's probably a growing awareness that the Times' coverage has been tendentious at best and outright biased, bigoted at its worst. Having that awareness is a good thing.

They can stop subscribing to the Times. I'm not against that. Or they can simply not amplify the Times‘ coverage. I'm hopeful that's already happening.

It may, somewhat, be too late, in many people's view. The damage, to a fair degree, has already been done. But having people understand that these are people who are not committed to giving factual, unbiased information.

It's not like there aren't still occasionally good stories at the Times. There was a story about a trans cancer patient that was one of the best I've read all year.

But will that ever get through to those who edit the Times? I don't think so. They're so wedded to their positions. I think they believe in them. I don't think that's probably going to change, at least not with this group of leaders. And Sulzberger's a young guy, he'll be around for a long time.

What else would you like our readers to know?

I was talking with Kae Petrin at the TJA [Trans Journalists Association], and one thing they mentioned was the emergence of a lot of independent news outlets. This is not just about trans issues, but other issues as well.

I think the awareness that independent news sources are really vital, and that maybe just reading the Times and subscribing to the Times isn't really the best investment of your money or your time.

-Edited by Mira Lazine