Boycott The New York Times

It is well known within our communities that The New York Times is an avowedly anti-trans publication. As we'll delve more into shortly, it has played a key role in the escalating genocide against us, and these attacks have been directed from the very top of the company.

Actions speak louder than words, and there is clearly an urgent need to remove any ambiguity on this issue. So here we are as a group of trans people (a news network, even) telling you, directly, what we have heard from countless other trans people around the world:

Boycott The New York Times.

No excuses, no exceptions. If you are giving so much as a dime to the NYT, you need to cease your support today. This is not optional if our lives and rights mean anything to you. This extends to sharing their articles on social media or, if at all possible, clicking on them, as they generate revenue through ads and virality. If you really need to talk about a piece, share a screenshot or quote snippet without a direct link to the article, as the NYT derives revenue even from gift articles.

Technologically-inclined activists can support this movement by creating Bluesky labelers that automatically hide posts with NYT links in order to decrease their engagement from the website, which represents a significant chunk of their revenue. Basically, treat them like you would a hate site, as that’s now what they are.

We are fighting a genocide, one in which The New York Times is an active, enthusiastic and major player.

We are not the first to point out that the Times’ rhetoric is contributing to our genocide.

The nonprofit Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that, between 2024 and 2025, the Times published over 130 articles on trans issues, and only quoted trans people in 14 of them. Media Matters and FAIR both have found that the vast majority of articles they published contained misinformation or outright harmful rhetoric against the trans community.

The Times has even been cited in laws and court cases attacking trans rights. In 2024, Mother Jones reported on numerous different anti-trans state-level laws and legal battles that cited their reporting, including in Alabama, Idaho, and Missouri. The infamous US v. Skrmetti Supreme Court decision, which ruled that Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care is legal, cited the Times 29 times in justifying their decision.

This coverage is not an aberration. The Times’ reporting on the AIDS genocides was so notoriously bigoted that it resulted in an extensive protest campaign by ACT-UP targeting both the paper and its higher-ups.—The newspaper has denied the Palestinian genocide and even ignored the Holocaust until the camps had shut down. Indeed, they are already facing a coinciding boycott from Writers Against The War On Gaza due to their role in peddling propaganda for the Israeli regime. So, in a time when it’s more important than ever for those facing genocide to stand in solidarity, this boycott call also joins that existing one.

This is not accidental. It is not simply the actions of a specific editor or department in a larger media company. Our extensive interview with former NYT editor Billie Jean Sweeney revealed that the paper’s anti-trans coverage is “a directive from the top,” from publisher A.G. Sulzberger and the company's highest ranks. This has even included the company breaking its usual editorial process, pulling more critical stories on transphobic policies and reassigning them to writers known for repeatedly portraying bigotry against our communities as a positive, ‘moderate’ position.

Notably, the paper's used their massive platform to respond to our coverage by referring to the existence of trans people as “fiercely contested medical and legal debates,” and disguising several easily disproven lies about our coverage as a “fact check.”

In 2023, over 1,200 contributors to The New York Times signed an open letter condemning their anti-trans coverage and calling on the leadership to take an immediate change in action. This letter, which included an additional 20,000 different media workers, subscribers, and readers, caused enough of an uproar that leadership tried to punish much of the staff behind it.

Since then, the NYT has only further escalated their transphobia as their profits have steadily climbed upwards due to puzzle games and recipe subscriptions, and they have been similarly vindictive against independent queer and trans media with the courage to report on their actions. In such circumstances, only an unflinching public response aimed at hitting the company where it hurts can make an impact.

Unfortunately, the obvious escalation of a widespread public boycott is apparently too much of a sacrifice for many liberals. Earlier this month, Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings’ condescending and insulting response to a trans woman simply asking him to find a different puzzle app than the Times’ resulted in a horrendous and transphobic news cycle that turned against us, defending him. Even the queer-branded outlet Them praised Jennings' vague statements of support while ignoring his attacks against trans people advocating a boycott.

It should not have to be said that no word puzzle app is more important than our lives. No amount of recipes, book reviews and “serious” journalism are worth our rights to exist, as ourselves, in peace and freedom. These things can all be found elsewhere, in better quality and far less stained by our blood.

We are not asking for ineffective liberal virtue signalling. We are asking you to use a time-tested and highly effective collective tactic, one that has put fear into empires and white supremacist regimes for centuries.

Consider that the original 1880 Irish boycott that gave the term its name was so successful that the British government had to deploy the army, and still failed to stop the spread of the tactic. They had conceded many of the peasants’ key demands within a year.

Decades later against the same empire’s repression of colonial India, less than 100 people led by Mahatma Gandhi began the Salt Satyagraha by marching to the sea. Millions of everyday Indians joined the civil disobedience and gathered salt across the country at beaches without paying imperial taxes. This simple act of civil disobedience exposed the weakness of the empire in the face of organized, concerted economic warfare of the masses. It marked a turning point in the nation’s long struggle against colonialism.

During the U.S. civil rights movement, which drew significantly from the decolonial struggles in India and elsewhere in the world, radical boycotts rooted in grassroots anger and community organizations helped directly break the hold of segregation by directly attacking the capitalist pillars underlying white supremacy.

Boycotts against apartheid South Africa, through years of persistence, grew from local organizing and advocacy to a movement that toppled an entire regime and ended apartheid. Even the U.S. and other imperialist governments once supportive of the white supremacist government sanctioned it in its final years–not because their heartstrings were pulled, but because they were compelled to act.

Building on these victories, the Palestinian BDS (boycott, divestments, sanctions) movement has brought tactics of economic warfare into the era of the internet and trillion-dollar tech companies in their fight against the genocidal Israeli regime. Despite laws passed against BDS in some states, their long struggle has had proven impacts on the bottom lines of massive corporate giants like McDonald's and helped force Microsoft to stop serving cloud services to an IDF military unit that was involved with war crimes, among other victories. One of their most important tactics is targeting a smaller number of companies with a larger amount of force, in order to simplify participation and maximize impact.

Drawing from these struggles, it’s important to recognize that a targeted set of companies maximizes the impact of boycotts, and a diverse set of tactics makes it harder for capitalists to defend their ground. Accordingly, activists should mount campaigns against institutional shareholders of The New York Times to divest their shares. A significant portion of the company is owned by pension funds in California, New York, and other state-run investment funds vulnerable to public pressure. Considering that the Times’ executive leadership is compensated largely based on the value of the stock, divestment is a direct attack against the profiteering of our suffering.

The term “satyagraha,” translating to “truth force," describes a form of resistance that relies on the truth of injustice as a force for effectuating revolutionary political change through economic boycotts or other means of civil disobedience. The concept was developed by Gandhi and others in the Indian freedom movement and influenced civil rights struggles in the U.S. and South Africa, and it echoes into our struggles today, as one tactic among many others. The injustice that trans people face every day because of elites conspiring to exterminate us is a truth that we must channel into an unstoppable force.

Our goal is simple: to damage the power, legitimacy, and capital underpinnings of an institution bitterly opposed to our freedom.

For allies, claiming you still support trans people on social media is not enough: you must stop putting bullets in the gun that's killing us. There is no trans papacy. We are not selling indulgences to fund a bit of our genocide. If you’re not prepared to give up a few puzzles, ask yourself – what are you willing to give up to protect those most under fire?

For trans people, we know how utterly exhausting it is to have to constantly explain the threat posted by the NYT to cis people. Now you can simply link them to this declaration instead. But fight we must, and any skepticism must be grounded in service of victory. Assuming any effort against our oppression is doomed from the start can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy that we must avoid. It is not hopeless, and our journeys are far from over.

This boycott will no longer be necessary when the NYT stops pushing genocide. This would require Sulzberger's resignation, along with the removal of key management officials like Joe Kahn and Carolyn Ryan and the firings, in public disgrace, of reporters like Emily Bazelon, Azeen Ghorayshi, Katie J.M. Baker, and Jeremy Peters — among many others — along with a completely different editorial direction. And that’s just on the trans front.

More realistically, we hope to hurt their ability to hurt us, to inflict as serious a cost as possible for what they have inflicted on trans people around the world, to dismantle the profit motive that funds and incentivizes their relentless attacks against us. We hope our demonstration of collective power will deter other publications from genocidal campaigns, and inspire other trans activists in the community to launch further organized boycotts, such as against HBO for Harry Potter, which will steer yet more funds to J.K. Rowling to bankroll trans genocide. We invite other groups, organizations and individuals to support this boycott and launch their own efforts using any tactics and methods they see fit.

The genocide against our people is, every day, directed by the elite, like the gentry heir in charge of the NYT. They have, to quote the proverb from labor organizer Utah Phillips, names and addresses. They have financial interests that can be targeted. They have reputations to ruin.

We are all tired of lying down, taking punishment, abuse and hatred from the status quo every day, for our entire lives, simply for existing. It is time for our communities to fight back, and to show the world the force behind our truth. This is just the beginning.

Solidarity,

Trans News Network