By Stacy Lee Kong

Hi, hello. Are you ready for some (relatively niche) Toronto media criticism?

Since the beginning of the year, NOW magazine has been receiving pushback for its coverage of trans issues, which has been skewing disturbingly 6ixbuzz—or, for the non-Toronto folks among us, Shade Room. At least twice now, the publication has crafted Instagram captions that frame news stories about trans issues in a vague but intentionally inflammatory way, most recently the Trudeau government’s pledge to fund up to $75,000 in gender-affirming surgeries for federal employees. And of course, each one ends with the question, “What are your thoughts?”

If you’ve been, um, on the internet recently, you already know why this query isn’t as innocent as it might seem. But just so we’re all on the same page: framing a story about government funding for gender-confirming surgery as a debate invites people to engage in debate about the validity of trans people’s healthcare needs, and by extension their very existence. It cultivates an environment where transphobia is welcomed. In fact, it panders to transphobes, and creates a space for them to regurgitate transphobic talking points gleaned from alt-right videos. And disturbingly, NOW ends up profiting from the resulting engagement.

This would be worth unpacking no matter what, but it’s especially concerning in light of the anti-trans sentiment that is flourishing at other prestigious publications, including the New York Times and the Atlantic, not to mention NOW’s previous reputation as a left-leaning progressive publication and the current state of the Canadian media landscape as a whole.

A close reading of NOW’s reporting on trans issues

Let’s start by breaking down what’s actually wrong with this story, because it’s not just the way NOW is promoting it on social media. In fact, the biggest problem is… the entire premise. The original version of the article began with the line, “many Canadians are expressing concerns about the government’s decision to fund up to $75,000 in gender-affirming procedures for federal employees.” This is a fascinating editorial decision, mostly because there doesn’t seem to be any reporting to support it. Nowhere in the story does it quantify what “many Canadians” means, how writer Veracia Ankrah knew that these Canadians were expressing concern, where they were expressing that concern or what those concerns were about. In fact, the only ‘proof’ for this statement is a selection of transphobic tweets that are embedded near the bottom of the piece. Tellingly, they are all replies to The Post Millennial and Jonathan Kay, editor of Quillette. Both of those publications regularly platform transphobia, disinformation and right-wing ‘rage bait,’ FYI.

Outside of those bookends, the story reports on the facts of the story, including that the Trudeau government will begin covering federal government workers’ gender-affirming procedures on July 1, 2023, to qualify, individuals must be over 18 and this funding is only available to people who have exhausted any coverage offered by their province or territory, for example. But even then, it includes outdated language like “sex change,” which GLAAD recommends avoiding (this has since been removed from the story, though it’s still in the carousel post). Between that, the lede and the tweets, the framing of the story isn’t actually subtle—readers are supposed to believe that ‘regular’ Canadians are annoyed that the government is spending money on trans people, who are positioned as undeserving.

There are also important questions about the source of this story, as XTra Magazine senior editor Ziya Jones pointed out on Twitter this week. “On Feb 23, Jon Kay, who has a long history of specious trans coverage, tweeted about the policy coming into effect,” they tweeted. “The next day, The Post Millennial, which has published virulently transphobic content, seems to build a piece around Kay’s tweet, embedding it in their story… Two days later, Now publishes an article claiming ‘many Canadians’ are questioning this new funding. [And] when you look at the PM and Now articles side by side, they're also noticeably similar structurally and informationally. The Now article used language like ‘sex changes’ that you no longer rly see outside of transphobic media.”

Jones questions whether NOW is aggregating content from The Post Millennial, noting that while this type of aggregation happens at many Canadian publications, mainstream outlets do not traditionally republish articles from right-wing ones. (I sent NOW an email asking about how this story was pitched/assigned, why it was framed in this way, the editing process and whether the editorial team has had any internal conversations about their reporting practices, but its PR team replied to say they were unable to accommodate my interview request.)

There are very real, very scary consequences to this type of journalism

After a moderately-sized internet backlash, the story was edited to remove transphobic language and the lede was reworded to, “Canadians are expressing mixed opinions online.” (Notably, NOW did not acknowledge these edits; doing so is journalistic best practice.) The magazine also published a follow-up story featuring Curran Stikuts, director of advocacy and strategic communications at The 519, who told the publication this extension of benefits is a “momentous step forward in providing affirming and safe care for trans people.”

I think it’s worth noting that this wasn’t the first time NOW flirted with transphobia to promote its content and had to backtrack; at the beginning of February, the publication characterized the Toronto Police Service’s decision to stop using genders and surnames when sharing information about missing people as “wokeness,” and again encouraged engagement by asking readers what they thought about the decision. After criticism in their comments section and on Twitter, the word wokeness was removed from the post.

I know it usually takes three examples to make a trend, but considering how often we’re now seeing transphobic content being platformed at seemingly credible legacy publications, I don’t think we need to wait for more cases, you know? I mean: after the New York Times hired a new executive editor, Joe Kahn, in April 2022, there has been what writer Jude Ellison S. Doyle calls a notable “anti-trans pivot” at the paper. It has published “15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast.” Former Books editor Pamela Paul is now the Opinion editor, and uses that role to publish transphobic opinions on a regular basis, including an essay defending JK Rowling that went live the day after more than 4,000 people signed an open letter protesting the paper’s approach to covering trans communities (🙃). The Atlantic has regularly platformed writers with transphobic views/approaches, including Jesse Singal and Helen Lewis, and when it publishes trans journalists on trans issues, those stories have usually been about detransitioning. In the U.K., a columnist at the Guardian recently compared politicians who support trans rights to accused sex trafficker and noted misogynist Andrew Tate. And there’s a growing number of internet-based outlets that are pure rage bait—and also based on straight-up lies. For example, last week, Bari Weiss published a single-source ‘exposé’ about a Missouri clinic that provides youth with gender-affirming care on her blog. The article claimed patients experienced “rapid medicalization” and there was “poor assessment of mental health concerns”—all of which turned out to be totally untrue according to a deeply reported feature published this week in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Last summer, journalists James Factora and Evan Kleekamp covered the dog whistle reporting on trans communities that has steadily been increasing in mainstream publications, explaining that they are harmful examples of bothsideism that “sensationalize advancements in transgender medicine, painting them… as dramatic scenes within a ‘raging political battle’ over ‘gender-related medical care for minors.’ Adapting to improving attitudes toward trans people and public criticism of transphobic reporting, these dog whistle pieces no longer target transgender adults. Instead, they claim that transgender activists are obstructing a ‘common sense’ dialogue about the allegedly surging population of trans-identified youth and, in extreme cases, use rhetoric that insinuates children must be protected from pedophilic ‘groomers.’” And, because they are being published in credible, legitimate news sources, these stories are perceived by the general public as credible and legitimate, which only ends up normalizing extremely dangerous ideas.

As that NYT open letter pointed out, there are real-world consequences to this type of coverage. According to the ACLU, there are currently 371 anti-LGBTQ+ bills moving through the U.S. legislative system; this week alone, Mississippi governor Tate Reeves signed a bill into law that restricts gender-affirming care for minors, as did Tennessee governor Bill Lee. And what do politicians use when trying to drum up support for these discriminatory laws? It’s not Fox News’ unhinged transphobic ramblings, right? Instead, it’s often the ‘credible’ reporting from the NYT et al. that questions the necessity and safety of gender-confirming healthcare, particularly for youth. 

It’s also important to note that violence against LGBTQ+ people, and especially trans people, is rising. According to a 2022 report from Everytown for Gun Safety, the number of homicides of trans and gender-nonconforming people in the U.S. more than doubled between 2017 and 2021. Most of the people who were killed were Black women, and they were mostly shot. Scarily, the report notes, many of the anti-trans bills that are currently on the books in the U.S. are happening in states with loose gun control laws.

What happens when a progressive publication starts encouraging anti-trans rhetoric?

And please don’t think this is an American problem; outside of NOW, transphobic sentiment has been gaining a foothold in Canadian outlets, too, including the Toronto Star, CBC and CTV. We are also seeing the implications of rising anti-trans sentiment; in 2021, Quebec proposed a law that would prevent trans people from changing the sex on their official documents until they undergo gender affirming surgery, which advocates said could potentially out people or put them at higher risk of harassment or violence. And earlier this year, Ontario premier Doug Ford cut funding to virtual healthcare services, which means it’s now much harder for people to even access gender-affirming care.

Clearly, there’s a strong and troubling link between transphobic news coverage and the lived experiences of trans people. But there’s another angle that we can’t ignore when it comes to NOW’s coverage, specifically: our responsibility as journalists, especially racialized or otherwise marginalized ones, to the groups we don’t belong to. I say that because in January, NOW became one of the only Black-owned outlets in Canada after Gonez Media, a media start-up founded by Toronto journalist Brandon Gonez, bought the publication from its debt-ridden parent company, Media Central Corporation (MCC). If you’ve been paying attention to Canadian media, you might know there was already some controversy around that purchase. As former NOW editor Radheyan Simonpillai explained in a TikTok earlier this month, the mag’s staff had been working for free to try to keep the publication going until it could be sold. They were promised a new owner would have to compensate them, but after the sale to Gonez Media, they found out it actually wasn’t responsible for covering their back pay. I don’t know what Gonez Media’s legal obligations are (though there’s at least one lawsuit underway to determine that), but I do think there’s a moral and ethical problem with positioning your brand as one that will fill gaps and prioritize diverse storytelling while simultaneously denying NOW’s former employees, many of them racialized, back pay… especially if you see their work as valuable enough to continue promoting it.  

At the same time, it is exciting and deeply meaningful to see Black people step into leadership and ownership roles in an industry where real decision-making power is still almost totally concentrated among older white men. As writer Huda Hassan wrote in January about the tumultuous transition from old to new NOW, Gonez “went from working at one legacy publication to owning another one, now possibly filling an everlong void. There's something compelling about such a story in Canada's complicated media game.”

Still, she notes, “representation politics is not enough. The new NOW will need to show us what its values and principles truly are. Until then, I'm not sure it's fair to cast them off yet.”

I don’t think we should, or need to, cast NOW off. But Hassan’s point that representation politics can only go so far is an important one—and NOW’s new pattern of transphobic storytelling (and seeming disinterest in actually engaging with critique) indicates its values, principles and frankly, editorial processes, need some fine-tuning. I’ve written before about why I think racialized people who amass power and privilege have an even bigger responsibility to operate in inclusive, ethical and anti-oppressive ways; that very much applies here.

It's just not enough for racialized people to run shit. We also have a responsibility to be better than the gatekeepers and decision-makers who we had to work around, to offer meaningful solidarity—to do things differently for real.  

And Did You Hear About…

This nuanced piece on Chloe Bailey’s recent collaboration with Chris Brown, and why he has so much support among Black women.

Chris Pine’s book recommendations.

Former Teen Vogue exec editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s thoughtful personal essay in The Cut about taking Mounjaro, an Ozempic-like drug, for weight loss. It is an obvious counterpoint to the other Ozempic articles we’ve seen recently, including the extremely fatphobic and triggering piece that the magazine published earlier this week.

This very nerdy Twitter thread.

Writer Sage Howard’s essay on Zaya Wade and the power of names, especially for people who live at the intersection of Blackness and queerness.

Bonus: CapybaraTok.

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