The Issue

“Gender identity” and “transitioning,” are on the fast track to normalization. The New York Times recently appointed a “Gender Editor” who published an article glorifying a young woman’s double mastectomy of healthy breasts.

Media bastions of the mainstream refuse to examine this trend from a critical perspective, which is affecting more and more western youth. Instead, they capitalize on a cultural contagion that is especially affecting young females. The mainstream media is normalizing the rise in young women taking extreme measures to destroy their breasts.

What You Can Do

Email Jessica Bennett, NY Times’ Gender Editor, along with other corporate media heads who are complicit in driving the narrative that self-mutilation is self-actualization, and demand they exercise ethical journalistic standards instead of capitalizing on female body self-hatred. Tell them it is their duty to stop romanticizing the cutting and harming of healthy female breasts. (Script and contact information below.)

Email Script

Dear Ms. Bennett, Gender Editor of NYT,

Your recent article “All in One Piece” in the New York Times (6/1/2018) violates journalistic ethics by romanticizing the mutilation of healthy breasts through binding and bilateral mastectomies to alleviate body dysphoria. You uncritically present cutting off healthy breasts as self-actualization. (Note: cutting off healthy breasts is qualitatively different than removing unhealthy tissue due to breast cancer.)

The writer describes her first experience of binding her breasts as “…tight enough to constrict my breathing, but it felt great. I was smoothed out, hardened, indestructible.” Publishing this piece is blatant glorification of a harmful practice. Binding and/or ‘ironing’ breasts (as is seen in parts of Africa and now in the UK) is a painful, physically harmful and dangerous practice. The dangers of breast binding include compressed or broken ribs, punctured or collapsed lungs, back pain, compression of the spine, damaged breast tissue, damaged blood vessels, blood clots, inflamed ribs, and even heart attacks.

Where are your ethics of truthful and balanced reporting?

There is an alarming rise in teen female body dysphoria and trans-identification. Many parents who are facing rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) in their teen daughters testify to the drastic upswing of teen girls ‘transitioning’ and its devastating impact on families. Instead of examining the causes of this sudden increase, the media, including the NY times, is unethically capitalizing on and encouraging it.

As the first “Gender Editor” of the NYT you are in a position to help end this profiteering on women’s body hatred and self-disfigurement. I am asking you to use that position ethically and courageously, to lead the way back to ethical, truthful and comprehensive reporting.

You could investigate and report on questions such as: (1) Why has this rise in the binding and removal of healthy breast tissue among young women become so prevalent? (2) Why are many major universities suddenly providing students with dangerous hormones and insurance for transition?

Do you believe it would be acceptable to publish a narrative account by a young man, outlining with graphic photos, the removal of his testicles or penis for a sense of liberation? Do you believe that the cutting and maiming of healthy breast tissue is a positive message for young women already getting the message from the diet, make-up, fashion, and magazine industries that their bodies are wrong? Is this the message you would want your daughter, if you have/had one, to receive?

I am asking you to do the right thing and stand up to this glorification of violence against women’s normal, healthy bodies.

Thank you,

[YOUR NAME]

Targets

Send an email to:

nytgender@nytimes.com

Copy:

mcgrory@globe.com, readers@washpost.com, acooper@sfchronicle.com, gandersen@SFexaminer.com, dbaquet@nytimes.com, cosmo.mail@hearst.co.uk, evening@cbsnews.com, NBCNewsMediaRelations@nbcuni.com, readers@washpost.com, Rachel@msnbc.com, betsy.reed@theintercept.com, submissions@truthdig.com, info@truthout.org, counterpunch@counterpunch.org, queries@cjr.org, USinfo@theguardian.com, letters@harpers.org, hrwpress@hrw.org, scoop@motherjones.com, mail@newleftreview.org, comments@newstatesman.co.uk, support@salon.com, slateoffice@slate.com, newsdesk@independent.co.uk, Stephanie.ebbert@globe.com, editorialsubmissions@nymag.com, comments@nymag.com, outreach@democracynow.org, stories@democracynow.org, nermeen@democracynow.org, mike@democracynow.org, producers@democracynow.org, amy@democracynow.org