The New York Times’ erasure of biological women is the latest sign of its ideological capture

The New York Times once had a reputation for being unafraid to air a wide range of different opinions, even for challenging the views of the so-called “progressive” Left. No longer. And the ideological capture of the publication is beginning to show even in the language its journalists and editors use.

In a recent piece on transgender athletes, it managed to use three words when one would have done. The story goes like this: the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the main governing body for college sports in the United States, has ruled on trans-identified volleyball players and testosterone levels. But the NYT chose a bizarre form of language to report the already extraordinary fact that a biological male with four times the level of testosterone as a biological woman is allowed to compete in women’s sport. It described women as “non-transgender women”.

It’s the latest sign that the publication remains under the cosh of blue-fringed ideologues who consider feelings to be more important than facts. And more so, who prioritise a miniscule population of trans-identified males over half the population of the planet.

Feminist campaigners against gender ideology who object to the erasure of women immediately hit out when the story was posted on X. One of those was the tennis legend Martina Navratilova, who, as an out lesbian since the early 1980s, has done more to fight for the rights of women than most in her field.

“NYT- you stink,” she posted. “We are women, not NOT TRANSGENDER WOMEN. Just WOMEN will do in the future.”

The use of “non-transgender women” is as inaccurate as it is insulting. Firstly, trans-identified men are not a subset of women, they are male. Secondly, this topsy-turvy use of language is a clear sign of misogyny. Other terms such as “assigned female at birth” and the use of female pronouns to describe “trans women” run through the article, which reads like a piece of trans rights propaganda.

Language matters, and it’s not just the NYT that insults women on a regular basis. A Sky News report on the case of trans-identified male sex offender Karen White, who was placed in a women’s prison where he sexually assaulted two female inmates, used the phrase: “she pressed her erect penis against the woman’s back…”

And some UK-based political parties are also guilty of using Orwellian language in an attempt to appease gender extremists. At the Green Party Regional Council in 2019, the appointment of the two new co-chairs was announced, describing them as “Self identifying Non-Male Co-Chair: (female)” and “Self identifying Non-Female Co-Chair: (male)”. I asked the Greens’ press office if, to ensure that lesbians were not excluded, they would also advertise for “non-male non-heterosexuals”.

The world’s most famous wordsmith, JK Rowling, who, like Martina Navratilova, is railing against trans madness because of its negative, often dangerous effect on women and girls, has ridiculed so-called “trans-inclusive language” on the basis that it excludes females.

“‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” she tweeted in response to an article about “Creating a more equal post-Covid-19 world for people who menstruate”. This was enough to have her labelled a “transphobic bigot”.

But to go back to the NYT, it’s not like they haven’t been warned. The talented founder of The Free Press, Bari Weiss, in her resignation letter to the paper, wrote: “Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions”. Weiss had been regularly contacted by journalists at the paper complaining of the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root.

We only need one word to describe an adult human female. Woman. Anything else is virtue signalling. And the public is getting heartily sick of it.