Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality

You might be disappointed to hear that I'm a paying subscriber to NYT, then :S. I'm actually unfamiliar with NYT's poor coverage of trans issues. Would you mind please giving a summary or providing a link to a good summary? Just to pre-defend NYT a little bit, I will say that it always appeared to me as if they're trying to be correct in terms of their pro-LGBT support. I do have to admit that I don't follow LGBT issues too closely, so I could be getting fooled by NYT razzle dazzle. But, another thing is you also have to remember that NYT is an institution, so it will inevitably lag behind some more agile sources in their reporting of LGBT issues. Of course, that would be a moot point if the poor reporting is something they've known about for a while and have continuously neglected.

I'd recommend listening to this podcast interviewing two of the hundreds of NYT contributors behind this open letter decrying the paper's coverage of trans issues, this podcast interviewing a trans activist about the paper's issues, or both. They'll cover the topic far better than I can, especially since some of the issues need a bird's eye view to really become apparent.

To summarize some of their points, the trans "controversies" mostly fueled by right wing hate groups on spurious grounds get front page coverage, legitimizing them, while all the blatantly anti-trans laws being passed by legislatures might get a passing mention somewhere in the paper. There's been a big fuss made about puberty blockers, which can have permanent long term effects on bone density that'll show up in someone's 50s rather than the 60s like normal. You know what else is permanent and an immediate concern? Puberty. Anecdotally, I've heard that trans people are disproportionately fond of the body horror genre, because it's one of the vanishingly few places in media where they see their experiences reflected. Going through the wrong puberty is traumatizing. But the NYT tends to gloss over that.

Also glossed over is that all treatment for trans people is also used on and usually developed for cis people. Puberty blockers for trans kids? Perish the thought. Puberty blockers for the cis girl who started menstruating at 8? Standard practice, not worth making a fuss over. The NYT will be sure to mention that some people regret gender-affirming surgeries. They don't properly contextualize it though: ~1% regret them, and IIRC that's counting the people who regret it because of how cruel society can be to trans people. The regret rate for surgery in general is ~14%. Gender affirming surgery regret rate is literally an order of magnitude below the standard. You'd be hard pressed to find any medical procedure with numbers that good.

The NYT does have the inertia of a large institution, but from the sounds of the people with experience in this field, they're pushing back more than most similar institutions. A lot of the workers want better coverage. Their readers want better coverage. The management seemingly does not. And I didn't even really touch on their bias in sources, where random people or members of anti-trans groups are treated as just as legitimate as actual trans people with lived experience in the matter.

My little theory about smartphones being the cause of all the political ills of the current times is actually a very lazy theory. I don't recommend anyone subscribe to it. There's definitely way more to it than just smartphones. That little theory of mine is just like an emergency eject button I have for when I start getting too stressed out about politics. I just shake my fists and go "fecking smartphones!" and then shelve political thoughts for the rest of the day.

I feel like I should clarify my position a bit here; I'm not solely blaming the environment the social media companies have created for all society's ills, I just think they've played a significant role in how bad online discourse has gotten, and that since they control so much of the online space and so much of peoples' time is spent there, this has had far-reaching negative effects. It's not the factor, but it is a factor.

I think both aspects, engagement-driven profit strategies and ease of access due to smartphones, are at play. As you mentioned earlier, there was a time when engagement-driven Internet outlets existed but weren't nearly as influential on discourse. While I don't think smartphones are the ultimate cause of this phenomenon, they've definitely contributed greatly to its virulence.

Another thing to be considered is that engagement as a metric of profitability isn't exactly new. It's been the paradigm ever since the first successful experiments in Internet monetization. That means that at this point there's been around 25 years of intense study on the subject of driving engagement of users. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that billions of dollars have been spent in developing it to be something close to a science.

That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but this development has happened amorally, without consideration of the wider effects such strategies might have. It's really only been the last 8-10 years or so that anyone's had much of a sense of just how profound an impact they've made.