On June 19, 2025, The New York Times published Nicholas Confessore’s 10,000-word epic, “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost.” At first glance, it appears to be a longform political autopsy — the inside story of a failed legal campaign, complete with donor briefings, courtroom drama, and cross-Atlantic medical disputes. But look closer, and you’ll see the real structure: this isn’t journalism. It’s liturgy.
Beneath the pretense of balance, Confessore performs what the modern left media does best — not reporting facts, but crafting narrative scaffolding to normalize radical innovations in medicine, law, and morality. This is not a neutral chronicle of events. It is a strategic exercise in cultural formation.
Let’s break it down.
I. Emotional Gravity, Scientific Ambiguity
The article opens not with a legal brief, but a parade. A.C.L.U. lawyers descend the steps of the Supreme Court to rainbow flags and club music. The crowd cheers. History is “made.” But what was the case even about?
We don’t find out for paragraphs.
The teenage plaintiff, anonymized as “L.W.,” is introduced not as a legal claimant but as a tragic figure. The language is telling: “I felt like I was trapped in the wrong body.” That’s not medical terminology — it’s metaphysics. And Confessore never questions it. Instead, he amplifies it with words like “lifesaving,” “vulnerable,” and “existence.” The moral pressure is overwhelming. To deny puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones is framed not as medical prudence but as existential violence.
Meanwhile, critics of pediatric gender medicine — including those within Europe’s own public health systems — are lumped in as “backlash,” “right-wing,” or “religious conservatives.” Serious concerns raised by the U.K.’s Cass Review, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, or whistleblowing clinicians at WPATH are mentioned — but always filtered through political framing, never allowed to stand on their own as reasoned opposition.
This is not reporting. It is framing. Emotional testimony is given a megaphone. Dissent is shoved behind glass.
II. Historical Fiction as Progress Narrative
Confessore does something especially sly: he attempts to graft the transgender movement onto the legacy of civil rights, even as it diverges radically from it.
Consider this line: “Trans and nonbinary people have always been here.” It sounds like a historical claim. But what it’s actually doing is collapsing two different realities — individuals who may have quietly suffered gender dysphoria in the past, and a post-2010s ideology that erases biological sex altogether. The trick is subtle, but powerful: invent a legacy to legitimize a novelty.
Just five years ago, the notion that 13-year-olds should receive hormone treatments and mastectomies would have been met with shock — even among liberals. Now it’s framed as inevitable. Why? Because the narrative structure demands it. Just as gay marriage was once considered fringe and is now mainstream, we’re meant to believe that medical transition for minors is the next step in our national moral evolution.
But it isn’t. It’s a rupture, not a continuation. No founder of the civil rights movement — not Frederick Douglass, not Martin Luther King — ever fought for the right of children to alter their bodies to match their feelings. To pretend otherwise is historical vandalism.
III. Words as Weapons: The Tyranny of Terminology
Watch how Confessore handles language.
- “Sex assigned at birth” replaces the medically grounded term biological sex. This phrase suggests arbitrariness — as though sex is merely a doctor’s opinion, not an objective observation.
- “Gender-affirming care” is repeated like a mantra. It implies compassion and truth, but rarely means counseling. It almost always means irreversible drugs and surgeries — including the removal of healthy body parts.
- “Medical necessity” is used again and again — despite the article’s own acknowledgment that European medical bodies consider the evidence base to be “low certainty” or “inconclusive.”
And note the double standard: activists get to use sweeping, emotionally charged claims — “this is suicide-prevention care” — while critics are described using distancing phrases like “so-called experts.”
This is not the language of analysis. It’s the language of ideological enforcement.
IV. From Margins to Martyrs — The Manufactured Arc
Confessore constructs his article like a parable: a brave minority ascends to the Supreme Court, where their humanity is finally recognized — or denied.
That structure demands a villain. Enter “right-wing politicians,” “Trump-appointed judges,” and shadowy groups with “biased media coverage.” No matter that the article itself admits deep strategic disagreements within the LGBTQ legal movement. No matter that Europe — hardly a bastion of American conservatism — has walked back these treatments out of genuine medical concern.
Even internal critics like Brianna Wu or WPATH’s own former leadership are treated as side characters — internal tensions, not red flags. The real story — that the scientific foundation for pediatric transition is crumbling — is buried.
The result is a narrative that demands you feel more than you think.
V. No Room for Moral Dissent
Perhaps most revealing is the utter lack of moral counterargument. Nowhere in the article does Confessore present, in full and fair terms, the view that children deserve to mature without irreversible medical interventions. That parents may object not out of hate, but out of love. That sex is real, not assigned. That caution is not cruelty.
Those views exist — they’re growing, in fact — but they don’t appear here as worthy of consideration. They are only ever positioned as obstacles to be overcome. That’s not journalism. That’s catechism.
Conclusion: The Paper of Record, the Priesthood of Ideology
The New York Times has not just taken a side — it has taken on a role. It is now the liturgical voice of a new orthodoxy, one that demands your affirmation or silence. Its language is sanctified. Its narratives are unquestionable. Its version of “truth” is not discovered — it is imposed.
The article by Nicholas Confessore isn’t just the story of a legal case. It’s a sermon to the American public: this is what you must believe, or you are the problem.
Let us be absolutely clear: trans-identifying people, like all people, deserve dignity. But dignity is not the same as unquestioned ideological surrender. And the American people deserve journalism that reports facts — not constructs dogma.
The real story isn’t what happened at the Supreme Court. It’s how The New York Times is trying to write your conscience for you.
Attribution:
This article is a critical analysis of “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost,” by Nicholas Confessore, published in The New York Times, June 19, 2025. All direct quotes and references are drawn from that article.
