The New York Times has published a piece outlining some of the dangers of young, impressionable children or teenagers undergoing genital mutiliations as part of their sex change surgery.

In a piece clearly marked as 'Opinion,' the Times published a piece by columnist Pamela Paul with the headline: 'As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.'

Over the course of her article, Paul outlines the case of 23-year-old Grace Powell, who experienced feelings of gender dysphoria when she was a teenager. 

The Times explains:

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell told the paper. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

However, the article goes on to argue that despite the behavior of "right-wing demagogues," the transgender movement is full of its own extremists: 

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

The Times also quoted the view of Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric tragender clinic in the U.S., who revealed that when she started working all her patients suffered from long-standing gender dyspohria. 

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

“You have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan," she continued. "Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Although perfectly obvious to the average person, such inflammatory claims will only excacerbate tensions about the paper's coverage of the trans issue. 

Last year, nearly 1,000 New York Times contributors, as well as tens of thousands of subscribers and readers of the Times, signed an open letter to the paper’s standards editor denouncing its coverage of the transgender issue.

The letter stated:

For those of us who truly treasured the Times’ coverage for so many years, it is appalling to see how the news and opinion pages are now full of misguided, inaccurate, and disingenuous ‘both sides’ fear mongering and bad faith ‘just asking questions’ coverage. We won’t stand for the Times platforming lies, bias, fringe theories, and dangerous inaccuracies. We demand fair coverage, we demand that the Times platform trans voices as both sources and full-time writers and editors, and we demand a meeting between Times leadership and the transgender community.

Whether the Times has heeded their list of demands remains unclear.