Shameless Promo Alert: Discourse Blogger Writes For Other Place

Please read this thing I wrote in The Nation please!

Genuine photo of the editorial process at The Nation. (Photo by KEYSTONE-FRANCE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Hello hello, as the headline says, this is a shameless promo! I recently got a job filling in as a senior editor at The Nation, which is really nice, and today, I wrote a big piece all about one of Discourse Blog’s favorite topics: the New York Times and how its coverage of trans people is terrible.

The piece came about after I made the kind of mistake I usually nab other people for: I went on a rant to one of my bosses. He then said, “Sounds like a blog!” (Well, he said it in loftier terms; this is The Nation, after all.) And thus, I had played myself, in exactly the same way I had caught so many Discourse Bloggers playing themselves. I am not one to shirk the rule of the blogger: if you go on a long rant about something, you have to blog it. So I did.

Specifically, I looked at how the Times, in its zeal to portray trans people as a bunch of suspicious oddities and not as, y’know, humans, is walking into the exact same mess that it created for itself over 30 years ago, when its bad coverage of LGBTQ rights and the AIDS crisis gained a similar level of notoriety.

From the piece:

It is somewhat astonishing, then, that in its coverage of trans people—and its patronizing wrath toward its critics—the Times is repeating the same mistakes [from its past]. The parallels between its current anti-trans coverage and its past coverage of gay rights are obvious. But the Times appears blind to them—and blind to the fact that, in its obstinance and its arrogance, it is once again placing itself in a situation that it will later regret.

I went through decades of past Times coverage of queer issues—there is some CRAZY shit in there, lemme tell ya—and I also talked to Donna Cartwright, the first openly trans person in the history of the Times, about how she views the paper’s anti-trans turn.

Anyway, I think it turned out nice, and so here is the link again if you want to read it.

PS: I also like this blog because of what they wrote for my bio.

That’s right!!!! I am very proud to see Discourse Blog, the greatest blog in the history of the universe, get a shoutout in The Nation.¹ What could be better???

OK, shameless promo over, Rafi will be back tomorrow with an actual blog.

1. Before any Nation people raise their eyebrows, let me stress that The Nation is a magazine, not a blog, so there’s no competition.