15 Ways Andrew Sullivan’s NYT Essay Undermines Trans Adults

He pretends to worry about the kids, but he’s all kinds of worried about adults

Panic by Dmitry Abramov, colorized background based on B&W by Noopur, both on Pixabay

Andrew Sullivan, a conservative gay commentator who’s been writing about gay issues since the ’80s, had a long essay in the New York Times on June 26.

Ostensibly it was to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court case that guaranteed the right to same-sex marriage in all states.

However, he barely mentioned marriage. Guess what he wrote about instead? What the New York Times pays everyone to write about: the problem of trans people.

There’s ongoing demand for this insult, even be it (as Sullivan’s is) a rehash of the anti-trans arguments we’ve heard ad nauseam for the last five years baked into a four-thousand-word, disorganized array of self-contradiction.

Sullivan parrots “gender-critical” arguments heavily flavored with respectability politics. I’ve debunked these before. Four years ago, when Sullivan posted “A Truce Proposal in the Trans Wars,” I nitpicked every one of his 121 sentences.

Here, instead of debunking everything he says about trans kids, I’ll take a different approach. Sullivan claims he’s examining the problem of trans kids, and…