The New York Times Celebrates Gender Confusion for Father’s Day

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the unusual — but totally expected — way the New York Times chose to mark Father’s Day, and we cover more media misses.

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Gender Confusion and Male Postpartum Depression: Happy Father’s Day from the New York Times!

For most Americans, Father’s Day is about men. Most families — those that don’t include any New York Times editors — mark the occasion by giving dad the opportunity to indulge in some male behavior, playing golf, grilling, having a beer, or guiltlessly monopolizing the TV to watch a mid-season baseball game.

But Times editors are different. For them, Father’s Day offers the perfect opportunity to promote gender confusion among children. This Father’s Day, the Times shared with its readers the story of a biological woman who identifies as a dad, and who has seemingly made it her child’s responsibility to help her feel more comfortable in her assumed gender.

Zach Ellams, who is female, authored an illustrated essay, “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated,” explaining that while Ellams had been a “trans man” since she turned 18, that she “had to learn how to talk about it” once her daughter, Elliot, was born.

“I had to trust her with the most vulnerable version of myself,” the writer says of her daughter.

The cartoon illustrations depict the young girl telling her “dad,” “I told my friends at school that mom made you a cake when you got your surgery.”

“Oh, right. That’s nice, but I don’t actually tell everyone I’m trans. I save that for special people,” the author tells the girl.

“Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t tell them you were trans,” the daughter says.

Later illustrations depict the child saying she wants to grow a beard when she grows up. When she’s told by the other children that she can’t grow a beard because she’s a girl, she replies, “My dad did, and he was a girl.”

In another panel, she earnestly asks, “How long did you have breasts for, dad?”

After detailing the obvious gender confusion she’s instilling in her young child, the author adds, “Kids can accept things at face value. They can move between complex topics . . . to something absurd within moments. It’s usually us adults that complicate matters.”

But the overarching message of the illustrated essay comes at the end, when the author explains that raising her daughter and watching her move through the world has helped her to “embrace who I am.”

“I thought I was teaching Elliot how to be happy and secure. Yet all along she had been doing that for me,” the author concludes.

Read more DOJ Joins Catholic Nuns in Lawsuit Against N.Y. Transgender Law

In another Father’s Day article that collapses the distinction between men and women, Health and Science Reporter Pam Belluck explores the phenomenon of male postpartum depression, elevating the stories of neurotic men who have been convinced by psychologists that their struggles are valid and comparable to those of their wives who, it should be said, just gave birth:

Daniel Singley, a psychologist in San Diego who founded a therapy center for men, said depressed fathers are more prone to express aggravation, annoyance or even rage. “Under that is feeling hurt, sad, afraid, ashamed, helpless, hopeless, but what we see externally is anger and irritability,” he said.

Paternal depression may manifest in physical symptoms like muscle tension or stomach pain. And men are considered more likely to mask symptoms with behaviors that can be detrimental, including drugs, alcohol or gambling, Dr. Singley said.

Dr. Fisher said some men believe they should only prioritize supporting the baby’s mother’s concerns over their symptoms and some have “a hesitancy to admit” that they are struggling.

It has apparently not occurred to Dr. Fisher that that “hesitancy” to make your feelings the focus when your wife is going through an incredibly trying time, both physically and mentally, is the product of healthy masculinity and is not something we should be encouraging men to do away with.

Leave it to the New York Times to use Father’s Day as an opportunity to undermine the very meaning of fatherhood.

Perhaps its little surprise that state lawmakers who count the paper’s staff as constituents are currently engaged in an effort to reduce fathers to “non-gestating parents” and mothers to “gestating parent” in the name of gender neutrality.

Headline Fail of the Week

There’s been no shortage of think pieces about how, or whether, U.S. soccer fans can enjoy the World Cup while their country apparently “burns down” around them.

The Seattle Times joined in on the discourse this week: “How Seattleites are grappling with USA soccer fandom in Trump’s America.”

“Some Seattle soccer fans have mixed feelings about patriotically backing the U.S. team during the FIFA Men’s World Cup, given the actions of President Donald Trump,” the paper explained in a post on X.

One fan told the paper he was “struggling to separate his love for U.S. soccer from his negative feelings about high ticket prices, President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants and Trump’s war with Iran, among other things.”

Read more Parents Demand Warnings on LGBT-Related Children’s Content

Media Misses

• MS NOW guest Akilah Hughes said Sunday she doesn’t think America will last another 250 years “if we’re on the same trajectory.””You know, 250 was a stretch,” she said, adding, “We have a concerted effort from the current administration to forget about history, to sort of destroy public education, to destroy public works, to privatize everything. And if we know one thing about corporations, you know, in the long term, they are not giving back to the people.””I think we are a very young democracy. There are so many other countries that have come and gone, and I don’t know why we believe we are immune to that.”
• Democrats are once again showing that unfounded rhetoric about stolen elections is okay, as long as it comes from their side. Rosie O’Donnell said last week that she moved to Ireland after President Trump won his second term because she “never in a million years thought we would put a convicted felon, who tried to start an insurrection, back in office. How did that happen? I don’t think it happened. I think Kamala won. I do.””I think that we’re going to find all this out, it’s going to come out,” she told former CNN anchor Jim Acosta. “I’m not the first person to say this. There are all these researchers who are saying it. I read it online again today,”
• The removal of President Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center proved to be a major event for Jim Acosta, who live-streamed on his YouTube channel for nearly eleven hours into early Saturday morning as signage with Trump’s name was removed from the building. “This is very much like watching the Berlin Wall coming down,” Acosta said.”It is a sign that mankind, that humankind can stand up against tyranny,” he added. “As long as it took, we pledged to continue to have this coverage going, and by golly, we did, because we knew how much this meant to a lot of people out there, and we know how important this was.”