The New York Times added menstrual products to its Manhattan office’s men's bathrooms over the summer, according to internal communications obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The paper’s decision was announced by the vice president for global real estate and facilities, Victor Liu, in a company-wide Slack message. From July 26 to July 29, Liu said, the company would begin "adding menstrual products and sanitary baskets" to the office’s men’s restrooms "to support transgender and non-binary colleagues." The company also announced that it was "removing gendered imagery and adding language that colleagues are welcome to use the restroom in which they feel most comfortable."
The move highlights the growing cultural and political rift between legacy media companies and the general public. Polls show that Americans generally support policies that require individuals who identify as transgender to use bathrooms that match their biological sex. President-elect Donald Trump hammered the transgender issue in his successful campaign last fall, which surveys show was one of his most impactful talking points.
The Times declined to comment.
Just 1 percent of the Times’s workforce identifies as "nonbinary," a category which includes transgender individuals but also those who simply choose not to identify with either gender, according to the paper’s 2023 "Diversity and Inclusion Report." The number of "nonbinary" employees, the report stated, does appear to be climbing, although they are still a negligible portion of the paper’s workforce.
The Times’s efforts to appeal to a broader swath of Americans are often hamstrung by partisan reporters and junior employees who demand the paper move further left. Staff at the paper revolted in the summer of 2020 after the opinion section published a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) that called for sending in the military to quell left-wing riots in the nation’s cities. That column prompted at least one writer, former tech reporter Charlie Warzel, to cry in an emergency staff meeting.
More recently, Times reporters are in the midst of a "rebellion" over the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza, according to the Wall Street Journal. Senior editors, the Journal reported in April, are worried that some reporters "are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests."
The issue of neutrality is apparent in the paper’s domestic coverage as well. The Times reported in October that the issue of whether Vice President Kamala Harris ever worked at McDonald’s was put to rest after reporters interviewed "a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal."
That friend, the paper reported, claimed that Harris’s now-deceased mother told her that Harris worked at McDonald’s one summer in California. The Times neglected to mention that the friend was a campaign surrogate for Harris.
A November survey found that nearly 60 percent of Americans share doubts that Harris ever worked at the fast-food chain. Harris has not provided any evidence that she was ever employed by McDonald’s.
The Times’s staffing headaches continue outside of their reporters. Its tech staff walked off the job one day before Election Day after they could not agree on a new contract.
A deal between The Times Tech Guild and management was reached on Dec. 11. The initial demands made by the Tech Guild included unlimited sick time, mandatory trigger warnings in meetings, and a ban on scented products in break rooms. It is not clear whether those demands were met.
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