Pamela Paul

I demand to speak to the editor!

Parroting squawkbox Pundits

And a dirty dozen more

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“”Usually it takes a columnist a few years to get to a certain level of asininity; Paul, who started at the opinion desk in April, has summited the highest peak on column five.

—Leah Finnegan

Pamela Paul is an op-ed writer who has gotten quite infamous since she got a column for The New York Times in 2022, though she had a history working for the newspaper long before that point. Although vaguely presenting herself as a centrist liberal, its clearly apparent that she is far more conservative than she lets on; as most of her writings are usually the same type of mindless and reactionary culture war slope you'll find on a Fox News segment (often accompanied by a stylish photograph or illustration above the essay, as if to create the illusion that what you're reading is more sophisticated and interesting than it actually is), but for some reason being laundered in a supposedly "prestigious" legacy newspaper. These primarily come in the form of articles either lamenting over whatever social issue/controversy is trending at the moment or criticizing members of the progressive left for going "too far", even though she does sometimes argue these points through left-wing terminology.

To give everybody an idea of just where her priorities lie, her first ever column for The New York Times was "The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’", where she criticized the idea that only those of a certain background can write about specific topics. Her article is filled with strawmen, with lines like the following:

It’s essentially a turf war. Only Latino authors can write novels about Latinos. Only Holocaust survivors can convey the truth of the Holocaust. Only disabled people can portray disabled people. Everyone else is out.

Paul offers no evidence for the claim that anybody has ever said, "Only Holocaust survivors can convey the truth of the Holocaust," a statement so obviously absurd that the vast majority of humanity would condemn it. The most we get is a reference to three controversies several paragraphs before hand, which reads:

Did Dana Schutz, a white artist, have the right to paint Emmett Till? Was it fair that a white historian, David Blight, won a Pulitzer for his biography of Frederick Douglass? Should Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner be the ones to update “West Side Story,” a musical conceived by four Jewish men but fundamentally about Puerto Rican lives?

However, of the three examples given, exactly one was actually involved in a public controversy. Best as anybody can tell, the only one of those to actually cause any controversy was the situation with Dana Schutz, and that was less because she merely painted Emmett Till and more because people felt, in the words of British artist and critic Hannah Black, "it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun." Jo Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye also say they felt it was tasteless for her to attempt to recreate the icon photo of Till's open casket saying the artist in question had "disrespected that act of dignity [given to the Till family through having an open casket funeral], by defacing them with her own creative way of seeing." Even if you disagree, this is far more complicated than merely "painting Emmett Till."

Dan Froomkin of PressWatchers.org wrote in response to this column, "Wow. New @nytopinion columnist comes out of the gates with a straw-man panic attack on wokeism. Just what the place didn’t need." Little did he know this was only the beginning.

Transphobia

Meme created to mock one of Paul's articles.

Meme made to mock one of Paul's articles.

See the main article on this topic: Transphobia

One of Paul's most notorious aspects is her transphobia, expressed all throughout her various columns, although her coziness with the transphobic goes back long before that point, earning her the label of "The Gray Lady's In-House Transphobe" as one writer put it. As GLADD once noted, "Paul was New York Times Books Editor when writer Jesse Singal, who is not transgender but who has built a career inaccurately writing about trans issues and targeting trans people, reviewed, and supported his friend’s inaccurate anti-trans book."

Paul typically tries to cloak her contempt for trans people by concern trolling petty complaints over some supposedly new type of semantics or personal expression that she simply happens to "disagree" with. For example, one article of hers with the headline "The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count" (published nine days after the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade by the way) claims progressives "deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes." Never mind how one of the terms she alleges activists are using to replace "women" is "birthing people," a term which involves explicitly calling the person a person when describing who they are. One particularly telling moment regarding how quick Paul is to not consider the wider context of the situation comes in this line:

Last year the British medical journal The Lancet patted itself on the back for a cover article on menstruation. Yet instead of mentioning the human beings who get to enjoy this monthly biological activity, the cover referred to “bodies with vaginas.” It’s almost as if the other bits and bobs — uteruses, ovaries or even something relatively gender-neutral like brains — were inconsequential. That such things tend to be wrapped together in a human package with two X sex chromosomes is apparently unmentionable.

This was in reference to The Lancet tweeting out the cover to its latest issue, which contained the quote "Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected." Paul wonders why the medical journal didn't use the word "woman" in reference to this group of people, but actually reading the article this quote came from shows they did in the very same paragraph that was being quoted on the cover:

Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected—for example, the paucity in understanding of endometriosis and the way women's pain has been seen as more likely to have an emotional or psychological cause, a hangover from centuries of theorising about hysteria. This exhibition and the Vagina Museum as a whole aim to redress this lack of attention. (Emphasis ours)

The article comparing those who advocate for inclusive language with anti-abortion activists also got it called "a nasty bit of business" by journalist Patrick Ness.

False comparisons between modern progressives and those on the far right are a reoccurring staple of Paul's columns, it should be noted. In an article of hers defending disgraced children's fantasy author J.K. Rowling, she writes:

This isn’t the first time Rowling and her work have been condemned by ideologues. For years, books in the “Harry Potter” series were among the most banned in America. Many Christians denounced the books’ positive depiction of witchcraft and magic; some called Rowling a heretic. Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the author of “Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism,” says that she appreciated the novels as a child but, raised in a family notorious for its extremism and bigotry, she was taught to believe Rowling was going to hell over her support for gay rights.

This is far from the most hyperbolic comparison in the column, by the way, as she also writes:

This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

Because having your books pulled from some stores due to your transphobia is the same as having a fucking fatwa put on you, we guess. One writer noted how Paul's comment was "perpetuating the shitty stereotypical trope of trans person as murderer that was played for cheap titillation in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill more than forty years ago."

The entire column is also filled with denial of Rowling being a transphobic, as Christina Cauterucci wrote in response to this:

If transphobia does not apply to someone who would exile trans women in need from shelters and crisis centers that could support them; who believes that there are simply too many transgender children these days, and who would consign trans youth to distress and dysphoria rather than offering treatment that will allow them to pursue safer, happier lives; who believes a handful of vocal detransitioners to be more trustworthy than actual transgender people, such that public policy and social structures should be built according to the notion that every trans person is a detransitioner-in-waiting; who considers trans women inherently deceptive, conniving, and dangerous; and who has built her entire public political persona around casting suspicion on transgender people and the argument that their needs are mutually exclusive to those of cis women and girls — to whom, exactly, should it apply?

Siding with transphobes

Although not everything Paul writes on the LGBT community is evidence of transphobia, she does seem to find herself on the same side as bigots more often than she doesn't. One example is her column "Let’s Say Gay" (the headline is a reference to the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida which gets no references in the actual column) where she criticizes the move away from terms like "gay" and towards terms like "LGBTQ" and "queer." Of course, writing columns like this put her in the same boat as people like the LGB Alliance who are infamous for their transphobia.

It is also worth noting that Paul's chief example of this is Kelley Robinson choosing to describe herself as queer during a video where she explains her life story in response to her becoming the President of the Human Rights Campaign. Tucker Lieberman, writing on Medium, says the following on Paul's choice to criticize her:

What Paul is doing is bothering a Black queer woman — someone whose family history has been shaped by racism and who has devoted her career to women’s reproductive choice and now to marriage equality, and who is personally in a same-gender marriage — over her choice to call herself “queer” rather than “lesbian” in a six-minute video and in her professional tag line as the new president of an inclusive organization. Robinson’s terminology is her choice — personal, professional, and activist — and is based on her expertise. She must have reasons for the words she chooses, which Paul did not interview her about. But Paul — a white, straight woman who has not been an activist on these issuesstraight— is pretty sure that Robinson’s language is a problem.

None of this is even getting into the factual errors present in the article, for she example Paul writes:

Many gay people simply prefer the word “gay.” “Gay” has long been a generally positive term. The second definition for “gay” in most dictionaries is something along the lines of “happy,” “lighthearted” and “carefree.” Whereas “queer” has been, first and foremost, a pejorative. For a certain generation, “queer” is still what William F. Buckley, jaw clenching, called Gore Vidal on ABC in 1968 — “Listen, you queer” — before threatening to “sock you in your goddamn face.”

However, this ignores the fact that "gay" had also been used as a playground insult for much of the 1990s and 2000s.

Another article sees her write about "a strain of progressivism that has repurposed some of the very stereotypes women and men worked so hard to sweep away" specifically in relation to gender roles. She goes on to write:

Now we risk losing those advances. In lieu of liberating children from gender, some educators have doubled down, offering children a smorgasbord of labels — gender identity, gender role, gender performance and gender expression — to affix to themselves from a young age. Some go so far as to suggest that not only is gender “assigned” to people at birth but that sex in humans is a spectrum (even though accepted science holds that sex in humans is fundamentally binary, with a tiny number of people having intersex traits). The effect of all this is that today we are defining people — especially children — by gender more than ever before, rather than trying to free both sexes from gender stereotypes.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) wrote a very detailed response to this article, noting the similarities between the rhetoric of Paul and the writings of the anti-transgender movement, saying:

Though she positions herself as a free speech liberal, Paul’s position reads remarkably like that of QAnon Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene, who proudly displayed a large sign outside her office announcing, “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. ‘Trust The Science!’”… Remember how Paul initially said the problem is that “a strain of progressivism” has “repurposed” gender stereotypes? Did you perhaps wonder what that means? She never explains it; she simply lets readers connect the dots on their own, with the obvious implication being that trans and non-binary people, by embracing a gender identity different from the one tied to their “biological reality,” are failing to challenge stereotypes and instead reinforcing them.

FAIR also makes note of an incident where Paul dedicated a column to defending a novel that was criticized for being transphobic without actually engaging in the arguments made against the novel in question.

Detransitioners

On 2/2/2024, Paul's column "As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do." was published, primarily consisting of a profile of detransitioners, or people who previously thought they were transgender but no longer believe that to be the case. The article was filled with misinformation, with transgender journalist Erin Reed writing an extensive fact check of the various claims Paul made. In response to this and another piece critical of her, Paul wrote a short article saying we simply don't know the rate of detransition among transgender people. As Erin Reed said in response "This is despite, in her original piece, devoting 4,500 words that painted a picture of high detransition rates, citing studies that she misread and misunderstood."

Anti-progressive rhetoric

Despite The New York Times being seen by many as some bastion of progressive thought, Paul has a long list of examples of bashing progressives despite writing her column for a relatively short amount of time. One column of hers, called, "There’s More Than One Way to Ban a Book" sees her drawing a false equivalence between attempts from the right to use the government to ban books and those on the left who use petitions and other peaceful methods as ways to attempt to persuade publishers not to work with certain people. Of course, given the right to petition others is a part of freedom of speech, Paul is expressing the paradoxical view that freedom of speech is causing censorship. In the same regard, freedom of association is widely seen as a right under The Constitution, and this should include the right of a publisher to not publish material they do not wish to for whatever reason.

Of course, this comparison that she draws between liberals and conservatives might hold more water if she hadn't defended one of the people most responsible for the right's interest in book banning, Ron DeSantis, whom she wrote an entire article on in order to argue that the left has unfairly demonized him. For those wondering what her understanding of Florida politics is like, at one point she writes:

In a country where government often looks sclerotic, DeSantis’s knack for action bears notice. We can decry his stunt in shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, but we should also be attending to the real concerns of people living in areas of heavy immigration. Lest we forget, Hispanic voters in Florida preferred DeSantis to his Democratic opponent in last year’s election for governor; they also supported his Martha’s Vineyard escapade, according to a Telemundo/LX News poll. “There are lots of Hispanic voters in this state who really like the governor’s style, this strongman who won’t back down,” one pollster explained at the time.

The implication is clearly that Hispanic support for DeSantis is a reason to take him serious, but Latino support for Republicans has been growing all throughout the Trump era, and you can find news stories talking about the importance of Hispanic voters for Republican victories going as far back as 2004.

Science understander

One of her columns, called "The Evidence Is In: Science Should Be Judged on the Merits" covers a supposedly scientific paper being rejected by publishers over its claim that science should be impartial. The problem is this never actually happened, as The American Prospect notes:

In fact, theirs is not a scientific paper based on analysis of verifiable data. It is an opinion essay, filled with anecdotes and stories, making the uncontroversial claim that scientific research should be impartial and the controversial claim that leftists don’t share that view. The authors compare the alleged left-wing bias in current scientific work with the “dangers of replacing merit-based science with ideological control and social engineering” in the former Soviet Union. The paper goes on to attack critical race theory, affirmative action, and efforts to attract more women and people of color into science through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training and policies.

The paper “reads like a rant,” said Michaels, the George Washington University epidemiologist. “It’s a hodgepodge of opinions masquerading as a coherent argument about science.”

Basically, the paper was rejected because, regardless of what you think of its conclusion, it did not fit the mold of what these journals publish. Rejection from scientific journals is a common phenomenon, with the article pointing out:

These authors know very well that the overwhelming majority of research articles submitted to serious scientific journals are rejected. The eminent journal Science accepts only 6.1 percent of submitted papers. Other prestigious journals have similarly low acceptance rates, including Nature (7.6 percent), the British Medical Journal (4 percent), The New England Journal of Medicine (5 percent), The Journal of the American Medical Association (4 percent), and The Lancet (5 percent).

Paul also makes a few odd statements about human nature, such as writing the following:

Consider the increasingly widespread practice of appending a “positionality statement” to one’s research. This is an explicit acknowledgment by the author of an academic paper of his or her identity (e.g., “nondisabled,” “continuing generation”). Positionality statements were first popular in the social sciences and are now spreading to the hard sciences and medicine. The idea is that one’s race, sex, relative privilege and “experiences of oppression” inherently inform one’s research, especially in ways that perpetuate or alleviate bias.

But whatever validity “alternative ways of knowing,” “multiple narratives” and “lived experience” may have in the humanities, they are of questionable utility when it comes to the sciences. Some defenders of positionality statements maintain that these acknowledgments promote objectivity by drawing attention to a researcher’s potential blind spots, but in practice they can have the opposite effect, implying that scientific research isn’t universally valid or applicable — that there are different kinds of knowledge for different groups of people.

However, Paul totally missed the point as to why such practices are used. They are not to show points of view to be more or less valid based on the identity of the person proposing the idea, they are simply statements of bias, something which everybody has. Paul also provides no evidence for what such actions cause "in practice," so she has not actually done anything but made an unsubstantiated statement.

Sex work

In addition to being a TERF, she also happens to be something of a SWERF as well, as evident in the article "What It Means to Call Prostitution ‘Sex Work’" where she argues against the liberal point of view regarding sex work and views the term itself as little more than a euphemism meant to hide what is really going on. Actual people inside the industry found it to be a factually inaccurate piece of misrepresentation, and criticized it thusly.

Paul's prudish attitudes towards prostitution and open sexuality appears to go back as far as the mid-2000s, when she wrote the book Pornified: How Porn is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families in 2006. In the book (the subtitle of which had suspiciously changed the word "damaging" into "transforming" in later editions), Paul makes several Evangelical-like arguments against the ever-growing availability of pornography and adult entertainment on the internet of the time; using a handful of anecdotes and selective studies to portray this cultural trend as a serious national crisis that turns everyday Americans into depraved "sex addicts", breaks apart families, and dehumanizes women.

Karen

Another infamous column of hers is "Don't Call Her 'Karen'" where she talks about the situation surrounding Sarah Comrie and the controversy that developed when one of her videos went viral, defending the woman in question and calling the term "Karen" a misogynist and ageist slur. Zack Linly, a black man, broke down Paul's understanding of the story and explained how she was misrepresenting certain aspects of it in order to make the woman look better than she actually was.