The New York Times today (12/2/16) has an op-ed by a trans writer Jennifer Finney Boylan talking about the election—which is refreshing, as trans people are more often written about than writing in prominent papers. She opens with an account of watching TV punditry the morning after the election:
On TV, a commentator speculated that Mrs. Clinton had lost because of her party’s focus on things like trans rights —“boutique issues,” they were called.
A boutique — a place where you’d shop for, say, artisan pantyhose — is not the first place I’d associate with an individual’s quest for equal protection under the law, but then what did I know? I was now one of the people from whom the country had been “taken back.”
The phrase echoed unpleasantly in my mind. A boutique issue? Is this what my fellow Americans had thought of my fight for dignity all along?
The use of the “boutique issues” phrase is a major point in the op-ed—Boylan goes on to discuss Bill Maher’s use of the same expression—so which commentator said it on that morning after?
Well, as writer Melissa Gira Grant pointed out on Twitter (12/2/16), it was New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni.
Times drops a rare trans rights op-ed. Perhaps edited out? The “commentator” was NYT’s Frank Bruni! https://t.co/I2hGXLamO4 pic.twitter.com/scVbOPf3LE
— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) December 2, 2016
Bruni appeared on MSNBC Live the morning after the election (11/9/16), talking to host Stephanie Ruhle about where Democrats went wrong. It was Ruhle who brought up “LGTB initiatives” and “transgender bathrooms”:
When many of the initiatives that represent Obama, when you think about LGTB initiatives, and it matters to so many people, many people could say, transgender bathrooms in high schools, how many people is that going to impact in this country? Not so many.
In response to which, Bruni replied:
I think in a lot of ways the Democratic Party has become this collection of boutique issues. That they think if you add them all together, you get to 51 percent or 52. But when you do those sorts of boutique issues, and you put all your firepower and all your rhetoric there, there’s a lot of the country that feels ignored. I really think the Democratic Party has to do some big soul-searching here.
If Boylan didn’t catch the name of the commentator she saw, it was not hard to find; if I put “boutique issues November 9 MSNBC” into Google, the first thing that comes up is a piece on Breitbart (11/9/16) approvingly recounting the conversation.
It seems more likely that the omission of Bruni’s name—a familiar one, of course, to regular readers of the Times op-ed page—was a deliberate choice. Note that Maher got different treatment—which seems to suggest a different standard for commentators who work for HBO vs. those who write for the New York Times.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @JNaureckas.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Liz Spayd at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @SpaydL). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
The Media’s ( especially Huffington Post’s ) obsession with LGBTQIA issues, instead of concentrating Worker / Labor Union issues, in addition to the Bernie-or-Busters, helped to put Trump in the White House.
Something tells me Bruni and the Times don’t consider kowtowing to corporate CEOs, of whom there are considerably fewer than trans folks, to be a matter of a “boutique issue”.
Ironic when you consider where their shopping habits lead them, isn’t it?
FAIR does great work holding the media’s feet to the fire on issues of great consequence to the public. But to my mind, it too often carps about trivial matters such as the NYT’s apparently deliberate shielding of columnist Frank Bruni as the speaker of the term, “boutique issues,” as discussed in this op-ed. Big deal. What’s the awful consequence of this? Highlighting every little slight that enters FAIR’s radar not only wastes its, and our, time, but crying wolf so often dilutes its credibility where it counts.
Please keep your guns trained on the big issues.
Steve,
You know that Bruni is a gay man?
It’s not many years ago that gay (not trans) rights were trivialized in the mainstream press, what that kind of belittling of gay rights say in 1995 a “little slight”?
But Bruni is also a White Male so he may be counting on that status to protect him during a Trump regime, and it is not as if Mr. Bruni has ever had that much empathy for the other “others” out there anyway. Also, the use of the word “boutique” also betrays an old stereotyping of sexual minorities by identifying them through their alleged patterns of consumption. Real Americans don’t patronize “boutiques”.
But let is take Bruni seriously for a second. He is telling us that that the nation belongs to its bigots and that failure to appeal them and their bigotry is a losing proposition: if Democrats want the White House back, ditch those other “others”, and the poor and women and the overall dispossessed.
And is that not the usual advice that the Times gives Democrats who aspire to (and sometimes win) the Presidency anyway?
On election day, Bruni, in a NY Times blog piece wrote something like:
I just voted for a woman president at my local elementary school.
Implicit in his statement was “the first woman to win the presidency”.
He was so stupid that he couldn’t even qualify his blog with “likely winner” or “a candidate who, whether she wins or not, is the first woman to be the nominee of one of the two major parties”. And since he couldn’t utter the word term “major party”, it appears that it didn’t occur to him that he could be saying “I just voted for Jill Stein”.
He, like so many others, just assumed that Hillary would win.
His peeling off trans people into yet another category, one he trivializes, is no great surprise.
the New York Times, shame, shame, shame. Chain chain chiain, chain of fools they are. I guess when your not the one oppressed or marginalized its easy to dismiss Trans rights at boutique issues, well here’s hoping they don’t have future children or other loved ones who will face the discrimination of a Trump presidency.