A response to Mark Patinkin’s disgraceful ProJo column
On one hand, the Journal is a dying paper
bedeviled by awful corporate ownership, and Patinkin
is a columnist who is perennially, often nauseatingly, wrong. He’s the kind of
columnist who called fellow journalists “disrespectful”
and “obnoxious” for the way they questioned Donald Trump during his first term;
who has mocked efforts to remove a racial
caricature as the mascot for an NFL team; who once wrote, “I sometimes think workers’
rights have gone too far. They can trample on something no one seems to care
about anymore: Management rights,” and in a separate column, proclaimed, “I’m not
going to cave to self-righteous lectures about it being my duty to embrace some
doctrinaire ‘ism,’ especially one I consider among the most dogmatic of all —
feminism.”
He’s a hack.
And yet the Journal remains Rhode Island’s
paper of record, and Patinkin is its last remaining staff opinion writer. His
words, poorly chosen though they may be, still carry some heft. And in this
moment of acute peril for transgender folks, they deserve a response.
To spare you the displeasure of reading Patinkin’s column,
I’ll summarize it. The thesis comes in its final line when he writes, “It’s why
I'm behind both President Trump and the NCAA for banning transgender student-athletes from playing
women’s sports.” In support of this position, he tells a
(literally) 25-year-old story from when his daughter was 11 years old, and he
took her to a girl’s basketball camp at Brown University, where a few boys
attended and wound up winning the bulk of the camp’s trophies, which he felt
was wrong. “You might expect that 25 years later, my disappointment would have
faded,” he writes. “But I still think about how unfair it was to allow even a
few boys into a girls’ sports camp.” This dusty anecdote is apparently sufficient
to justify his support for Trump’s ban. He cites nothing else – no other
stories, no statistics, no research – to bolster his position.
The column is so self-evidently bad that criticism almost feels redundant. But it was published, and so I feel compelled to publish a response.
First, Patinkin’s column fails because his lone piece of
“evidence” in support of Trump’s ban is a 25-year-old story that doesn’t
involve transgender athletes. Patinkin admits as much when he states near the
top of the piece: “The case I’m talking about did not involve boys who had
transitioned.” This is where his editor (if he has one) should have spiked the
piece: it’s a column purportedly about transgender folks in sports that doesn’t
discuss transgender folks playing sports.
Second, Patinkin fails because he neglected to include key –
and glaring – context that would have undermined his own argument. According to the NCAA’s own president there
are fewer than ten transgender athletes among the 510,000 athletes currently
competing in college athletics. Even if you round that number up to 10, we’re
talking about an issue involving around 0.002 percent of NCAA athletes. It is
an infinitesimally small issue. An honest commentator would have mentioned this
– or acknowledged the research that debunks his thesis.
Patinkin did neither.
Thirdly, Patinkin’s column fails because, in its narrow focus on the supposed excesses of trans advocacy, he gave the false impression that transgender folks are a privileged class stomping through cisgender institutions and ruining things for the rest of us. The reverse is true. Few groups in our society are more vulnerable than transgender folks. They are more likely to experience homelessness than their cisgender peers. One in four transgender adults report having been physically attacked, while more than 4 out of 5 trans employees have experienced discrimination at work.
Here in the Ocean State, a recent survey showed that,
to quote from ABC6, “71% of transgender
Rhode Island high school students said they’ve felt so sad or hopeless for two
or more weeks during the past year that they’ve stopped their normal
activities, a rate that is twice as high as the number of cisgender students
who reported the same feelings.”
With this column, Patinkin used his platform to stoke
animosity toward an already vulnerable and victimized group. In doing so, he
failed to uphold one of the pillars of the Society of Professional Journalists’s Code of Ethics which
calls on journalists – including columnists – to “MINIMIZE HARM” and treat
“sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings
deserving of respect.” If Patinkin considered the humanity of actual trans
folks when writing the piece or seriously weighed the consequences of his
column, it didn’t show in the finished product.
Speaking of journalism, it belies a profound lack of news
judgment that Patinkin would pick February 2025 as a time to write about a
statistically nonexistent “crisis.” At a time when crowds are assembling for
emergency protests in Kennedy Plaza; when a Nazi-saluting oligarch is
machete-ing his way through the executive branch; when trans folks in
particular are facing a “series of executive
orders and actions attempting to exclude transgender people from nearly every
aspect of American public life”; when every day brings a non-stop barrage of
abuses of powers, corruption, and democratic deterioration, Patinkin decided to
scotch-tape an old grudge onto a few words of praise for our
demagogue-in-chief.
Trans folks deserve better than this. They deserve our love,
support, and solidarity.
And they deserve our material support, too. After writing
this piece, I donated to TGI Network of Rhode Island, which
describes itself as the only statewide organization focused solely on providing
support and advocacy for the state’s transgender, gender diverse and intersex
communities.
The site didn’t ask me to explain the donation, but for the
record: I did it in honor of Mark Patinkin.
Steve Ahlquist is a reader-supported publication. To receive
new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
