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.
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.