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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/briefing/the-protocol.html
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Health care for transgender youths is deeply personal and important to thousands of American families. It’s also one of the most divisive cultural and political issues of our time. Twenty-seven states have banned surgery, hormone treatments or puberty blockers for minors. The Supreme Court will decide soon whether those bans are constitutional.
The Times just published a special six-part podcast on the history of these treatments and the contentious debate. It reflects two years of work by Azeen Ghorayshi, who has reported on the intersection of gender and science for a decade, and Austin Mitchell, a senior audio producer. Jodi, who oversees Times newsletters, spoke to Azeen about the project’s ambition, how she got people to open up, the biggest surprises in the reporting and how her own work has been weaponized.
How was this project different from your prior work on this beat? What were the big unanswered questions you set out to explore?
With this audio series, the interviews are more like long, in-depth conversations. People can connect more easily when they hear others in this way, and it can help challenge assumptions.
The big question we were trying to answer was, How did we get here? The science and the politics have gotten so entangled, but something this reporting made clear is that politics has been baked in all along.
The show is titled “The Protocol,” after the Dutch Protocol, which grew out of the pioneering treatments in the Netherlands in the 1990s and 2000s. Why start there?
