There are some revolutions that the Old Gray Lady just doesn’t get…

The New York Times is widely considered the leading daily newspaper in the United States, and its editorial page, which could be called ‘the voice of the establishment,’ is one of the most influential. When the Times gets it right, as it often does, that influence can be helpful to the cause; but when the Times gets it wrong, it can go very wrong indeed.

On Nov. 9, two days after the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 3685 — the version of the Employment Nondiscrimination Act without gender identity or expression — the Times weighed in on the issue. In an editorial entitled “An Overdue Step for Equal Justice,” the Times editorial board praised “the diligent efforts of Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the measure’s chief sponsor, and fellow Democrats Steny Hoyer, Tammy Baldwin and Speaker Nancy Pelosi” and called passage of ENDA “a significant, if long overdue, breakthrough for equality and fairness.”

The Times editorial board noted the controversy over inclusion of gender identity and expression — language that would include transgendered people and enhance protection for gender-variant lesbian, gay and bisexual people — writing, “We sympathize with the groups’ sense of injustice, but disagree heartily as to strategy. Transgender people should be protected from discrimination, and we hope they soon will be. It would have been regrettable, however, had the sponsors refused to compromise, and as a result, lost the chance to extend basic civil rights to the millions of Americans who would be covered by the current bill.”

But what ‘compromise’ is the Times editorial board referring to? As far as I’m aware, no Republican — let alone the Republican minority leader — offered support in exchange for the ‘compromise’ of stripping ENDA of transgender-inclusive language. The elimination of gender identity from the inclusive ENDA bill introduced in April was not a compromise, but a betrayal — a betrayal of the promise that Pelosi and Frank made to their own members as well as to the LGBT community to move forward with H.R. 2065, the inclusive bill that had the support of the entire community.

The Times editorial board compounded the mistake of its wrong-headed editorial with a wrong-headed and confused post on its new blog, “The Board.” In its Nov. 9, post, “Gay Rights, the Transgendered, and Accepting Partial Progress,” the editorial board echoed the confused and superficial non-thinking of its editorial, praising Nancy Pelosi and criticizing U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), one of seven Democrats to buck the House leadership and vote against the exclusionary ENDA bill on principle. “It’s frustrating to take equality one step at a time,” sniffed the editorial board writers. “But that is how equal justice has been won in this country.” To add insult to injury, the editorial board even backed up this supercilious and uninformed opinion with a reference to a “Timeline of Federal Civil Rights Laws, prepared by the Human Rights Campaign,” which the editorial board seems to think captures “the incremental nature of the nation’s long march toward equal justice.”

By simply parroting the party line on incrementalism from the HRC press release on ENDA, the Times editorial board demonstrated a failure to think through the underlying issues involved in the controversy over transgender inclusion in the bill.

Passage of ENDA in the House will give not a single lesbian or gay person any more rights than s/he had before Nov. 7. The White House has already announced the inevitable presidential veto of the bill should ENDA get through the Senate. Rather than incremental progress, passage of the stripped down ENDA bill by the House represents regress from the nominal commitment of Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and their Democratic colleagues in the House — as well as the LGBT community itself — to full transgender inclusion in federal non-discrimination law. And that is in fact the issue at hand: the right of transgendered people to live lives free from invidious discrimination, which has nothing to do with the false issue of incrementalism mooted by HRC, Pelosi and Frank and parroted unthinkingly the Times.

It is a topsy-turvy world in which the Times editorial board uses HRC timelines rather than discussions with LGBT activists — at least, those not associated with HRC and the Washington power elite — to inform its editorials and its blog posts. What the Nov. 9 editorial and blog post demonstrate is how far removed from the lives of real LGBT people and especially real transgendered people the New York Times editorial board really is.