On Monday, March 31, 2025, the University’s annual Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression hosted a conversation between New York Times Magazine staff writer Emily Bazelon and President Michael Roth ’78 to discuss the rising threats to freedom of speech in a dialogue titled “The Fate of Free Speech in the Trump Era.”
Presented by the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life and moderated by Interim Associate Provost, Professor of Music, and Dean of the Arts and Humanities Roger Grant, the Hugo L. Black Lecture is an annual on-campus lecture that attracts public figures and scholars with experience and expertise in matters related to the First Amendment.
Some transgender students, including those from student activist group Beyond Empire, expressed disappointment and frustration with the University for inviting Bazelon to speak on Trans Day of Visibility due to her 2022 article “The Battle Over Gender Therapy.”
According to the original promotion of the event, Roth was not intended to be the host for this year’s lecture. However, Executive Director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life Khalilah Brown-Dean, who was slated to conduct the conversation, abruptly cancelled without reason. Brown-Dean declined a request for comment by The Argus, instead referring reporters to the Office of University Communications.
The University did not respond to an inquiry about the claim that Brown-Dean’s cancellation was due to her stance on Bazelon’s article.
Bazelon’s article addressed existing conflicts within the medical community concerning gender transition therapy, particularly for transgender minors. It covered perspectives ranging from clinicians emphasizing the need for comprehensive assessments due to rising cases and complex mental health factors to trans advocates and medical practitioners who argue that requiring extended evaluations imposes harmful barriers; today, Balezon wrote, many conservatives push for bans of the care altogether, contributing to increasing polarization around the issue.
Following its publication, Bazelon faced reproval for presenting what critics viewed as a false balance between families aiming to find appropriate gender-affirming care for their child, and opponents seeking to criminalize this care. Disapproval was garnered from LGBTQ advocacy organizations, among others.
In an open letter published on Feb. 15, 2023, nearly 200 New York Times contributors criticized the publication of Bazelon’s article. They referenced the fact that the article cited and improperly misidentified a former president of an anti-trans advocacy group as simply an individual who had detransitioned and had a personal opinion against gender-affirming care for minors. They also pointed to the fact that multiple experts with whom Bazelon consulted for her article expressed regret that Bazelon had misrepresented their research.
In a subsequent letter published on Feb. 24, 2023, the New York Times writers said that over 1,200 Times contributors and 34,000 readers had signed on to their original letter. Additionally, over 100 LGBTQ advocacy organizations signed a separate letter condemning Bazelon’s article as transphobic, citing reasons similar to the Times’ letter.
Bazelon’s article was also cited in court filings by a number of conservative U.S. attorneys general. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton cited Bazelon’s article when defending laws both banning gender-affirming care for minors and removing protected legal status from transgender individuals of any age. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey cited Bazelon in an emergency order aiming to greatly restrict gender-affirming care. Additionally, Bazelon’s article was cited in an amicus brief filed by 15 Republican attorneys general in defense of an Alabama law seeking to criminalize gender-affirming care.
At the University lecture, Bazelon and Roth spoke to a near-capacity group of faculty and students at Beckham Hall and roughly 200 virtual attendees. After being introduced by Grant, the pair discussed several First Amendment issues that Bazelon wrote about in a 2020 article titled “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation.”
“When I wrote that in 2020, I was thinking about how we were really drowning in a sea of falsehoods and lies and whether there was another way to try and grapple with that,” Bazelon said. “I feel really even more uncertain about suppressing speech in any way…. If it’s regulating social media and algorithms, I still think that’s necessary, but if you have a government that is not operating in good faith and might be using those tools to manipulate a whole information ecosystem to its benefit, then that [concern] becomes even worse.”
They also briefly discussed the online response to her 2022 article.
“This was the story I took on because my editors assigned me to it, and then there was a lot of blowback from some trans activists and litigators on Twitter,” Bazelon said. “I thought really hard about the reaction that I got, and I also was troubled by the fact that I felt like there was a real misperception of what I had actually written. For me and for The New York Times, it is like a fundamental question of journalistic independence. I am not an activist. I’m a journalist, and I feel like I have to show readers what I’m seeing and finding.”
Roth and Bazelon then touched on the threats to journalistic independence from the federal government.
“I don’t think we are afraid to write,” Bazelon said. “Government censorship and all the punishments the government can threaten are different from criticism. I think that the problem right now is bigger for the broadcasters than for the newspapers. But that doesn’t mean that newspapers are not also going to see the same kinds of efforts to chill speech and control speech that universities are seeing right now or that the law firms are experiencing.”
Bazelon further emphasized the importance of freedom of expression and association within the press.
“Once you’re willing to tear out the fabric of American civil society, of course, you’re also going to come after the media, because we’re also being independent and trying to hold the government accountable in some way,” Bazelon said.
On Wednesday, April 2, 2025, two days after the lecture, the student group Beyond Empire uploaded an Instagram post with screenshots of an email allegedly sent by a transgender student to Brown-Dean and Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Science in Society, Philosophy, and Religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein. The account claimed that the administrators refused to participate in the talk following this email correspondence, but did not provide any evidence to support this claim.
“Emily Bazelon’s work has been cited in the Missouri state legislature to ban gender-affirming care for minors,” Skylar Moehs ’26, who is transgender, said. “To platform this person who has an audience of millions as a New York Times staff writer, above trans people, is just absolutely ridiculous. And I truly, in my heart, believe that this is antithetical to any genuine value or values of free speech.”
Despite the controversy surrounding Bazelon’s article, participants at the talk were engaged and interested.
“I loved the talk. It was comforting to hear a New York Times journalist speak in front of me as opposed to via the newspaper,” attendee Xander Lord ’28 said. “I felt like I trusted her expressed intentions more when I actually saw her. She stressed [that] her role as a journalist is not to be an advocate, and that felt like a very mature distinction. Overall, I left feeling better, but not great, about the New York Times than I did when I walked in.”
Arya Dansinghani can be reached at adansinghani@wesleyan.edu.
Miles Pinsof-Berlowitz can be reached at mpinsofberlo@wesleyan.edu.
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