Philip Eil: A response to Mark Patinkin’s disgraceful ProJo column

"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."

I wondered whether to spend time responding to Mark Patinkin’s disgraceful Providence Journal column applauding President Trump’s ban on transgender student-athletes playing college sports.

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 reveals 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.