Newspaper publishes, then retracts, letter bashing dead teen’s pronouns
Laura Adelman-Cannon was drinking her morning coffee when her husband abruptly tossed their local newspaper.
“And I can’t believe they published it,” Adelman-Cannon recounted her husband saying on Wednesday.
The Times-Picayune/The Advocate, the papers owned by the same company, had published two stories and a separate obituary on the death of her 17-year-old child Belle Adelman-Cannon after she was struck by a school bus on June 3. But now the paper had printed a letter to the editor that referred to her child’s pronouns as an “inner confusion” and a “whimsical ideation,” Adelman-Cannon, 48, told the Washington Post. Her child was gender fluid and used she/he/they pronouns.
The Times-Picayune/The Advocate on Wednesday retracted the letter, which criticized the papers for using the teen’s identifying pronouns and was published in Wednesday’s newspapers and online. The papers issued an editor’s note the same day apologizing for what they said was a mistake.
“On Wednesday, June 14, The Times-Picayune/The Advocate published a letter that did not meet our editorial standards and was insensitive to a local family’s grief,” the editor’s note read. “We apologize for the error.”
Rene Sanchez, The Times-Picayune /The Advocate’s executive editor and vice president for news, told The Washington Post in a statement that they had apologized to the family and would use this incident to “review and improve our process for vetting reader letters.”
“Our editorial standards require treating all families and their communities with full respect, especially when they are coping with grief,” Sanchez said. “We removed the letter (on Wednesday) as soon as senior editors became aware it had published. We sincerely regret the hurt it caused and apologize for it.”
Adelman-Cannon said an editor with the paper called her later that night to apologize for the “mistake.”
The incident comes at a time when transgender youth are being targeted by conservative state legislatures across the country with bills banning them from sports, using their pronouns in school, preventing them from using certain restrooms and undergoing gender-affirming surgery.
When reached for comment, the author of the letter to the editor, David Larose, told the Post that he stood by his submission. “I do not wish to be disrespectful,” he wrote, “but an individual’s inner confusion – a whimsical ideation – is not a sufficient reason to blithely ignore thousands of years of convention.”
Belle told her parents around eighth grade that she identified as gender fluid and would like everyone to address her using she/he/them pronouns.
Belle’s identity was as fluid as the many languages she spoke – French, German, Hebrew and Chinese, her mother said. They were as fluid as the poetry they wrote and the movement of the needles they used to sew her own clothes.
She looked forward to working part time at a local youth farm growing sustainable food and serving as a counselor at Jewish camp this summer.
“Belle was extremely proud of who they were, of their queerness and their Jewishness, and never once felt the need to apologize for that,” Adelman-Cannon said.
Last year, Belle and a group of other Benjamin Franklin High School students walked out of classes to protest a set of local bills that would ban the discussion of LGBTQ issues in some public classrooms, bar transgender athletes from girls sports and ban gender-affirming care for children.
On Wednesday, minutes after reading the letter in the opinion section, Adelman-Cannon grabbed her phone to type another letter responding to the stranger’s opinion.
She was supposed to return to work for the first time since Belle’s death that day, but she would not let this man win – not because she believed what he said about her child to be true but because other children like Belle shouldn’t believe a word of what the paper published, she said.
“Maybe there is someone that thinks their pronouns are not valid,” Adelman-Cannon said. “I want the other children who aren’t in families like ours to know that they are not alone. I just don’t want that to be the last word. I want that child to know, ‘No, you are loved. You have a right to be wholly yourself and there’s nothing wrong with you.’ ”
The papers published her letter to the editor online that same day. A copy of the letter ran in Thursday’s newspaper, which they get delivered to their home daily.
When Adelman-Cannon opened Thursday’s paper, she saw the last word was hers.
“It’s out there,” she said. “That means that there’s someone who can see that they are loved, they are whole and that they are not broken.”