“Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings sparked online debate Thursday after using sarcasm to dismiss calls from transgender activists to boycott The New York Times’ word games.
Jennings sarcastically claimed he received “express permission from the trans community” to keep his games subscription, taking aim at demands that readers boycott all New York Times products.
The joke has since sparked pushback from transgender activists online, who accused him of trivializing their concerns.
The exchange began on the social media platform Bluesky, where Jennings posted screenshots of the New York Times’ game Spelling Bee.
He wrote, “My wife and I have a game where we try to invent the day’s grossest-sounding word on NYT Spelling Bee.”
In response, a user on the platform reposted his comment, saying, “I wish people who care about trans people could understand that playing nyt games is still an insult to trans people.”
In response to the user’s comment, Jennings replied, “This may be true of others but I actually got express permission from the trans community to keep NYT games and recipes. I also have a news subscription, which is arguably worse, so I had to specifically send in a written request. Took 30 days but I got approved.”
Jennings added, “They were like ‘Trans people are not a monolith’ and ‘Like-minded allies may disagree on specific media boycotts’ and stuff like that. It was a huge load off my mind!”
The user responded, “I was being sincere and serious, but thanks for turning it into a joke. that feels great.” On Friday, the user noted that Jennings had not contacted them since and made “no effort to apologize or acknowledge that he was an a–hole about trans people. No lessons learned it seems. I was really hoping for some sign he understood why people are so upset.”
In the replies, some Bluesky commenters told Jennings to “read the f—ing room” and called his response “dismissive.”
Others commented on his original post and questioned whether he was going to apologize for the comment.
Journalist and “Blocked and Reported” podcast co-host Jesse Singal, who often reports on internet culture, told Fox News Digital that the outrage reflects the platform itself rather than everyday sentiment.
“I’m guessing the average trans person is orders of magnitude more likely to play NYT games than to get mad at others for doing so,” he said. “Bluesky, like all hyperpartisan social-media platforms, has a tendency to concentrate users with extremely strong and rigid views in the same place, at which point certain ugly pressure-cooker dynamics set in, causing normies to flee for their sanity and leaving behind a group of addled internet-radicals engaged in a desperate game of rhetorical oneupmanship (there are no winners),”
“You see a similar dynamic among certain right-wingers on X, in fact, where the craziest stuff naturally centers not on left-coded concerns like trans rights but on right-coded ones like immigration,” Singal added.
For several years, transgender activists have spoken out against The New York Times over what they’ve described as anti-trans coverage, arguing that web traffic and subscriptions to products like its games financially support the outlet.
In 2023, hundreds of New York Times contributors, along with thousands of subscribers, signed an open letter to the paper condemning its coverage of transgender issues.
The LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD also sent a letter, calling out “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people.”
Jennings has previously voiced support for transgender rights, even taking to Bluesky in July 2025 to call out California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stance on transgender youth, after Newsom stated he did not think it was fair for transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports.
Responding to a user who said he would “never, ever” vote for Newsom, Jennings wrote, “This is correct. Any candidate cynically ‘triangulating’ on trans kids is a non-starter, and now is the time to say so. There’s still so much time to advance candidates that DON’T suck.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Jennings for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
