Mainstream media ignores transgender people. These journalists are fighting back.

In the spring of 2023, headlines continued to ignore the flood of anti-trans bills and focus on other questions. That is, are all transgender children really transgender? Is the gender-affirming medical care that some transgender people receive really safe or secure? Many of them had access to such care.

Much of the coverage appeared on the front page of the magazine. new york timeswith over 1,200 contributors and 34,000 media members participating in April. times Readers sent letters criticizing what they considered to be biased reporting in the Journal of Record. times It was dismissed as an “advocate” with the implication that an “advocate” could not be a proper journalist.

But Reid says her transgender identity and deep connections within the trans community are not a source of prejudice, but a source of journalistic power. She can talk to people that other journalists wouldn’t talk to. Because they know her work and trust her. She doesn’t pretend to be neutral. Rather, she says, her work occupies a middle ground, where “reporting the facts is itself a form of advocacy.”

Most reporters could not accept the label “advocacy” even if they wanted to. Lewis Raven Wallace, a transgender journalist who worked for a major public radio station after President Trump was elected in 2016, marketI wrote Moderate A post titled “Objectivity is dead, but I’m okay with that.” That post got him fired. However, he expanded his own thesis into his book. view from somewhere, argues that standards of journalistic objectivity are applied unevenly; Wallace said that while cisgender white men are allowed to have opinions, “the rest of us are expected to remain ‘neutral’ even when our lives or safety are threatened.” ” he wrote.

Founder Evan Urquhart allocated media— a site that provides “daily coverage of anti-trans propaganda” — has published many detailed critiques. times Articles from the past year. Unlike Reid, he does not identify as an activist or advocate.

That doesn’t mean he’s trying to separate his identity from the press. “I see myself as serving the trans community, and the reason I’m interested in serving the trans community is because I’m trans,” he says.

Urquhart released allocated media In October 2022. [Assigned Media] “It originally started out of malice,” he says. After losing his role as a staff writer elsewhere, he started the site to fill a gap in quality coverage of transgender issues, even as gender was becoming a complete right-wing concern. was established.

Despite his habit of tearing apart biased, transphobic news reports line by line, Urquhart entered the industry for his love of journalism. slate Until he finally gets a writing job — and he says his job is about holding journalism to his professed standards. In the summer of 2023, he raised more than $16,000 for his new project, the Trans Data Library, which tracks anti-trans individuals and organizations.

“Evan’s work provides some very important tools for reporters who are simply trying to understand a situation,” says Kay Petrin, executive director of the Trans Journalists Association. . Petrin said TJA created a style guide intended to be a more “permanent resource” and address long-standing questions about reporting best practices, while the Transdata Library was designed to be more specific. and the backgrounds of those pushing anti-trans laws to help reporters who otherwise wouldn’t be able to dig into them.

Petrin is also a data and graphics reporter for: chalk beat, last summer, they reported an article highlighting restrictions affecting trans students in K-12 education. Although they based the map in this article on the ACLU’s more popular legal tracking tool, Erin Reed’s more extensive and up-to-date spreadsheet was critical to Mr. Petrin’s fact-checking and reporting process. did. Independent reporting is valuable in its own right, but “it can support the entire reporting ecosystem,” Petrin said.

But despite the resources available, people can be hesitant to report on trans issues, said Adam Rose, a journalist and TJA board member. Either out of fear of being misunderstood or, more charitably, because they can’t afford to invest. To the nuanced coverage they want.

But you don’t have to be a trans health care expert to do this work, Rose says. General journalism skills are required. That means listening to sources, thoroughly understanding rhetoric, and constructing accurate and complex narratives. “There shouldn’t be a temple of five or six really good trans journalists telling trans stories,” he says. “Everyone should do this.”

In fact, as newsrooms everywhere continue to shrink, few people are reporting full-time on threats to transgender rights, rather than debating whether transgender people should have rights. not here.

That created an opportunity for independent journalists, Urquhart said. If you just keep “putting one foot in front of the other every day,” it won’t take long for you to write the occasional big article that gets national attention.

If you ask him about others doing similar work, he’ll give you a lot of names, but he says they can be hard to keep track of. People burn out, and he doesn’t think he’s immune. For now, he plans to continue as long as possible.

“I wish there were 10 people doing the same thing as me,” Reed says. Instead, she hears the same thing from people over and over again. She “needs to take a step back.” This is too much. I don’t even know why I’m doing this when nothing seems to have changed. ”

As anti-trans laws become stricter, Reed is having to reframe the way she thinks about her work. Most of the time, she’s not trying to change the outcome of a particular bill. Instead, she says the goal is to document what happened and how it happened. “Even if bad things happen, even the worst laws can happen, I’m writing for the future,” she says.