Cis journalists stop putting trans people’s existence up for debate

Just over two-thirds of Americans say they don’t personally know a trans person.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that statistic throughout the past year, witnessing the escalation of efforts to push trans people out of public life under a federal government employing executive orders and court decisions to further marginalize trans people from accessing various parts of society, from education to healthcare.

Well-resourced, major news publications neglected to cover stories like the attempt to shoehorn a provision attacking trans healthcare into Trump’s tax reform bill, H.R. 1. The paper of record, The New York Times, continued its track record of anti-trans publishing — one that allowed 29 of its stories to be cited in state amicus briefs in U.S. v. Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming youth healthcare. The Times also published a podcast meant to illuminate the history of gender-affirming care for youth — and left out their voices. In the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency, research from the Trans Journalists Association and Berkeley Studies Media Group found that journalists at national publications primarily asked cis people to be the experts on trans people and executive orders’ impact on their lives.

It’s embarrassing and unsurprising that major news media — from The New York Times to The Washington Post and The Atlantic — have bolstered efforts to erase trans people from the record by continuing to frame our lives as political debates rather than as people gravely targeted by federal, national, and local policy.

While legacy media walks hand-in-hand with the government to push us out of public life, trans journalists and people write the same thinkpieces year after year, begging newsrooms to do the bare minimum of not questioning their existence. As repression along industry and identity lines continues to escalate, trans journalists must decide between articulating their basic humanity and sustaining their livelihoods.

There’s another statistic that I’ve been thinking about after poking through the data from the newly-launched Trans News Initiative. Of the 190,561 articles the team has tracked about trans communities across the past 5 years, 22,509 articles are about ideology and culture wars. Just 6,175 (3.2%) are about resilience, resistance, and solutions — the fewest across all the 13 different themes of articles on trans communities the initiative has tracked.

Resources and models exist. Hire trans journalists and speak to trans people, for one. The Trans Journalists Association continues to update its workplace solidarity guide and general style guide. The latter provides newsrooms guidance on semantics and framing that acknowledges trans people as equal community members. The Trans News Initiative offers a wealth of data about how trans communities have been reported on. Trans-led publications like Assigned Media, TransLash, and The Needle, alongside movement media newsrooms like Prism, have been diligently reporting on the federal government’s wholesale campaign to eradicate trans people’s rights to model explanatory, clear journalism that actually considers trans people agents in their own lives while chronicling their efforts to build better futures.

Trans journalists are already creating an archive of how the moment is impacting us. But if cis journalists don’t step up to the task this year, it’s no longer a failure of their research. It’s a failure of their humanity.