Reporting While Trans

A dozen journalists on the risks of working in the news industry—and how to ensure their safety.

In recent years, trans people have become increasingly visible in the news. We are being banned from using bathrooms, participating in sports, serving in the military, accessing proper identification, and receiving medical care. It has always been risky to be trans, but recent political and cultural shifts against trans rights have exacerbated many of the dangers.

For trans journalists, risks tend to fall into two categories: those associated with being a trans employee and those associated with reporting as a trans person. The former poses many of the same challenges that trans people face in all fields, such as being forcibly outed by automated systems that default to legal names or having to navigate being misgendered at work. Ensuring that internal systems use preferred names is a simple way to make work safer for trans employees, as is having policies for people to report misgendering and procedures for how to respond. In the course of a series of conversations with trans journalists, one described having been misgendered by a coworker, only to be given an “accommodation” to work from home, meaning they were restricted from the collaboration and community building that take place at work. “That’s not an accommodation,” Lewis Raven Wallace, an independent journalist in North Carolina, told me. “That’s the definition of discrimination: to exclude someone from shared space that others have access to.”