The trans journalists battling media bias

In an industry filled with hostility, is it any wonder that trans journalists

ATotaljobs poll in 2021 of 400 trans people in the UK found that 65 per cent of trans people don’t reveal their gender identity at work. In a public-facing job such as journalism, the decision to come out at work isn’t just to your colleagues. It’s to the whole world.

The media has historically been hostile in its reporting on trans issues. This often makes trans journalists feel unsafe being visible in their workplace. City alumni Ændra Rininsland (Interactive, 2012) often works behind-the-scenes at the Financial Times. As a senior developer, they work on creating graphs or maps with bylines that tend to fy under the radar of the public. This partial invisibility provides them a level of safety at work.

“I look at some of the outward hostility that other trans journalists encounter and I consider myself fortunate to be out of that line of fre, given that the work I do is not as immediately apparent,” Rininsland explains. “I see [transphobia] as a simmering undercurrent in the industry. It’s something that prevents me from being as ambitious as I’d possibly like to be. I’d probably pitch a bit more and work on more visible projects but

I worry about the backlash that I’ll get.”

A 2020 investigation by IPSO revealed there has been a 400 per cent increase in coverage of trans issues in the last decade. Without context, these statistics sound like something to be championed. However, when this only spans trans criminals, murder, and negativity, the atmosphere surrounding trans issues in the media is overwhelmingly hostile.

You need not look much further than this year’s media coverage surrounding rapist Isla Bryson, who transitioned during her trial. The phrase “transgender rapist” appeared in the headlines of all major news outlets in the UK. With a severe lack of positive press balance this narrative, phrases like this contributes to one prominent message from the media: all transgender people are dangerous. When, in actuality, the transgender and non-binaryidentifying community are too often generalised and grossly misunderstood in the media.

“The press’ treatment of trans issues has been appalling, and a major vector in the UK’s ongoing lurch into fascism,’’ Juliet Jacques, author and flmmaker, says. “It’s been widely said [within the LGBTQIA+ community] that the contemporary coverage of trans and non-binary people resembles the coverage of gay men at the heights of the HIV/AIDS crisis –which led to the passing of Section 28 – and it’s true.”

Juliet Jacques apologises at the end of her email for being so pessimistic. Described by Gay Times as “one of the UK’s most pioneering transgender writers”, Jacques has written about the trans experience for the last decade.

Her most recent book, Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021, documents her struggle to bring trans stories to front pages of the UK press. However, now 13 years after Jacques began writing, very little seems to have changed.

Stonewall’s pivotal Trans Report in 2017 found that one in eight trans people have been attacked physically while at work.

While journalists often have the safety of

What are the biggest challenges for trans journalists?

“Along with the aggressively transphobic climate engineered by media owners and editors, it's the fact that many trans people are struggling fnancially. This means they can't do the unpaid internships and other labour required to get into the media.” –Juliet Jacques, freelance journalist, flmmaker, and author.

“The fact that legacy publications continue to dismiss trans people and trans issues as a matter of opinion and engage in both sidesism.” – Linda Codega, staff writer at io9.

“The discourse is so vitriolic. We’re put into this zero sum dialogue where we either exist or we don’t. There’s no space for nuance and it’s a topic that requires an abundance of nuance. There’s no way you can classify the entirety of the trans community under one generalisation.”

– Ændra Rininsland, Senior Developer at Financial Times.

However, trans journalists remain hopeful that transphobia can slowly exit the industry, and in its place make way for mor LGBTQ+ writers to enter.

“Anticipate that it’s not always going to be easy but things will get better over time,” Rininsland offers as words of advice for other trans writers. “If writing about LGBTQ+ topics, too, is something that you’re passionate about, I wouldn’t let fear of the industry itself be something that prevents you from pursuing that.” assumptions. With a large portion of transrelated media coverage being reported in a bad light, this skewed cycle of perception is only encouraged to continue. In order to prevent the perpetuation of this cycle, it is a must to push back against this media bias –against all of the vilifcation, the “othering” and the taboo. And the best way to do this is for people who truly understand what it means to be a part of the trans experience to be the people who are documenting it. being behind a keyboard, it doesn’t mean that they don’t receive discrimination. Writers like Jacques have been “alienated” by the media for refusing to comply with “discussions of trans issues on terms set exclusively by our opponents”.

The road to removing transphobia from within the press is not singular or easy.

When cis-identifying journalists are left to write about LGBTQ+ topics, they are unable to understand them from a sense of lived experience – they will be writing only about things that they have heard about, as opposed to circumstances they have been in or what they have felt.

This means that the writers will, in fact, be writing about something they know nothing about, leading to many articles about trans journalists producing misiformation and being grounded in stereotypes or

For Rininsland, this is a change which needs to happen now. “There’s never been a greater need for LGBTQ+ journalists, and being able to present LGBTQ+ stories well,” Rininsland said. “If it’s not us who are reporting the stories of our own community, then we are relying on people outside of the community to represent us.”

To read some good examples of trans and LGBTQ+ content, our interviewees recommend paying a visit to Pink News, the FT and Them online.