Trans journalists are rewriting the industry

Elliot Page at the IMDb Studio in Toronto, Sept. 7, 2019 [Rich Polk/AFP]

Actor Elliot Page lit up Twitter this month when he came out as trans and nonbinary. Fans of the hit film Juno and series Umbrella Academy praised his courage in coming out while in the spotlight. However, several news outlets that covered Page’s announcement “deadnamed” him – a term that means referring to a trans person by their former name. (AJ+, following guidance from GLAAD on Page’s announcement, also made this mistake.)

The Trans Journalists Association, a coalition of transgender journalists working to make news coverage of trans communities more sensitive and accurate and make workplaces more supportive for trans journalists themselves, rebuked media outlets, tweeting that there is “NEVER a reason to publish someone’s deadname,” and urged media outlets and journalists to treat Elliot with respect.

I recently spoke with Oliver-Ash Kleine, a founding member of the Trans Journalists Association, about how the group came to be and how the media, and cis journalists — journalists whose gender is exclusively what they were assigned at birth — can be more mindful and informed when writing about trans communities.

Building community for journalists is a major focus

Kleine said that the association started out as a Facebook group, then a Slack group, for trans journalists to build community and support one another in the field. Seeing the need for resources to improve clumsy or thoughtless news coverage of trans people, the group launched the Trans Journalists Association this summer. They offer professional resources for newsrooms, like the Trans Journalists Association’s Style Guide, and employer guides for creating trans-friendly workplaces.

“For me personally, it's enriched my life really, really significantly … I've been in journalism for over 10 years, and I’ve never felt a close community in my industry, and having a place where we’re building genuine friendships and supporting one another and mentoring each other is beyond anything that I had imagined for myself,” Kleine said.

“No one person is equipped to write the perfect guide”

The style guide was collectively written and credited to several people, though Kleine penned the first draft and brought it to their colleagues for feedback. It refers to a wide range of preferences, and often simply reminds the reader to defer to the choices of the trans subjects and employees themselves.

For example, the entry for “transsexual” took some careful thought: It’s a word that some trans people find offensive, but that other trans people use to describe themselves. “People's varied perspective on language and our communities, and bringing in a bunch of different people, made the guide so much stronger and more accurate and comprehensive. The reality is that our communities aren't a monolith, and so no one person is equipped to write the perfect guide,” Kleine said.

An important change would be getting more trans people in newsrooms

When the association launched, Kleine saw someone on Twitter remark that they might still work in media had the association existed 15-20 years ago. It gutted Kleine to read that.

One of the most important changes would be “getting more trans people in newsrooms, because when you have cis people leading and driving the conversations about our lives, choosing the framing of these stories, that coverage just isn't going to be as strong or nuanced or accurate, because the reality is that it takes a lot of work to understand cissexism, to understand how transphobia manifests in our world,” Kleine said.

Trans people also shouldn’t be restricted to writing about trans issues. “If you don't have people in your newsroom who do have that deeper understanding,” they said, “the coverage is sometimes gonna fall short.”