With reports of anti-trans violence on the rise, experts and activists say the media’s role is more important than ever in covering this violence—as well as the everyday violence and discrimination trans people experience—with the care, respect and nuance it deserves.
“I think that at this point, we have to be honest and say that they know they have the resources, they have the tools, they have the knowledge,” trans rights activist and executive director of the National Trans Visibility March Hope Giselle-Godsey says when asked about whether media outlets can improve their coverage of trans issues. “They;re deciding not to at this point; this is a choice.”
Many mainstream newsrooms began to meaningfully cover anti-trans violence as a broader social issue rather than one-off incidents in 2021, a year that sticks out for those tracking deadly anti-trans violence across the globe. According to separate estimates from the Human Rights Campaign and the Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) project, 2021 was the deadliest year for trans people on record both in the U.S. and globally. According to its 2021 statistics, TMM did not track any murders of trans and gender-diverse people in Canada, though even numbers compiled by TMM are understood to be an undercount.
But since then, many of those same newsrooms have failed to sustain that attention. And experts, like Andrew Ortiz at the Transgender Law Center (TLC), say that isn’t exactly a surprise given the sporadic way newsrooms cover trans issues or anti-trans violence broadly. (And while the mainstream press may have just woken up to the reality of anti-trans violence, others in the queer press, like the late Monica Roberts, have been covering these stories for years.)
“We get that, like, one article a year that’s on Trans Day of Remembrance,” says Ortiz, a senior policy attorney at the TLC. “Or we get that one article that’s like, ‘This is the worst year on record for trans murderers.’”
Alongside criticism of that lack of sustained coverage, Ortiz and others say framing around anti-trans violence that focuses on incident counts, rather than systems that allow this violence to persist, still continues to miss the mark.
In fact, in the TLC’s own journalists’ resource guide on covering anti-trans violence, the organization discourages journalists from focusing on rhetoric like “deadliest” years—versus a more systemic, holistic approach to covering anti-trans violence. The guide states that this deadly violence is inseparable from discussions about access to affordable, safe housing, secure employment and quality healthcare, and recommends that coverage about these issues reflect that fact.
Instead of only covering acts of violence, covering local organizations or individuals who are working to respond to or address this violence is a necessary part of improving coverage.
“By adopting a more informative and solutions-oriented approach, journalists can effectively guide their audience towards understanding and addressing the systemic violence faced by transgender individuals,” TLC’s guide states.
In the face of a glaring dearth of media coverage from many of the newsrooms that jumped on the HRC’s headline-making 2021 report, it’s hard to argue with that advice. The mainstream media is a business that, for better or worse, chases extremes—the deadliest, the worst, the most violent, etc. And with a shrinking media ecosystem—especially for those covering issues like race, class and gender—sustained coverage and the long-standing community connections that are necessary for that coverage can be difficult to build.
“There’ll be something that will make headlines, it’ll be sensational and there won’t be really any digging further into that,” Ortiz says, “There’s very limited coverage or follow-up in these situations, like how often is somebody identified as the perpetrator of violence and then, like, what happens to that person.”
Alongside discussions of framing and coverage priorities, the media must also contend with its long-standing history of mishandling coverage of anti-trans violence. This history is detailed in a comprehensive report from investigative newsroom ProPublica, which describes systemic misgendering and deadnaming by the police. The report also describes how related misreporting in the media can seriously hamper efforts to bring perpetrators to justice, and can foster mistrust in the media by the trans community that then hampers future coverage of these issues.
And echoing criticism of crime coverage in general, Giselle-Godsey says that coverage of anti-trans violence broadly, but murders in particular, can oftentimes be dangerously silent about the reality of who is impacted the most by this violence.
“Publications have to stop, in my opinion, divesting from things that are not white or Eurocentric,” Giselle-Godsey says. “Because Black trans women are being killed and murdered and not found every single day, and I don’t see a single post on those things from … any of those white-led media outlets.”
And while anti-trans murders are an easy entryway for many journalists into discussing anti-trans violence and mistreatment, Giselle-Godsey and Ortiz both say journalists need to do a better job at going beyond grizzly, headline-making murders, covering the everyday discrimination and brutality that trans people experience.
“It’s only murder that gets covered,” Ortiz says. “It’s not anything else.”
The violence trans people experience everyday can be emotional, verbal and psychological as well as physical and sexual. Violence doesn’t just come with bullets, bats and balled fists, but in stares, scowls and slurs as well. Focusing on a particularly salacious sliver of that violence minimizes the scope and severity of what trans people experience for merely existing in public. And when murders do occur, the media must also do better at connecting the dots from this everyday violence to deadly violence.
We live in a world where people vying to lead the most powerful nation on the planet have turned trans people both into a political football and a dangerous enemy that threatens the fabric of our society. To ignore the connections between that rhetoric and ensuing fatal violence does our readers and the trans community at large a deadly disservice.
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