Jael Holzman is sounding the alarm

What’s the difference between writing a news article and writing a punk song? There’s a lot more in common there than you might think—something Jael Holzman knows very well. 

“As an investigative reporter, I’m very detail-oriented. I love digging on the internet for facts. All of that becomes quite clinical in a way that I find therapeutic, and also impactful,” the journalist and punk singer tells Xtra. “But writing music is just in the body, and I think that’s why music can ultimately impact people in a way that news can’t.”

As a former reporter for U.S. politics mainstays Politico and Axios who now covers climate for Heatmap News—and moonlights as frontwoman for up-and-coming punk rockers Ekko Astral—Holzman has the unique experience of working in both worlds. While she’s clear that her song lyrics aren’t directly about the kinds of politics she reports on, she says that her experience as a trans journalist working in Washington, D.C., does inform her songs: “A lot of songs I would write for Ekko these days, it’s like, shit I wrote down on my notes app as I was having a panic attack on the Senate subway, freaking out because I just heard someone like [far-right senator] Josh Hawley say he wanted to eradicate trans people, right next to me.” On the band’s latest album Pink Balloons, which came out earlier this year, Holzman’s lyrics navigate these tensions, whether she’s writing about stalkers or the end of the world: “icymi the earth’s coming down/ and i’m throwing a fit at the luncheon/ but i ain’t calling it quits here for nothing,” she sings on “baethoven.” 

It’s a surreal experience, she says, to be physically present in the Senate gallery as a trans person—more often than not, the only trans person in that physical space—and to have not only your legislators, but your own colleagues, refuse the facts of your existence, she says. After transitioning in 2020, she says her colleagues were for the most part pretty accepting and welcoming—which makes it so much more surreal, she says, to see how badly the D.C. media world has dropped the ball when it comes to covering the anti-trans movement. 

The mainstream political journalistic establishment in the U.S., as Holzman wrote in a recent Medium essay on her decision to leave congressional journalism, is treating trans rights as a culture war issue in a way that’s playing directly into the right wing’s hands. Being a trans reporter in the midst of this, she says, was surreal: “The cognitive dissonance around that time started to percolate around the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, as it became clear that the anti-trans sentiment in modern American politics was not only not going away despite its unpopularity in the polls, but was actually permeating in a way that felt forced, and in an intentional way, to shape the way that media covers trans lives.”

This type of complicity manifests internally as editorial roadblocks that trans reporters face even at publications that would deem themselves apolitical. In 2022, when Holzman was working at Politico, a high-up member of the editorial team told her that “the publication would never, under any circumstances, publish a story about anti-trans activists that made them look like bigots,” she says. 

“That was the moment for me that I stopped seeing a place for myself in the political press. I realized that the healthcare that I lean on to survive, that so many trans people lean on to survive, had stopped being a conversation that is about healthcare, and had suddenly become a conversation around political speech.”

Holzman says incidents like this one are indicative of a general climate of fearful indifference within the media that has the potential to prove deadly for trans people. “The problem is the same thing that’s been happening at the New York Times. The problem is the same thing that’s happened at NPR affiliates. It is a systemic issue around a lack of knowledge and respect for the efficacy behind this care. And if that is not reckoned with, then the media will commit another grave sin where it did not adhere to the science,” she says. 

As a climate reporter, Holzman sees parallels between the way the media currently engages with anti-trans activists, and the way it used to engage with climate denial. “You know, 10, 20 years ago, it was pretty commonplace to quote climate deniers—because to advocate for the existence of man-made climate change was somehow considered a political act, even though it was primarily a scientific one,” she says. “But over the years, media literacy within our industry has changed, and we understand that to quote a science denier is to quote a climate denier.”

We’re having a similar problem right now, Holzman says, when it comes to mainstream media quoting anti-trans advocates, who, she points out, are also often quoting “bunk science” for the purposes of spreading misconceptions about the efficacy of trans care. She wonders: when will the mainstream media have a similar moment of reckoning around trans issues? 

When it comes to how media outlets can make a difference, Holzman believes beat reporting is crucial: while most outlets have dedicated departments or at least reporters for issues like climate and business, LGBTQ2S+ issues aren’t afforded this luxury. “A news outlet needs to hire someone with experience in the community and sources within the community to cover this movement, one of authority, and it needs to do so now,” she says. She also points outlets to the Trans Journalists Association, which maintains a style guide and provides resources for news outlets looking for guidance on covering trans issues.

When we look at the way anti-trans sentiment exists both institutionally and culturally in this moment, something that alarms Holzman is how ideas that were extremist conservative talking points just a few years ago have moved out of the fringes and into mainstream discourse. This kind of shifting of the Overton window is dangerous—particularly in a world where most of us are consuming large quantities of unverified news on the internet every day. The mainstream media, Holzman points out, has a choice: it can push back against these narratives, or it can sit passively by and enable them. 

This power is why her concerns about the industry extend beyond merely being able to report a story. “The thing that bothered me was: will it matter? Because it’s not about the public,” Holzman says. “What needs to happen is, the good story needs to get picked up by other outlets and create a media cycle. But when a media cycle around the violence inflicted by anti-trans laws and policies is not possible because people in the press corps are actively censoring in order to avoid offending anti-trans readers, that is when a bias is present and harmful.”