How newsrooms are capturing the “trans debate,” but not its consequences

Every time a journalist asks me to travel to Florida, I head to Google.

The search is usually the same: Florida bathroom law arrests transgender. Sometimes I add, safety in private spaces act. What I want to know: Has anyone like me been sent to prison for using the “wrong” bathroom?

No one seems to have the answer.

The question isn’t hypothetical for me. The 2023 law restricts bathroom usage in a way that makes it dangerous for trans people to use any restroom that isn’t all-gender. Doing otherwise could easily become a misdemeanor trespassing charge that carries up to a year in prison.

National news has written a smattering of articles on a trans woman who deliberately got arrested while protesting the law. But if a trans person who lives in Florida wants to know whether anyone has served any actual prison time? The news is silent. If I — a transgender journalist who covers public education — need to know my own risks for walking into a school, a university, a government building? Also silent. As far as I can find, there’s no news about how or where or even whether the bathroom law is being enforced.

This time, I FOIA’d the public records myself. I’ll let you know what I find out.

Maybe the response will come before I head to Florida in December for a conference about practicing data journalism under authoritarianism.

That’s just one example of the conundrum that brought me to the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford. News about trans people often perpetuates misinformation, when it exists at all. The phenomenon troubles me in both prongs of my work — as a media educator for the Trans Journalists Association and a data journalist who covers policy in twelve states for Civic News Company.

On January 20th, the U.S. government released an executive order that accused transgender people of “gender identity extremism.” Three dozen members of Congress recently signed a letter stating that trans people are “inflicting harm on our nation’s children.” As Stanford researchers at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research note, legislators in the U.S. have introduced more hostile bills in the last five years than in the previous 200 combined. Hundreds of those state bills have passed into law; some, including Florida’s Safety in Private Spaces Act, already have several-year histories of implementation and ample public records that could lead to important public service journalism.

Yet for every story that documents the cause or consequences of laws hostile to trans people, ten more speculate that the Democrats should divest from “transgender issues” to win upcoming elections.

Why are journalists dedicating our limited resources to hypothetical chin-stroking about political theater, when real things are happening to real people — right now?

It would be one thing if these stories were half-decent journalism. But these speculative stories are based on false assumptions, including the idea that voters care about trans policy at all. Most don’t. That’s not partisan; polling from The 19th shows that a growing number of both Republicans and Democrats want politicians to stop focusing on trans people altogether. Researchers behind the viral poll that supposedly says anti-trans sentiment influenced the 2024 presidential election have publicly repudiated that interpretation of their data. Many news outlets described the poll incorrectly but have not run clarifications. The stories on other abstract anxieties have been plagued by similar errors.

Data shows that these “trans debate” stories represent a trend, not an isolated incident. Coverage of trans communities spiked in 2023 as hostile state legislation tripled, according to initial analysis from the collaborative data journalism effort Trans News Initiative. Legislators also proposed record-breaking numbers of anti-trans bills each following year, marking an increase of 64% from 2023 to 2025 — yet coverage of trans communities dwindled. What did newsrooms prioritize? Rhetorical debates like the public statements of J.K. Rowling, often framed in terms of “cancel culture” and “culture wars.”

Government hostility towards trans people isn’t new. Historian Jules Gill-Peterson describes the seeds of the first global trans panic in the 1800s: The British adopted an official policy to “reduce” the number of hijras to “lead to their extinction” in India; halfway around the world, United States federal agents arrested and forcibly detransitioned two-spirit people of Indigenous communities.

Contemporarily, trans people of every race are vastly more likely to be incarcerated in the U.S. compared to their cisgender counterparts. We are nearly ten times more likely to report sexual assault in prison, according to federal data, and experience persistent police harassment outside of it. In 30 states, killers can still successfully and legally justify our murders by using a different kind of “trans panic” as a legal defense. That all was true before 300 new laws and ongoing federal executive orders targeted us.

So you can understand, perhaps, why I’d like to know what’s going on with the bathroom laws before I travel to Florida.

It’s not just a story relevant to me and the millions of others who belong to trans communities in the U.S. It’s not even limited to our parents and partners and faith communities and sports teams. Anti-trans policy work has consequences for everyone, from the dismantlement of public schools to the decline of already-strapped state economies to the harassment of gender-nonconforming teenagers in bathrooms.

I’ve spent the last five years advocating for very simple practices: Apply journalism 101 to your stories about trans people. Please. Trans people’s stories need to be told as part of the widespread rollbacks on U.S. civil rights, even when the data is bad. Talk to trans people, especially when the government is arguing that we do not exist. The Trans Journalists Association itself has put out an evergreen 18,000-word style guide and more timely supplemental resources.

Going forward, though, static resources and fact-checks seem increasingly insufficient. That might catch oversights in line edits; it doesn’t cultivate the stronger, better stories and smarter editorial priorities that we need from the start. Ample evidence also shows that facts don’t change minds. That holds true for both the public and journalists.

I don’t want to check facts; I want to change the conversation.

So how can we shift journalists’ thinking from “let’s cover the political debate about trans people” to “let’s document its material consequences”?

What’s next

During my time as a JSK Fellow, I intend to observe, and to try things, and to think. How might we expand existing tools like a public records project and an exploratory data dashboard to support both journalists and a broader ecosystem of people trying to improve the accuracy and quality of information available to and about trans communities? How can journalists find all the stories we aren’t telling? How do these issues reflect larger pedagogical, training, and cultural problems in how journalists teach and learn editorial judgment — and how might we reimagine that?

I’m building connections with media researchers and academics outside of traditional journalistic spaces, here at Stanford and beyond. I’m talking to data practitioners and industry support desks and investigations trainers. I want to identify what needs to exist, but doesn’t. 

How to collaborate

Are you a researcher or academic interested in media accountability work, or a journalist who works on projects that make resources accessible to the whole industry? Please reach out. 

Just want to follow along?

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