blog: A better blueprint for trans coverage: Lessons from TJA’s Kae Petrin

A better blueprint for trans coverage: Lessons from TJA’s Kae Petrin

by: Saneeha Mirza
posted on Thursday, December 04, 2025

Across the country, news about transgender people is shaping how audiences understand gender, rights, and community life. With so much at stake — and with misinformation spreading fast — BMSG recently conducted a media analysis in collaboration with the Trans Journalists Association to learn more about coverage. The analysis explored how journalists reported executive orders impacting trans people signed by President Donald Trump in his first 100 days in office. These executive orders threaten the way trans people navigate daily life by creating limits and obstacles to accessing legal documents, health care, and education.

The analysis highlighted a dearth of trans voices in related media coverage and put forward recommendations on how journalists can improve their reporting when it comes to policies impacting trans communities. As a follow up, we talked with TJA co-founder and board president Kae Petrin, one of the leading voices guiding newsrooms on this coverage, to hear their thoughts on the analysis, the present media landscape, and how we can move forward.

Q&A:

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me a bit about your background. What brought you into this line of work?

I’m a data journalist, and I’ve spent my entire career in local news in one form or another. I’m also one of the co-founders of the Trans Journalists Association, which launched in 2020. My work with BMSG brings together the data and accountability reporting I’ve always done, and my commitment to improving media coverage of trans communities.

Traditionally, I’m the person who takes a spreadsheet from a government agency, analyzes it, and translates it into something meaningful for the public. With this project, we’re generating the dataset ourselves, analyzing it, and then applying a broader lens to journalism as a field. It’s still the kind of accountability work I’ve done my whole career, just focused on a different part of the ecosystem.

What inspired this particular research project? Was there a moment, headline, or story that made you think, “We need to study this”?

In January, as Trump’s second term began, the administration issued executive orders at a rapid pace. Journalists were scrambling to contextualize them because executive orders aren’t laws, but they can still shape policy and administrative behavior — and many were already getting challenged, changed, or blocked in real time. Some of the earliest orders are still tied up in the courts. They impacted so many different areas of civic life that newsrooms were under pressure to decide what to cover and how.

At the Trans Journalists Association, we were especially concerned with the orders redefining sex and gender across federal agencies. Those definitions have enormous implications not only for trans people but for anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into the gender binary. Sometimes the gender-related language was buried in orders that weren’t about gender on their face — like an order on birthright citizenship that casually defines a mother as a “female biological progenitor” and a father as a “male biological progenitor.”

With more than 140 orders released in such a short window, we wondered: How are journalists going to cover this? What’s getting attention, and what’s slipping through the cracks? Since we already had a partnership with BMSG, we realized we were in a position to ask some of those questions and generate useful data.

Did anything about the findings surprise you — or confirm what you already suspected?

The headline finding that very few stories quoted trans people, even when the policy directly affected us, did not surprise me. I was surprised that the number wasn’t even lower. I expected even more stories with zero trans sources.

We were also curious about how stories used data. Misuse of data is a recurring problem in trans coverage, and we expected to see a lot of that. Instead, most mainstream outlets were using very basic data, and the explicit misuse we saw was mostly concentrated in one right-leaning publication. In hindsight, that makes sense: This was largely breaking news coverage, not longer-form work where data gets interpreted more heavily.

Some of the more interesting patterns, like how consequences were described or whether stories contextualized uncertainty, would’ve required deeper qualitative analysis to unpack fully.

Why do you think journalists so often relied on government officials without including trans people themselves?

Time pressure is a big part of it. Many journalists don’t have deep source networks in trans communities, and trans people understandably don’t always trust reporters. Building relationships takes time — time that reporters on tight deadlines often don’t have. So, they default to the people who pick up the phone quickly: government officials.

There’s also a structural issue in political journalism. Many newsrooms treat policy stories as political stories, so the reflex is to call a Republican and a Democrat. That framing sidelines the people actually affected by the policy. Our study shows how that approach fails trans communities, and it’s a broader problem across many coverage areas.

Compounding all of this is the fact that many politicians themselves didn’t understand the executive orders they were commenting on. Journalists were often relying on sources who couldn’t reliably explain the policy either. The tension between speed and depth shapes a lot of the gaps we saw. Even with those constraints, though, the lack of trans voices remains striking.

What are the consequences of that kind of sourcing for public understanding — and for trans communities?

It leaves everyone, including journalists, with an incomplete understanding of what’s actually happening. The legal landscape was chaotic. Different states were reporting very different experiences. Sometimes no one knew what an agency planned to do until it happened. That level of ambiguity requires context, and without it, coverage can be unintentionally misleading.

Being transparent about what journalists don’t know is essential for public trust. It also helps counter misinformation. When government documents themselves suggest that a group “doesn’t exist” or shouldn’t be recognized, which is the subtext of many of these orders, journalists have a responsibility to demonstrate concretely that trans people do exist and are affected.

This isn’t about performing a simple fact check. It’s about grounding reporting in reality: showing real people, real impacts, and real stakes. When coverage focuses only on political theater, it ignores the people living with the consequences right now.

What are some first steps cisgender journalists can take to build trust with trans sources — and avoid extractive or tokenizing practices?

A great starting point is a report called Why Should I Tell You? from the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It helps reporters explain their process to sources who may not understand how journalism works so they can make informed decisions about participating. That alone can prevent a lot of extractive interactions.

Beyond that, trust comes from showing up consistently — not just when there’s a crisis or a big political story. Cover smaller community events. Ask people what they feel journalists are missing. Build relationships before you need them.

For example, one great reporter on trans communities in San Francisco is a cis reporter who spent years covering small but meaningful stories, like the opening of a gender care clinic. By being present and reliable, she built trust so that when bigger or more sensitive stories emerged, people felt safe talking to her.

It really comes down to traditional, relational reporting: listening, spending time, and investing in a community even when it doesn’t produce immediate stories.

How do you hope these findings might influence newsroom policies? Are there practices that editors can operationalize in their daily routines so that responsibility is shared, rather than resting solely with individual reporters?

When reporters struggle to source a story, there’s almost always a deeper issue — something about the framing or the premise that’s off. My first question is always, “Have you asked people why they don’t want to talk to you, or what they would want to talk to you about?” Many haven’t.

Newsrooms can help by creating time and space for genuine reporting rather than keeping reporters on an endless production treadmill. Some outlets have held focus groups with community members to ask directly: What are we doing wrong? What do you want to see? That kind of structured relationship-building requires institutional support.

Editors also play a major role by giving reporters more time. Not every story needs to be published the day an order is announced, especially when no one understands its implications yet. Sometimes, waiting even 48 hours yields much better information. There’s a cultural pressure toward nonstop breaking news, and that pressure often works against depth, context, and accuracy.

The challenge is balancing the expectation of immediacy with the responsibility to inform the public meaningfully. That balance is hard, but it’s essential.

You mentioned in a recent op-ed that effective sourcing is a starting point, not an end point. What does good reporting on trans communities look like — beyond simply including trans voices?

Good reporting doesn’t have one specific look, but most problematic trans coverage shares a common issue: It’s framed entirely through a cis lens. When journalists aren’t familiar with trans communities, they often treat us as unusual or “other,” and that shows up in the framing.

A classic anthropology exercise illustrates this: Students read an analysis of a “strange” culture with sensational hygiene rituals and then discover it’s about Americans, written from an outsider’s point of view. That’s how reporting can look when journalists write about trans people purely as outsiders.

The first step is recognizing your own unfamiliarity and bias. From there, listen to people, ask what you don’t understand, and approach coverage with genuine curiosity rather than assumptions.

Another huge factor is misinformation and disinformation. A lot of political actors are intentionally exploiting the public’s unfamiliarity with trans people. When journalists are also unfamiliar, they can become conduits for that misinformation and disinformation without realizing it. Reporters covering Russia and information operations in Europe, for example, have documented some of these patterns on other topics, like immigration. Those stories ask, who started this misinformation, who is it targeting, and who benefits from it? It’s less common that domestic trans coverage takes a similar approach. Instead, disinformation sometimes gets treated as legitimate scientific debate or breaking news, and some journalists don’t do enough to question that. Good reporting actively counters that by grounding stories in reality, context, and concrete impacts rather than hypothetical or abstract arguments.

Can you share any examples of news outlets or reporters who got it right during this period?

Some of the strongest, most consistent work comes from The 19th’s team. Teen Vogue’s news team, before it was unfortunately disbanded, was also producing excellent coverage. NBC Out, which was also recently dissolved, did strong work as well. Prism does excellent work.

There are also some investigative LGBTQ outlets doing important investigative reporting, including Lookout News and Uncloseted Media. The Washington Post’s gender coverage has been relatively consistent, and ProPublica and KFF Health News have produced solid, deeply contextual stories and helpful resources.

You wrote something in a previous piece that stayed with me: Journalists can use all the right language, show sensitivity to their sources, and still produce misleading coverage. That suggests that something much more fundamental, and perhaps harder to quantify, is missing from coverage. What else should newsrooms be considering to improve their reporting?

Ultimately, journalists need to focus on what’s concretely happening, not just what people say is happening. There’s a lot of rhetoric around trans issues, but reporters often stop at the rhetoric instead of digging into the measurable reality.

Good journalism requires asking: What is actually occurring? What isn’t? What were people told would happen that didn’t?

Florida is a great example of this: The Associated Press ran a piece about how trans adults in Florida were “blindsided” by restrictions on their care in 2023. That happened in part because some earlier stories from large news organizations didn’t rebut politicians’ factually incorrect statements that new laws would only restrict youth care. Some newsrooms covered the story as a debate over the quality of youth gender care rather than closely evaluating the legal language, as you should in a policy story. Trans reporters at small independent outlets caught this nuance and reported on it, but their audiences are much more limited; larger newsrooms didn’t consistently follow up on this reporting, and the false narrative that these restrictions only affect children was more dominant in the public conversation.

Too much coverage treats trans existence as a theoretical debate, even though we have decades of data about everything from bathrooms to sports to health care. The executive orders and new laws often frame trans people as a new or unprecedented phenomenon, but we’re not. Reporters need to resist getting pulled into abstract arguments and instead document real-world impacts.