Journalism Salute Update: A College Student's Take:
Mark Simon here … We have a student from The College of New Jersey helping us out. Asaka Park is a senior journalism major who is building a career as a freelance writer covering lifestyle, culture, and wellness. She writes about Gen Z life, (in)visible disabilities, and finding silver linings amidst the shades of grey.
Here, she’ll be writing comprehensive episode summaries, providing her take on what she found most interesting in the interviews. She’ll also be helping us out behind the scenes.
We present her first article on Mark Simon’s interview with Erin Reed, who covers anti-transgender legislation.
(Plus, if you want to hear from more student journalists, we’ll be talking to 7 of them in our new episode recapping the College Media Association Convention, which will be posted on Tuesday)
Erin Reed is an independent journalist known for her eagle-eyed, data-driven coverage of policies impacting the LGBTQ community. Reed talks about what she looks for to assess the progression of LGBTQ rights, what it’s like to be a self-employed journalist, and what keeps her going.
Coming from a background in data analysis, Reed combines activism and journalism by using facts and statistics to fight transphobia. Her breaking news has been picked up by major media outlets such as the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Associated Press.
Reed dipped her feet into reporting five years ago while navigating her own gender transition. Frustrated by searching for help in her transition, she started mapping clinics in the United States that provided informed consent hormone replacement therapy. She shared this map on TikTok and Twitter, and it took off (it now has over 7.8 million views).
“That just sort of grew and ballooned outwardly until I finally became sort of unwittingly, a central source for information about health care access,” she says.
Meanwhile, Reed had a new worry: an increase in anti-trans legislations. In 2021, the number of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in state legislatures doubled compared to 2020.
She tells Mark: “I found myself very quickly having to pivot and talk about, ‘Okay, so I’ve tracked all these clinics, now there are laws that might endanger them.’”
She dug in. She combed through databases, tuned into meetings, and started messaging activists across the country.
“Very few people have read as many of these bills as I've read, and I would wager to say that nobody has watched as many hours of legislative hearings on this topic than, than myself,” she said.
On social media, she established herself as a helpful resource, empowering the trans community with crucial information.
Reed, like many others, was alarmed by the 2022’s uptick in anti-trans legislations. By October, there were already 250 anti-trans legislations, and that was Reed’s personal breaking point. She quit her job at an advertising firm to dedicate herself to reporting.
“I only had two months savings to my name. I had never written an article … Well, I’d written a couple articles, but did not do this for a living any time in my life. And I opened a Substack newsletter, and I said ‘I’m gonna try to either start an organization or just report on this.’”
The blog, Erin in the Morning, now has over 52,000 subscribers
Here are the 5 main takeaways from her conversation with Mark.
“I was definitely in the mindset of, ‘people rely on me for information’ before I entered into this, but I did not know that long form content, that writing articles, would be something that people would follow me for, because up until that point everybody who relied on me for information was relying on me for very short tweets, or for videos that I was putting on TikTok.”
— Erin Reed on The Journalism Salute
1. It’s all about community.
Reed knows the power of reaching out and building rapport.
“Back when I was 11 or 12 years old, I first came out to a select group of friends, mainly friends that I had made online, in a little Dungeons and Dragons group that we played back then. That was my first safe space, where I could tell people who I was.”
In her years as a citizen journalist, Reed has built a strong relationship with her audience, characterized by mutual exchanges of information and an emphasis on community-identified needs.
“Any time there was a major event on this issue, chances were I knew who it was that was going through it. Or I knew the clinic director. I knew one of the legislators,” she said.
Reed is engaged to Zooey Zephyr, a Montana representative and the first openly transgender person to be elected to the state legislature in Montana (you can hear more about their sweet relationship in the podcast!)
2. Anti-trans legislations do not reflect the concerns of the community.
When a bill enters Reed’s radar, she learns everything she could about it. She spends many hours watching recordings of hearings, and attends hearings if she can.
She says that number of people who rally against the bills “is almost always 5 to 10 times higher” than the number of people who rally for the bills.
“I’ve seen that number go up all the way to about 20 times,” she tells Mark, recounting a recent bill that 500 people registered to speak against, while about 30 people registered to speak for.
Reed wants to hold them accountable: “A lot of these bills are going to pass, and no matter how you report on them, they’re going to pass, but sometimes whenever you shine a light on them, especially in an embarrassing way like that, they back away, and that’s something that I’ve seen on numerous occasions.”
Recently, she published an article titled Georgia Senator Vows to Protect Girl, But Then Runs Away After Learning She Is Trans.
“That’s exactly what happened and I had corroborated the story with people that were there that had secondhand accounts of what happened.”
You can read the story here.
“I just got word — and I need to confirm it — but I just got word that that bill didn’t pass, it didn’t go forward,” she said.
Listen to the episode on the podcast app of your choice
3. Republican legislators might not be all that thrilled about the anti-trans bills, either.
But they’ll still vote for it.
Reed has an eye for patterns. Some patterns are obvious: people are very divided on trans issues right now. In recent years, anti-trans bills have been initiated exclusively by Republican legislators, while many Democrats actively oppose them. Others, not so much.
Reed notes that in most of the hearings she watches, “only a single Republican legislator will speak and all of the Democratic legislators will speak.”
She thinks that this because many of Republican legislators don’t actually believe in it.
“I’ve spoken to some of the Republican legislators actually on background and learned that, a lot of times, they don’t support these bills. But they know that they have to vote them anyway in order to not get primaried.”
To Reed, decoding legislature is a lot like assembling “puzzle pieces. You hear the exact same points made in each hearing, you hear the exact same information, you can see the way in which, they will not speak on bills, for instance.”
Listen to the episode on the podcast app of your choice.
4. These bills may be “copied and pasted” across states.
When we hear about anti-LGBTQ bills in the United States, it’s often the same two or three states that come up. Florida, in particular, has been under scrutiny, for concerning legislations such as the infamous ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill (which doesn’t explicitly prohibit mentions of LGBTQ per se, but allows administrators to unfairly discriminate against LGBTQ topics under the cover of sticking to curriculum), and now, a series of book bans that whitewashes history.
For those of us looking from a distance (hi, fellow New Jerseyans!), it’s easy to view these attacks on civil rights as a fringe issue, rather than a systemic problem in our country.
But these bills thrive on precedent, says Reed.
Between 2021 and 2023, the number of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced have tripled. Reed has a heat map that helps people visualize the prevalence of anti-trans legislations by state.
“They’re all copy and paste from one another; they look the same, like I can scan and they look the exact same,” she tells Mark.
Changes in nomenclature, on the other hand, serves as “early warning” on how these bills escalate, says Reed.
“If I see something that’s different, I know that, okay, this is now something that they’re going to focus on in the future.”
At first, anti-LGBTQ laws focused on youth, giving hardline ideologues the platform to psychologically damage kids under the guise of developmental appropriateness. So when Reed began hearing adults mentioned, her attention sharpened. She started working on a map dedicated to adults.
“They added one targeting incarcerated trans adults, so people that are in jail, basically banning their care. But also they started banning Medicaid for any age,” she explains. “And we just saw that in South Carolina today.”
“Over the last three years or so, I began doing this a little bit more methodically. I learned how to operate legislative tracking tools. I learned how to read bills alongside, you know, people who do this for a living. And I became the first person to break news on, like: ‘here's a new bill that dropped, here's what it does, here's how it might affect you.’”
— Erin Reed on The Journalism Salute
5. Whistleblowing is a team effort.
“A lot of times what I find myself doing is at 12, 1 in the morning [is that] I am loading up the Legiscan page to find all of the hearings that are going to be scheduled for the next day, because unfortunately, a lot of times these legislators don’t want any attention on their hearings since they won’t release them until the day before.”
Keeping up with those bills is overwhelming to say the least, but it’s all worth it, says Reed.
“I’m always being sent messages from trans kids, from the parents of trans kids, from trans adults who are coming out to their family, who constantly tell me that they use my resources to help get acceptance, to help show their mom what’s going on, to help show their company why they can’t go to Florida, to help fight for healthcare benefits, to, to help them learn that they can also run for elected office.”
Reed now works with an editorial team to maintain a legislative tracker.
“One of the people on my team has built a bot that will essentially automatically refill or fill the information in on any bill that I put in there.”
With contacts in every state, thousands of people counting on her, and a strong support network, Reed shows no signs of stopping.
“We raise alarm whenever we see something that looks dangerous,” she says.
You can hear the full episode here and you can find Asaka here.