New Episode: Evan Urquhart On Covering Transgender Issues

Assigned Media is an important news outlet where people can get well-educated

Those of you who are longtime followers of the podcast know how much I prioritize diversity and representation here. With everything that's going on in the United States at the moment, I felt it imperative to have a journalist covering transgender issues on the podcast (we've previously had a couple, most notably Erin Reed).

Evan Urquhart was my interviewee this week. Evan, a transgender male, has his own website, Assigned Media, on which he and his staff cover anti-transgender propaganda and legislation and other issues that impact that group of people.

Evan is currently working on a Knight Fellowship, a prestigious project covering US vs Skrmetti, a Supreme Court case challenging Tennessee's ban on gender affirming care. Work on the website continues though with frequent updates and new stories.

This was a good conversation and I want to highlight three questions and answers that came up. Hopefully it'll motivate you to listen to the whole interview.

How do you decide what gets covered on your website?

It is a little different this year because what I used to do was just wake up at 6am and scroll right-wing headlines and like look at The Daily Wire and stuff and let them kind of set my agenda.

But because I've been doing this fellowship, we've really had to beef up our freelancers and, so we have Alyssa Steinsiek who writes two times a week. And she has a very sassy voice, and she generally picks a topic and gives it her unique spin, which is usually like a little bit humorous, a little bit angry and trying to be a bit fun.

And then, we really are interested in covering protests right now because, there's a lot of talk in the trans community and in LGBTQ media about giving people positive stories. Maybe because I'm a newsman I don't like this kind of fluff or this kind of fake positivity or giving people something that doesn't feel really authentic.

So, my version of that is to give people protest stories, give people a vision of what it looks like to resist as a way to cut some of the bad news. We really care a lot about having original reporting on the site. There is a lot of what a freelancer brings to us that goes into that. We try to look for stories that aren't being covered elsewhere. So, Alyssa might do a take on a story that's widely in the news, but then for our freelancers, we really want them to bring us something that no one else is gonna have and something that, frankly, mainstream media would just consider not important enough.

What advice would you give to those people covering the attempts to pass legislation banning transgender participation in organized college sports?

We've had years of this being like one of the most contentious political topics in the world and people don't know the basic science of whether trans women have any proven advantage over cis women in sports, which they don't, with a little bit of an asterisk because hormone therapy seems to really, change people's bodies pretty drastically.

There was kind of a process, a history by which most organized sports at elite levels made some sort of threshold that was that trans women could compete after a certain amount of time on hormonal medication.

And it worked well enough so that no trans woman has ever dominated a single sport ever in the history of trans women participating in sports.

And that just feels like such a basic reality that I feel like the debate over trans people in sports doesn't even touch on. If the facts, as I've told them, which is how I understand them, are incorrect, I would love reporters to delve into it and tell the truth as they understand it.

I feel like I don't understand how we've had so long talking about this without people even really engaging with the question. Not that it never happens, but I just feel like it should be a basic part of the story always.

Like, what is the reality here?

 I ask this question earnestly: We've heard a lot about legislation and situations and how they impact transgender women (I was referring to athletics, the military, and prisons). Are there any issues that specifically impact transgender men that aren't getting awareness that should be getting news coverage?

The thing that immediately comes to mind when you ask that is the way that young transgender boys and young adult men are incessantly referred to in the media as girls and daughters and presented as a sort of wave of false transitions.

I think it's really insidious that you have whole articles discussing transgender boys that do not identify them as boys, that only use she/her pronouns that talk about them as if there's some huge trend towards girls making a mistake and thinking they're transgender incorrectly.

And that doesn't exist in the data. It's not that it has never happened, but it just is not a trend in any honest accounting of it. And I think people don't even realize when they're reading these articles that these are trans boys who are under discussion. It's trans boys and men's lives that are being like, that are the heart of this controversy over these kinds of 'lost daughter' narratives. I think publications will use this kind of language without realizing this is misgendering, this is what we're not supposed to do. This is denying that that people are trans.

I think that there are certainly ways that reporters can write about this topic of young trans people whose identities are contested, where they keep in the back of their mind that almost every single one of the young people under discussion is a trans boy who is going to grow into a trans man whose parents may not be supportive of that, or who may come to be supportive of that eventually.

Young trans women are also affected (by this), but I think that's what comes to mind (for this question).

Evan also talked about the poor coverage of trans issues from The New York Times, offered opinions on which outlets cover transgender issues well, and shared how he's developed as a journalist and as a person. Hope you’ll listen!

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