Crossdreamers: The Threats Facing Transgender News and Analysis (and what we can do about it)

Illustration: Getty

The whole Internet media landscape is changing dramatically, and that has repercussions for media coverage of trans issues as well as transgender content providers. Trans journalists and activists have to adapt to these changes, if they are to serve the LGBTQ community and contribute to the coverage of trans issues.

By Jack Molay

There are several reasons for why such writing is important.

First of all trans people - including journalists, activists and LGBTQ organizations - need up to date information and analysis regarding transgender issues in order to (1) put up a defense against anti-trans activists and policies and (2) build a learning arena for trans people and their allies as far as the topics of identity, life journeys, social and cultural challenges and politics go.

I would argue that if you are at war, intelligence gathering and sharing in of outmost importance, and right now the transgender community is under continuous attack.

Secondly transgender media may provide important input to cis journalists and media, and it this way help trans people get the message across to a broader audience.

The importance of the web for trans people cannot be overrated. Before the internet most trans people had extremely limited access to information about gender identity and gender dysphoria. There were newsletters and zines, for sure, but if you wanted to get access to them you needed to know they existed.

The Encyclopedia Britannica - once considered the best encyclopedia around - had zero entries on queer and trans issues in 1942. What this epitome of knowledge told LGBTQ people was that they did not exist. So yeah, trans web visibility is very important, and especially online, as this is the main source of info for many closeted, questioning and isolated gender variant people.

Traditional media is failing

It is baffling to see to what extent cis journalists fail to include trans voices in their reporting, while transphobic TERFs and right wing extremists are given a lot of space. I guess this is part of an overall systemic pressure towards upholding the status quo, in this case traditional gender roles and power relationships.

We can add the Republican Party's need to stop voters from focusing on their failures, and the TERF's pathological obsession with genitalia. Trans people are used as scapegoats distracting people from the real threats of society.

Most cis journalists do not know much about trans issues, and few of them bother to do the research needed, as the pressure to produced a lot of content fast is increasing. Besides, doing proper research would often mean challenging their own preconceptions.

This may also apply to reporters who see themselves as progressive and radical. Their mental maps are shaped by the same narratives and prejudices as most people, so when transphobes use a language they can relate to ("protecting women's spaces") they fall easily prey to transphobic lies and anti-trans propaganda.

Furthermore, today's media landscape is dominated by the idea that journalist have to be "neutral", "objective", and "balanced", with the implicit message that "the truth" lies somewhere in between the extremes, trans activists representing one of these "extremes". This means that the media can get away with "presenting both sides" - no further research needed.

As anyone who have studied the history of women's liberation, the civil rights movement or gay liberation will tell you: when it comes to the liberation of marginalized groups, the truth is never between the extremes.

Indeed, unpleasant truths threatening existing power structures are always seen as "extreme." The truth did not lie somewhere in between Hitler and the Jews of Weimar Germany. Since our culture is biased in favor of the status quo, this "balanced reporting" favors reactionaries.

True critical and investigative journalism should be aimed at unmasking oppression, corruption and unfair power structures. But that requires hard work and resources, and given that most media companies now insists on producing more with fewer real journalists, it should come as no surprise when newspapers, TV channels and news sites fail in their reporting on transgender issues.

That being said, there are cis journalists and writers out there who want to provide a factual understanding of transgender issues, especially now when anti-trans hate is used to distract voters from serious issues. And they need help.

The challenges facing queer media

There was a time when many believed the internet would lead to more quality journalism. After all, if you did not have to spend money on print and distribution, you could spend more on journalists, right?

Wrong. All over the world newsroom are reducing the number of journalists. This also applies to parts of the queer news sphere. The British Pink News recently sacked nearly all of its journalists, and is now - for all practical purposes - a news curator recycling press releases and stories covered by others. Instead of investigative journalism we get an awful lot of celebrity gossip.

Sophie Perry on Bluesky

American Equalpride, a company that own sites like Out, Advocate, Pride.com and them (bought from Condé Nast in Ferbruary), save money by republishing the same articles on several of their properties.

You will find some of the same people managing many of the sites. For instance: Christopher Wiggins is Equalpride's politics and news editor and explicitly “leads and shapes coverage across The Advocate, Out, and Them.”

This is not necessarily a problem as far as independence and good journalism goes, but the fact that so many LGBTQ properties are owned and managed by the same company and the same people leads to less diversity and increased vulnerability.

And yes, Equalpride also let go of a lot of editorial and administrative staff in order to cut costs. According to Matt Minton over at Progressive.org Chief Executive Officer Mark Berryhill referred to “cancellations of major advertising campaigns” under the “current economic concerns and challenges” when explaining this to the staff.

These sites continue to deliver high quality LGBTQ journalism, though, which gives me hope. I get a lot of useful information from them.

Trump's anti-DEI policy and the following decline in ad revenue do not help. reports that this especially has affected transgender journalists. Over at the Objective Deng quotes Tre’vell Anderson, executive director of the Trans Journalist Association and lead contributor to the Trans News Initiative, who says that lack of media representation has only fueled hate and misinformation against trans people.

NBC OUT, NBC's LGBTQ newsroom/vertical, is gone, although some of the journalists have been moved into the general newsroom.

Teen Vogue, which has been an important pro-trans site, has not totally given up on LGBTQ content, but the coverage has been weakened since Condé Nast’s "restructuring" of the publication in November 2025. "Restructuring" means sacking a majority of the staff, including many transgender journalists.

Furthermore, the Minnesota based Lavender Magazine is gone. BuzzFeed no longer publishes real transgender news.

Equalpride republishes articles on several of its sites.

The problem is not that there is no LGBTQ coverage in media. The problem is that there are fewer journalists who are paid specifically to understand LGBTQ+ issues and who have the experience, knowledge and skills to provide critical investigative journalism.

That being said, there are sites that continue to deliver. To give one example: QueerAF is a British nonprofit community interest company and describes itself as Britain's only press-regulated LGBTQIA+ publisher. It does not focus that much on increasing advertising exposure, relying more on membership and community support. QueerAF says that a third of its writers have a trans+ background.

For more relevant LGBTQ news sites, go to our article Sites Covering Transgender News.

The search engine tragedy

Queer media has, in the same way as cishet media, for a long time been powered by what Amelia Handsford refers to as "metric anxiety", the desperate desire for more traffic, more clicks and through this more ad revenue. Ad revenue pays for salaries and whatever profits the shareholders expect.

If you primarily report on profit rather than cultural, social or political influence, you are incentivized toward publishing click bait more than proper journalism.

Illustration: Getty

I am not going to condemn every publication that deliberately publishes click bait in order to attract visitors.

Even if your main goal is to inform, you need visitors to read the stuff you are writing. But if the click bait stuff replaces quality content, the site stops functioning as a vehicle for knowledge based analysis.

The click bait craze grew out of the Search Engine Marketing culture, where you tried to find ways of making especially Google like, list and rank your website's content.

There was a kind of tacit social contract between Google and web content providers: The sites would provide the content and answers Google's users are looking for, while Google would give these sites traffic in return. So having a link at the top of Google's search engine result pages (SERPs) for a competitive keyword phrase was gold.

For transgender bloggers and site owners, this was not primarily the matter of selling more ads and products. The goal was rather to present pro-trans information to the public and beat the transphobes to it.

This became increasingly difficult, as TERFs and other reactionaries set up huge networks of sites linking to each other, boosting each others ranking for important trans related keyword phrases in the process.

That being said, it was possible to find good transgender related content using Google search. Both science based content and the writings of trans activists and writers could rank high.

However, that model has been dying for years, as Google, step by step, has filled the SERPs with their own content and answering services.

There is no solid proof of Google deliberately degrading the quality of search results to generate more searches and make people stay for longer at their site, but court documents show increasing pressure inside Google to generate more searches, longer user journeys and greater advertising revenue.

The way Google now increasingly relies on AI results ("AI Overviews") to give users what they want has seriously undermines the old model. Search engine traffic has halved even for large, popular sites. Sure, traditional search queries also seem to be increasing, but the click through rate is going down.

Source: Pew Research Center

Traditional search engine optimization does not work i a world where keyword phrases have been replaced by long, complex, questions, and where the search engine (or AI) gives people the answer directly.

Note that trans relevant queries often are why, what or who questions, like:

Why are puberty blockers used in transgender health care?
What does the latest Supreme Court decision mean for transgender students?
What does research actually show about detransition rates?

These are exactly the kind of questions that triggers an AI response.

And note that young people are more likely to use chat bots than older people. I suppose this also applies to LGBTQ youth. Given that young trans people most likely need more help to find relevant content than those who have lived for a while, reaching them through AI answers become imperative.

Source: Reuters Institute

It does not seem that all media companies have gotten this memo. For those whose overall goal remains eyeballs or clicks (as opposed to providing quality content), this new trend has led to even more celebrity gossip and AI slop, a tactic based on the hope that if you throw enough mud upon the screen some of it will stick.

Bring on the clicks!

But publishing more AI written slop is a doomed strategy in this new environment.

Big AI services like Google, Anthropic and OpenAI "fingerprint" or "watermark" AI generated articles, so that they can be identified as AI generated content.This stops the models from drinking their own P when answering questions. Ironically, the large language models want original human made content.

Because of this AI generated content generally ranks lower than human written content in Google. So the best way for carbon based writers to get any amount of traffic is to write high quality content that will rank well in the old fashioned links that are still there, or which the AI answer will link to.

But, again, do not expect much traffic from AI answer links. People are apparently clicking on links from AI systems more often, but this is nothing in comparison to traditional search engine results.

And how do you produce more quality content with fewer journalists?

Social media are punishing links

Some argue that the sites will have to use their social media presence to generate alternative traffic. This is true. But this will not lead to less click bait and AI slop. Quite the opposite.

Moreover, sites like Facebook and X-twitter are now deliberately punishing posts that link to content outside their walled garden, as this may make users leave their sites. You can promote your site, but a post promoting a specific article and which includes a link to that article is buried deep by the algorithm.

When I tried to publish my transgender news feed on Facebook last year, it was simply deleted. Why? because I provided content that made trans and trans ally readers leave Meta's platform.

Publishers who want to use these platforms to generate traffic to their own sites have to become very creative indeed. (One trick is to add the link in a comment!)

Only social media platforms that are at least in part set up to help people find content online work these days. Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Flipboard may provide some traffic.

Bluesky seems to have replaced Twitter as the main arena for transgender news curation, but it has in no way reached the levels of information dissemination Twitter had in its pre-fascist days.

Alternative media

While traditional text based journalism and analysis may be declining, people are more likely to follow other types of channels, and especially video and podcasts. S

o visibility om YouTube, TikTok and/or Instagram may help people find good transgender news. A podcast can be distributed for free on music streaming services (Apple Music, Spotify), YouTube and dedicated podcast sites and directories.

The problem is that as video and podcast production has become professionalized, it has become much more complicated and costly to make videos that brings in viewers. People are less likely to condone amateurism these days (bad sound, bad lighting, endless chatter).

That being said, it is still possible for an individual to run a simple video or podcast channel by themselves, if they invest in a decent mike, a good camera and some extra lighting. You can even use a good smartphone for this kind of work.

Trans writers can also ally themselves with relevant video and audio producer and get the message across that way.

News sites run by by transgender people

There is one group of transgender news reporters that do know a lot about transgender lives and issues, namely transgender writers. Some of them have decided to publish outside the established "professional" media channels and address their audience directly.

You could call them bloggers, but some of them provide journalistic content that goes beyond what bloggers normally provide.

The most popular publishing platform these days seem to be Substack, as you can publish articles for free over there, it has a substantial reach and you can use it for paid subscriptions and crowd funding, if you want to. Substack also doubles as an email newsletter distributor, which will appeal to some readers.

Substack has in many ways replaced Medium, as Medium now requires you to subscribe to their platform to read their content. There are still trans writers who use the platform. There is some quality content found - for instance - in the Prism & Pen channel. but they pay a high price for doing so. People are constantly asked to pay for subscription these days, and most people simply move on to free content elsewhere.

The main transgender journalist on Substack is Erin Reed. She and her friends publish new articles every day on Erin in the Morning. I believe this is the most influential news provider of its kind right now.

Her business model seems to be to provide most of the content for free. If you pay for the subscription you get additional subscribers only content, although I think most sign up for the paid version to support her work.

Among other transgender powered news blogs and sites we find Transitics and Assigned Media.

I have published a list of more transgender news providers here.

This is not all about numbers

It is important to keep in mind that the effect an article has on culture and society cannot be reduced to the number of click or eyeballs.

A well written critical, analytic and fact based article that brings influential readers the knowledge they need, can have a much larger effect on the zeitgeist or on concrete politics than a trivial celebrity gossip piece with several hundred thousand views.

A quality article can be a catalyst that leads to a large number of new articles, posts, comments and videos - all of which may help change the world.

Journalism cannot be reduced to clicks and ad revenue, as far as the effect it has on society goes.

The new model is not sustainable

The current AI-driven search industry (including Google, meta, Anthropic and OpenAI) is not sustainable. It will collapse when a sufficient number of human writers give up. Sites run by idealists also need some income to pay their bills. Not only will this become a huge problem for marginalized groups like trans people. Our democracies are at stake.

Illustration: Getty

What we are seeing here is the overexploitation of the commons of the World Wide Web. A well functioning commons requires that all the users respect the needs of the others using the same fields.

Yet I don't think the demand for knowledge based quality content will go away. There is a sufficient number of knowledgeable, critical and genuinely interested people out there for there to be an audience for quality news and content, trans writing included.

And if there is a demand, someone will come up with new models for how to distribute such content - eventually.

Even the big AI/search companies will have to contribute to the development of good content in the end, simply because their whole business model is based on the ability to provide such information.

We are in the middle of a significant technology shifts, and during such transformations the move from one way of doing things to another is often messy, traumatic and destructive. We have to find ways of coping during that transition period.

Be the expert

It seems to me that original content will stand out in this landscape. Recycling existing content does not cut it. Publishing write-ups may be of help to your already existing audience, but it will not be sufficiently visible in AI and search results.

This is why I think trans and trans ally content providers will have to focus on original reporting, interviews, human stories, knowledge based critical analysis, popularized presentations of science papers, and articles written by experts. Include references and links to sources.

As far as LGBTQ relevant content goes, queer and transgender publications will have an advantage compared to traditional media, as they are more likely to have access to expertise on queer and trans issues. Hate sites presenting prejudices as pseudo-science are less likely to succeed in this new landscape, as LLMs are getting better at identifying and ignoring crap.

Furthermore: Help people find the content by writing meaningful headlines and introductions. If the headline does not communicate the main message, no one will click on the link.

Make use of sign up newsletters. You control that database of followers, not Google or ChatGPT.

Another way of helping quality transgender news providers is to link to them directly on your own sites or in social media. This is a way to get around the bottlenecks of degraded search engines and AI answers.

LLMs

Let me add here that even if Google and the other minor search engines are replacing search results with AI answers, that does not mean that regular search results have no effect at all.

Moreover, the AIs are using their own web searches to find - or steal - content, and if the goal is to help trans people find relevant information, it is better that it comes from someone who knows something about the issue than from bigots.

This is a cynical approach, I know, because this argument basically means that we should provide the LLMs with good content, rather than blocking them.

That does not mean what they are doing is OK. What they are doing here represents an unethical exploitation of the hard work done by good people. They do so while destroying our environment and engaging in undemocratic social engineering. We need an international political effort to stop these companies from destroying the web and the world.

But with the political paralysis caused by extremism, polarization, fascist billionaires and political stupidity, I am afraid we will need a systemic collapse to be able to introduce new just and more humane policies.

But we cannot stop acting while we are waiting for that to happen. At this point in history we need to do everything we can to provide trans people and their allies with good information. If the LLMs become the main gateway for information about trans people, we need to be there.