Published July 5, 2020 (updated with new link October 7, 2023)

This is exciting! A lot of love and hard work went into its creation, and the Trans Journalists Association Style Guide is now a living document!

What is that, you ask? Straight from the source:

The Trans Journalists Association’s Style Guide is a tool reporters, editors and other media makers can use to begin to improve trans coverage. It gives insight into appropriate language, common shortcomings, and steps journalists can take to make their coverage better. While this guide provides a strong foundation for covering trans communities with sensitivity and care, trans communities are incredibly diverse. The language some trans people use to describe themselves and their communities might be different from or even contradict parts of this guide. Reporting well on trans communities requires nuance and care, and this guide is only a starting point.

The language of any conversation shapes that conversation. This is a long-overdue resource that I hope will be bookmarked and used in newsrooms everywhere in the English-speaking world.

The Associated Press Stylebook has updated its guidance on LGBTQIA+ coverage in recent years, and even added a Stonewall 50th Anniversary Topical Guide. GLAAD also has a Media Reference Guide. The Trans Journalists Association’s Style Guide is more extensive, thanks to the transgender people who worked on it for months.

In my role as a copy editor at a daily newspaper in 2019, I had to correct stories that referred to a transgender woman as having been “born male” or “biologically male,” and because I am a trans woman, this hits close to home. Those stories were about a local transgender woman who was slain, and whose accused killer had exploited that fact after his arrest, an offense compounded by the language used by law enforcement in documenting the case. The work of creating the Trans Journalists Association’s Style Guide was going on at the time, and I communicated with the group’s leadership for help with how best to educate the people in my newsroom about using inappropriate and offensive terminology. The style guide will help to prevent such language from appearing in news accounts going forward.

This is a wonderful thing.

If you care about transgender people and issues, please consider bookmarking the style guide and spending some time reading it.

With love,

Carly

Illustration of transgender people and the transgender flag by Lorelyn Medina via Shutterstock.