When the Barbie movie came out earlier this year, the Poynter newsroom’s Annie Aguiar expressed joy that journalism is still seen by many as an aspirational career path for young women, akin to being a doctor or the president. 

“Seeing it through Barbie’s eyes is affirming," she wrote. "Girls can be brave, bold, and unapologetic; demand answers of figures in power; and they can do it by being journalists.” 

I come at the world not as a woman, but a transgender, non-binary person, someone still outside the cisgender male norm of a working journalist, but with a very different experience as “outsider.” 

I was taught to write and self-publish as a teenager by a quietly radical English teacher, together with older students over cups of tea while picking apart the works of Kae Tempest (a non-binary performance poet I’ve since run into on a night out) to see how authors bring politics to life on a page. 

While it was my calling to string words together for a cause, the next question was how to do it while paying the bills. After seeing a couple of posts from Amnesty International calling journalism one of the most dangerous forms of activism, it seemed that would be the means to my end. 

But I come from the UK, and people here don’t trust the press. We're one of the most trusting nationalities in the world, only 13% of Brits have at least quite a lot of confidence in the fourth estate. 

That puts us six places below the US, which stands at 30%, and higher only than Egypt, according to research by the Policy Institute at King’s College London. 

I am on the cusp of finishing a five grand journalism diploma, and it made me understand why. It taught me to write from a courtroom without putting myself in prison (we have some very restrictive contempt of court laws), choose words carefully to avoid falling foul of defamation law, and make quick work of Excel spreadsheets that obfuscate simple societal problems. 

But it also taught me that if I want to write to make the world better, the press likely won’t be the place to do it. 

On the 11th of February 2023, a 16-year-old transgender girl named Brianna Ghey was killed in Culcheth Linear Park in Warrington, in a possible hate crime. When reporting on the killing, the Times, a supposed ‘newspaper-of-record’ akin to the NYT, published her ‘deadname’ in print. 

They were not the first, mind. The Daily Mail did so first after allegedly finding it out from her former optician. 

An outsider might think this was just a misinformed and overly nosey journalist not knowing it’s 'offensive' to call a trans person by their deadname. But it goes so much deeper than this. 

Professor Paul Baker conducted a study commissioned by children’s charity Mermaids and found three and a half times as many articles about trans people in British newspapers between October 2017-19 as there were in 2012. 

Within them, the word “transgender” co-occurred most regularly with words like “angry, clash, complaint, fury, offended, outrage, row, spat, upset and wrath” and those linked to crime, “killer, prisoner, lag, criminal, murderer, rapist, jail and kill.” 

His corpus covered a period when our right-wing Conservative party line was to support transgender people. They had published an LGBT Action Plan, proposing to make it easier for us to be legally recognised, among other things. 

All were kicked into dust when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, taking Britain spiralling to new lows, from proposals to redefine legal sex to exclude trans women from gendered resources like domestic violence refuges and healthcare facilities, to banning puberty blockers in all but a few mandatory research settings, much to the joy of the American conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom spurring these actions on. 

Had the Action Plan been implemented, the age at which someone can change legal gender may have been brought down to 16, in line with the UK’s age of consent. Brianna would have been old enough to apply and, had she done so successfully, under section 22 of the Gender Recognition Act the Times would have committed a crime.

That's because deadnaming someone in death, to us, is akin to vandalizing their gravestone. It's a desecration of their memory, preventing their sense of self from settling as a fact in the public memory. Every deadname that goes to print unchallenged makes the rights of surviving trans people to self-govern more questionable, more debatable, and less secure.

But these protections apply only to holders of a gender recognition certificate, people who are 18+, have waited often over five years for two mandatory gender dysphoria assessments, and collected two years' worth of documents proving they have " lived in the acquired gender throughout the period of two years." 

Brianna was killed before she could meet these criteria.

Our tutors drilled into us that, when weighing privacy rights against the public interest, children’s rights weigh more. But this premise is reversed for trans children. Because Brianna died a child, she had less protection than if she had died an adult. 

With blood running as hot as a deep fryer, I approached one of my tutors, an expert in the Editors Code. 

In the UK, most news publications are members of the Independent Press Standards Authority, which has a Code of Practice they are meant to follow. The code was written in the fresh blood of Millie Dowler, of soldiers and of terror victims whose families were all spied on by News International for their next big scoop. 

I also knew that transgender people had played a role in the inquiry that followed, submitting evidence of their own mistreatment. 

I had my eyes on regulations which said: 

“Editors will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual's private life without consent, considering an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy.” (Clause 2) 

“The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual's … gender identity… and details of an individual's … gender identity… must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story.” (Clause 12) 

But, I was in for a rude awakening. 

“You can’t invade the privacy of a dead person,” the tutor said. 

Dr James Barry would very much beg to differ, I thought, recalling how the first European doctor to perform a successful C-section in Africa was outed as trans against his will, allegedly by the charwoman who dressed his body. 

Further, IPSO does not regard deadnaming as “prejudicial or pejorative” in and of itself – only offensive – and causing offence is one thing it won’t challenge. 

Even if it had decided there were breaches, while IPSO has the power to levy up to £1 million fines, it has never done so. 

I sat at my desk, head in hands, and wondered what the hell the point was. 

Unlike in the US, in Britain it is not the political right that distrusts the media most, but the left. Only 1% of self-identifying right-wing respondents said they felt the media covered them unfairly, compared to 8% of left-wingers, according to the 2022 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. 

Being left-wing, I’m undoubtedly biased. But I do think this distrust is valid. In the words of RSF (Reporters Without Borders): 

“The British media landscape continues to suffer from a lack of pluralism, with just three companies – News UK, Reach, and Daily Mail and General Trust – dominating the national newspaper market, concentrating power and influence in very few hands.”

This problem is far from unique to us; RSF identified the same problems in America. A media landscape in any country that relies on engagement for profit, run by billionaires who care for little other than the weight of their pockets, was never going to meet the needs of the public, let alone minorities in it. 

And, while we have a public service broadcaster to compete with them, it has its own history of propagating transphobic myths and stereotypes, losing prominent LGBT reporters as a result. 

Trans people comprise just 0.5% of the population (a figure our supposed Equalities Minister aims to artificially shrink by challenging the accuracy of Census data). The real figure may be larger, as I know some people were afraid to disclose their status in a government-controlled survey. 

Nonetheless, we’re not a big group, highly stigmatized and vulnerable to discrimination, “conversion” torture and hate crime. 

We make the perfect folk devils, with too few of us to stand up on our own and complex life experiences, subcultures and health needs that demand more empathy and medical/legal/statistical literacy than many people can muster. 

When have you ever had to think about Tanner stages before this moral panic? What about your hormones? Bone densities? Androgen sensitivity? Karyotype testing? 

Most school children in the UK and US don’t even get a basic civics education anymore, let alone a comprehensive civics and sexual health education. Most adults here are still catching up from Section 28, our 1988 attempt at a “Don’t Say Gay” bill which made it an offence to “promote homosexuality” in state schools until 2003. They don’t have the tools to be able to properly confront these issues, and if they don’t have immediate access to a trans person to help them, they often rely on the press to do so. 

I’m not sure, then, if what I do can be called “journalism.” It’s certainly not the strict bourgeois style of ‘fact’-only, he-said-she-said news reporting promoted by the NCTJ or the Associated Press. 

Some things, while complex, can be expressed and proven as facts. Do hormone blockers dissolve your bones? Which MPs voted for Andrew Bridgen’s bill to ban social transition in schools? How old is the average person living in a British council house? The answers are there in scientific literature, Hansard, and the national Census. 

But how do I go about proving that what the Times did to Brianna was wrong? How do I prove the reality of such a complex bio-socio-psychological phenomenon as my own gender, let alone a girl I never got to meet? 

How do I prove 20-year-old Alice Litman was who she said she was? Watching her sister condemn the healthcare system that made her wait over one thousand days to even try, the candle I held flickering like the rage I saw in her eye. Soho Square. Transgender Day of Remembrance. 

14-year-old Corei’s name will be included on the list this year, and I will hold a candle for him too. 

Some things cannot be proven as easily. They need both the raw data – the blood tests, surveys, crime statistics and tribunal reports – and a human voice to explain it, one that isn’t so detached that it trades objectivity for genuine expertise. 

If I were not trans, if each death did not feel like losing one of my own kin, I would not know the laws, the sources, and the facts to check tell their stories well. My expertise comes at the cost of my objectivity. If that means my writing is not journalism per se, so be it. 

These young people deserved better than journalism.