No one likes to be misrepresented. Especially myself. Especially in the news media. Unfortunately, things happen; the important thing is to learn and grow from them when they do.

As transgender sources, there are and will always be a great many people who draft articles relating to the news of our community, to which most are unfamiliar. When allowing yourself, as a transgender individual, to be quoted in the media, there are a few things to consider before opening the door to that conversation to ensure you align with a reputable journalist who will represent your words with care, rather than a media publication’s agenda.

Vetting Publications and Journalists

My first recommendation is always to do a little digging into bias.

Some sites I like to use include:

• Media Bias / Fact Check — https://mediabiasfactcheck.com
• Allsides — https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
• Media Bias Dashboard — https://mediabiasdetector.seas.upenn.edu

As for vetting journalists:

• Muckrack — https://muckrack.com

Aside from that, I’ll conduct a deep dive into a potential journalist’s past articles and into who I am considering for quotes. What articles they’ve written, and how fair and balanced the representation is throughout all of their articles. This tends to be an excellent indicator of the probability of bias in the articles that they write.

How Quotes Can and Do Get Taken Out of Context and What to Do After The Fact

As much as you can prepare and have all your ducks in a row, sometimes a journalist and/or publication can throw you for a loop and take your words out of context. It’s happened to me once. I hated it. Hated it. So I’ll touch on it briefly and explain how to course-correct.

In terms of providing quotes related to gender identity and the entertainment business, I have had one large publication select a fragment of my full quote, leaving out the full context of my commentary to fit their pro-conservative-leaning angle regarding a known UK highly anti-trans author and why a studio would place funds behind their regurgitated franchise.

The quote utilized was:

“is a business move by a studio plain and simple,”

What was left out was my full quote that was provided:

“This is a business move by a studio plain and simple, motivated by corporate greed as opposed to platforming positive social impacts — a bigot is being platformed and given more opportunities to spew hate here while a corporate entity looks the other way.”

You see how much that could shift the way my stance on the topic appears? Naturally, I was pissed off because I was misrepresented.

So how did I choose to navigate this? Let it ride. Sometimes you have to, but also live through and with the experience I had. There’s a saying that’s never left me since hearing it from a former agent client of mine: “experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” Having my words taken out of context was an experience. I learned a lot.

I further expanded my vetting processes for journalists and publications, with much, much more scrutiny, and I will now never provide a quote to that particular journalist or publication, period. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. I saw the agenda there and was none too pleased.

So, of course, I may be asked about that quote from the article in the future by those open-minded enough not to believe everything they read, and I’m ready for those conversations. The reality is that not everyone operates at that level of awareness. That’s the world of PR; things are not always what they appear to be.

With that said, always go directly to the source and ask the hard questions. You may be pleasantly surprised that the answer isn’t what you initially thought it would be, and you very well could come out of the conversation having learned a lesson yourself.

There are a great many journalists who cite transgender sources and do not misrepresent our words; however, I would encourage you, as a transgender source, to be very discerning when communicating with journalists and media publications.