Seen But Not Heard: The Cost of Trans Hypervisibility

Trans Day of Visibility, celebrated March 31st, was created sixteen years ago with the aim of humanizing trans people in the media, changing our narrative of one exclusively of violence and victimhood. At that, we have certainly succeeded. Unfortunately, visibility is not the same as empowerment.

Overwhelmingly, trans stories in both news and entertainment media are still being told by cisgender people, framed around cisgender concerns, and filtered through tinted lenses for cisgender comfort. The result is not real representation — it is a kind of hypervisibility that erases trans humanity and harms trans people at every level. It poses a direct harm to our health through the effects of being exposed to dehumanizing material. It shapes how cis people treat us, making us more vulnerable to targeted violence. And it fortifies a political environment in which lawmakers are emboldened to restrict our rights.

A 2021 study in LGBT Health which surveyed 545 trans adults found that 97.6 percent had been exposed to negative media depictions of trans people. More frequent exposure was significantly associated with clinical symptoms of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and global psychological distress — even after controlling for age, race, income, and experiences of abuse. A 2023 study in Sexuality Research and Social Policy found that exposure to news coverage of anti-trans legislation was itself associated with increased psychological distress, health symptoms, fear, and identity concealment among trans youth and young adults — even among those not directly affected by the bills.

The trans people I spoke with for this story are living proof of these impacts. Nyx Melody is a licensed mental health counselor in New York City who specializes in working with transgender and gender-diverse clients. She founded The Qlective, a private group practice staffed by trans therapists. She sees the impact on both sides of the therapeutic relationship. “Negative media coverage can provoke anxiety, fear, trauma, and depression — feelings that my trans clients share with me, and I experience myself,” she said.

Tre’vell Anderson, executive director of the Trans Journalists Association, sees the same dynamic from inside the industry. “What we know is that with that increased visibility has come increased vulnerability,” they said. And that vulnerability means each hostile headline or hate-filled comment section can take a personal toll on each of us. “For me and where I am in this work, it’s exhausting," Anderson said. "It becomes yet another example of the ways that the news media in particular, but media more broadly, is being used to further other and marginalize our communities.”

“Even when it’s about us it usually doesn’t include us,” said Jen Durbent, a transfem tech writer in the Chicago area. “Our lives are afterthoughts to how cis people feel about us. So I feel invisible to anything except hate."

Danielle Morris, a trans woman involved with A4TE, the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, and Oregon’s Pride Chamber, describes a community in retreat. “My gender non-conforming friends, lovers, colleagues, and I have all been impacted by the increased media attention. I would say most of the exposure since POTUS 47 reimagined his return to the White House has had negative consequences. It’s difficult on a good day and nearly impossible on a bad one,” she said. “Because of all of this, many inside our communities are withdrawing,” she said. “Turtling is my word[...] to escape by moving inward.”

This exclusion from our own stories is well-documented. Two years ago, Media Matters for America and GLAAD released a study which found that The New York Times failed to quote a trans person in 66% of its stories about anti-trans legislation between February 2023 and February 2024. Similarly, in 2025, the Trans Journalists Association in partnership with Berkeley Media Studies Group,found that of significant articles about trans people in the first 100 days of Trump's second presidency, 70% did not quote a single trans person.

In 2016, GLAAD found that only 16% of Americans said they personally knew a trans person. By 2021, Pew Research put that number at 42% — a significant increase, but still a minority. According to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, "Some of the first and most common ways both trans and cisgender people learn about trans and non-binary people is through the news and media." And the media they're consuming is overwhelmingly produced by, published by, and quoting cisgender people. Most cis people are not just learning about trans people from the media. They are learning about trans people from cis people in the media. And the results aren't limited to the screen.

“I’ve personally heard people using Joe Rogan anti-trans talking points in the wild,” said Jade Marciniak, a 30-year-old transfemme in Buffalo, New York. “I think because a lot of people don’t know any real trans people, media has a huge impact on how we’re perceived by the general public, especially in the sense of bringing people who’ve never thought about us at all into a conversation which they have little investment in." Marciniak thinks the "strong knee-jerk emotional reactions" that cis people have on trans issues can give them a "false sense of conviction" about the factual validity of those feelings.

These failures in the media create a self-reinforcing loop, making it harder for journalists trying to report on trans issues and communities to do so effectively, as trans people lose faith in the media and no longer feel safe speaking to the press. Written evidence submitted to the UK Parliament by Trans Media Watch and TransActual described “significant distrust in news organisations, fuelled by a widespread belief that news reporting is ... spreading disinformation — not as outright untruth, so much as through selective reporting and its framing of stories.”

The mechanics of selective reporting by mainstream media is something Anderson thinks about professionally. “The foundation of our industry is one that does not consider trans people,” they said. “It doesn’t consider Black people or brown people or immigrants or disabled people.” The result is what Anderson calls a self-perpetuating cycle. “We’re getting covered, but we’re not being part of the coverage,” they said. “That reproduces the same harm, the same erasure, the same exclusion, and the same vulnerabilities that the community is already dealing with.”

This lack of consideration isn't necessarily always intentional, but it is systemic. While billionaire-owned media outlets and their stewards may be making top-level editorial decisions with an anti-trans agenda, many journalists and frontline editors are simply working from the same place of ignorance as the general public. “The majority of the anti-trans antagonistic sentiment that we’re seeing in news media is often done by well-meaning people,” Anderson says.

Which means that narrative can change.

Byron Kimball is a public relations specialist in Portland, Oregon, who trains people on how anti-trans media narratives are constructed and how to combat them. “Even when we’re looking at coverage that is benignly produced,” he said, what journalists inevitably, inadvertently do is repeat the framing of anti-trans actors … using the same language,” he said. Conservative policy institutes use the media as a tool to influence public opinion, and then use the power of that influence to create momentum for legislation that solidifies their anti-trans agenda into law.

“A lot of what we’re seeing is the consequence of a drastically well-funded anti-trans campaign,” Kimball said, pointing to The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think-tank behind the plan commonly referred to as Project 2025. “We’re being used as a wedge issue. We’re being used as a distraction to support the political aims of far-right — and arguably fascist — policymakers.” According to Kimball, those narratives are then laundered through media ownership structures and redistributed through licensing deals to smaller outlets that lack the capacity to independently verify what they publish.

The documentary Heightened Scrutiny, directed by Sam Feder, traces the direct trajectory from media coverage to anti-trans legislation, showing how outlets like Fox News cited the New York Times' reporting to legitimize their own anti-trans framing, which in turn provided cover for lawmakers. For example, an Assigned Media investigation co-published with The Objective found that the decision in the U.S. v. Skrmetti Supreme Court case which upheld a Tennessee Law banning puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries for transgender minors cited New York Times coverage 29 times.

Texas cited a New York Times Magazine article in court documents targeting families of trans youth, the Arkansas Attorney General cited three Times articles in an amicus brief supporting a law criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors, and a Times op-ed was cited in an anti-trans legal brief in Idaho within four days of publication. The HHS report which sought to discredit gender-affirming care for trans youth cited debunked and discredited media sources, including noted anti-trans journalist Jesse Singal.

Anti-trans legislation has increased by more than 600% in the last five years, both in proposed and passed bills, and the laws result in direct and immediate harms. A study published in 2022 study in PLOS ONE found that when states passed anti-trans legislation, Google searches for "suicide" and "depression" increased — and when those bills were defeated, the searches went down. A 2024 study in Nature Human Behaviour, with data from over 61,000 trans and nonbinary young people surveyed from 2018 to 2022, determined that states which enacted anti-trans laws saw suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary young people increase by up to 72 percent.

For those journalists fighting transphobic disinformation on the front lines, it can feel impossible.

"It is overwhelming. Every day we wake up and there’s another thing that we have to contend with," Anderson told me. "One of the mantras that I have been holding dear and working to embody particularly since the election is moving at the speed of care." For Anderson, this means doing everything we can to reclaim our visibility. "We have to resist the urge to disengage while also not getting overwhelmed. Right? We have to thread that needle. Because the success of their project rests on us being overwhelmed. It rests on us disengaging and respectfully, it also rests on us going back into closets, not wanting to be seen, not feeling comfortable."

Anderson sees the solution in the hands of trans journalists themselves. We have "an opportunity to wrestle journalism and media back."

Melody agreed: “Abundant positive representation makes us feel safer, more resilient, and hopeful. Seeing ourselves reflected with dignity and humanity in media has a profound, affirming impact on our lives.”

Kimball, despite everything, is also hopeful. “These moments of backlash come when the opposition feels that we are winning,” he said. “I am actually very optimistic that we will get through this time. We will be able to change the narrative…I’m just going to say it here now — we will get there.”

Publications like The Backbone and Well Beings News are part of a growing community of independent media projects built by and for our communities, moving at the speed of care in defiance of the mainstream media machine. We find ourselves in excellent company, as the trans media ecosystem blooms. Subscribe to Well Beings News for free for more queer trans health news, or join our paid membership for providers, practitioners, and professionals.

A Message from the Editor: Dear readers, I hope you enjoyed reading BJ’s story as much as I did. Make sure to subscribe to their newsletter, as they’ll be publishing some exclusive, original reporting of mine this upcoming week in the other part of this exchange.

In trying times like ours, it’s easy to feel crushed under the weight of the world. I’ve written before that being a trans journalist can feel like being a Cassandra, forced to know what is coming but powerless to stop it.

But I find my deepest comfort in the arms of community, solidarity, and resistance. May you find your comfort there too.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility.

We’ve earned it.

Sincerely,

Madisyn

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