The View From Somewhere: Transgender Journalists Resisting “Objectivity”
Many people first learn about transgender issues in the news media. Coverage of transgender issues and the presence and visibility of transgender journalists are both on the rise. At the same time, transgender people have and continue to be reported on through distorted lenses of transphobia, white supremacy, and binary gender, and much of this reporting is presented as objective and fair.
In this panel discussion, Meredith Talusan and Lewis Raven Wallace, seasoned transgender journalists and movement journalism activists, will address the problems of “objectivity” for trans journalists and trans subjects, and discuss how to chart a path of rigor, conscious subjectivity, and community accountability in the worlds of journalism and non-fiction storytelling.
About the Speakers
Meredith Talusan is an award-winning journalist and author. They have written features, essays, and opinion pieces for many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, VICE, Matter, Backchannel, The Nation, and The American Prospect. She has contributed to several books including The New York Times best-selling Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay. Her memoir, Fairest, is forthcoming from Viking/Penguin Random House.
Lewis Raven Wallace is the host of the The View from Somewhere: A Podcast About Journalism with A Purpose. This single-season podcast explores the origins of “objectivity,” dispelling the myth of a single, stable ethic for neutral American journalism through stories about coverage of slavery, lynch law, Vietnam, and the early LGBTQ movement. The podcast features journalists from marginalized and oppressed communities who are creating new ways of thinking about and practicing journalism through a lens of social justice and systemic power analysis. The View From Somewhere podcast is based on Wallace’s book with the same title from University of Chicago Press.