We started with listening: the Trans+ Voices project

Hi everyone, 

I’ve been running this newsletter for almost six months now, and it’s really helped me work out some patterns in the kinds of stories I want to tell here: the kind that change the world.  

More often than not, I’m finding these stories actually make change because right at the start, the people behind them decided to do their journalism differently. 

In general, investigative journalism is quite different from the rest. It takes longer, goes deeper, costs more. It can bring change because it fundamentally targets the status quo. It asks: but what if it wasn’t like this? What if it’s not what it seems?

But in other ways, sometimes it can be very similar to other mainstream reporting. A journalist arrives, writes the story they think is most interesting, and leaves. The community is left behind to deal with the fallout. 

That’s why my newsroom, TBIJ, developed community-led investigations. We wrote about it at the time as way “to move beyond story choices being made by journalists” by “listening to communities and what they see as the key issues that should be dug into”.

It sounds pretty basic, right? Listening. But it turns the usual dynamic of journalism on its head. Instead of a reporter telling the story, they’re hearing it. 

And it’s an approach that’s led to some of our most important stories. Our Deliveroo project equipped riders with info they needed to know; I told you last week about some of the changes our Hot Homes project brought about. 

Earlier this year our Bureau Local team embarked on a new community-led project. Trans+ Voices was launched to work directly with trans and non-binary communities across the UK to explore the impact of toxic political discourse on their daily lives. 

In recent years trans rights have been increasingly debated by politicians and across the media. Countless column inches have been devoted to discussing trans and non-binary people – too rarely in a positive light and hardly ever featuring lived experience. 

Asking trans people to trust us with their stories was a lot to ask. In a 2021 survey of trans people, 93% of participants reported that media transphobia impacted how strangers interact with them and 85% said it affected relationships with family members. More than 70% of people surveyed felt that media transphobia impacted their mental health. 

So the team had to start with listening. I wasn’t directly involved myself, but the project kicked off with a listening event. The team then assembled an advisory panel to keep getting feedback throughout the project and hold them accountable. It included people from across the UK with backgrounds in community organising, campaigning, research, journalism and healthcare. 

The plan was to work for a year, building up to the expected election at the end of 2024 or start of 2025. Then, in May, Rishi Sunak threw a spanner in the works. I was beavering away on my own set of election stories, but I saw the team – Vic, Eve, Billie, and Lucy – step up a gear to deliver pieces that armed the community with the knowledge they needed. 

The team published explainers on what might happen to existing gender policies, what was being promised in the party manifestos and what new voter ID laws could mean for trans and non-binary voters. The manifestos explainer became one of our most read pieces on our site, demonstrating the demand for fact-based content that covers trans+ issues.  

Trans+ Voices was formed to produce work that included the voices of the community so we could direct our investigative focus to the issues that were most pressing for them. Below, I got to speak to Sasha and Valeria, who wrote our first big investigative piece for the project, about what it was like to finally get their work out in the world.

And, if you want to hear more about the project, my colleague Eve has written an amazing round-up of all the work that went into it. I really recommend digging in.

“We began this investigation as our final project for our master’s in Investigative Journalism in 2022. We were interested in writing about trans conversion therapy, and after speaking to several trans people who had been subjected to conversion practices, we learned that it was more often led by parents than by therapists.

We worked on the investigation for two years, and it had been commissioned and killed by several outlets before TBIJ picked it up. Some of those other outlets had been interested in the story, but were ultimately too worried about legal repercussions to publish it. 

Over the course of this project, we were forced to reflect on the way that trans people are excluded from public conversations about their existence. We had to face the reluctance of the UK media landscape to publish stories about the harms perpetrated – institutionally and personally – against trans and nonbinary people. 

But we also realised that people want to read these stories, and we were grateful that TBIJ was willing to take the risk of publishing them. The public are hungry for deeply reported stories about the campaign against trans rights in the UK.

The investigation was well received by people that know about and are interested in trans and nonbinary issues, but was also appreciated by readers that were less familiar with the subject. 

A big part of this investigation’s success is having made the harms trans people are facing clearer. We were particularly glad that some children of Bayswater parents reached out to us and told us their stories; we hope to be able to share them soon. 

We think the investigation significantly reduced the public reach of the Bayswater Support Group. The group used to be frequently quoted in major newspapers across the political spectrum as an authority on trans youth. But since publication, we’ve seen a decline in reputable organisations using them as a source, with only The Times, The Telegraph and GB News referencing the group uncritically since publication.

Trans rights campaigners who have been trying to counter Bayswater’s public influence for a long time can now openly discuss Bayswater’s advocacy for conversion practices, and refer to our articles to push organisations not to use their resources. A supportive parent of a trans child told us that she’d be using the investigation to dissuade other parents of trans youth from joining the group.

We were really proud to have our investigation published as part of Trans+ Voices. Our editor called the investigation a “bread and butter investigative story about undue influence”, which really stuck with us. In the struggle to get the British media to consider a story about trans people at all, we hadn’t considered how similar our investigation was to this very common genre of scoop. 

It put into perspective the disadvantage we were at purely because this was a story about harms being perpetrated against trans people.

There’s a severe lack of institutional support for this kind of work in the UK, which is part of why trans people (who disproportionately lack family support) are so shut out of the media, and why journalism is so dominated by people who (like us) have the luxury of choosing fulfilling work over anything approaching a steady income. 

We’re so happy the investigation is out there, but remain frustrated by how difficult it was to get it published, and the general lack of opportunities for early-career investigative journalists.”

As you might imagine, working this way takes longer than a normal investigation – and our normal investigations can take months, even years! That means it also costs a lot to get this many people involved, and do all the checks and balances to tell stories like this with rigour.

The team is the process of trying to get instututional funding to continue the Trans+ Voices project beyond this year. But it also helps when people like you fund our work in general month-to-month. If you’d be interested in doing that, you can become a Bureau Insider here:

Also, a quick word of thanks for everyone who responded to the survey back in August. I’m not supposed to say, but Sparkies were some of the most generous with their time and feedback, and I really appreciate that!

I’ll see you again next week,