About Our Work

The Trans Journalists Association is a professional membership organization that promotes more accurate, nuanced coverage of trans issues and communities in the media and supports gender-expansive journalists in their workplaces and careers.

We are a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization and our EIN is 93-2276958.

Since its founding in 2020, the TJA has worked with newsrooms, affinity groups, and journalism-supporting organizations to discuss best practices for covering trans people in all contexts. As part of that work, we maintain a style guide that aims to address common and complex questions that arise when reporting on our communities.

We have supported more than 800 trans and gender-expansive journalists through our workplace and coverage resources, and maintain an active membership of about 200. In 2023 alone, we also reached more than 1,000 working journalists across the world with panels and webinars on covering trans communities with accuracy and nuance.

Our members span the globe and represent a vast spectrum of media formats, experience levels, and coverage areas. We welcome the support of gender-expansive journalists of all self-descriptions and backgrounds, as well as allies interested in our work.

Learn more about opportunities to support us, our supporters, sponsorships, and donating.

If you wish to stay up to date about the latest happenings of the TJA, you can sign up for our mailing list.

We maintain online communities for journalists, including dedicated spaces for trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive to connect and discuss journalism, trans coverage, and working in media. Learn more about joining or head to our members site to join now.

For media requests, questions about membership and other inquiries, please email contact@transjournalists.org.

You can also follow us on Twitter, Bluesky, and Instagram. We are most active on LinkedIn.

Annual Reports

Our supporters

The TJA's work is sustained by a combination of philanthropic grant funding and individual donors, primarily from the journalism industry. We are a grassroots group, and more than 20% of our active membership donates to support our work.

We are supported by a seed grant from the Ford Foundation's Creativity and Free Expression program.

Thank you all for making our work possible!

If you'd like to get in touch about supporting the core of our work, or sponsoring a specific program or workshop, please email us.

Learn more about our other supporters.

Our board of directors

President and volunteer interim Executive Director Kae Petrin cofounded the TJA in 2020 with several dozen other journalists who organized out of an informal Slack. They have since run many of the organization’s internal operations. They currently work as a Data & Graphics Reporter on Chalkbeat’s data visuals team. They have presented on queer and trans coverage best practices, data reporting and visualization tools, and the intersections of these topics for universities, industry conferences, custom-designed workshops, and newsrooms around the U.S.

Secretary Adam Rhodes is an investigative journalist whose work primarily focuses on queer people and the criminal legal system. They currently work as a training director at Investigative Reporters and Editors, and have been published in outlets including BuzzFeed News, Xtra and The Nation. Their recent work has examined HIV treatment access in Puerto Rico, HIV criminalization in Illinois, and the myriad ways the criminal legal system disproportionately impacts queer people.

Treasurer Minami Funakoshi is an award-winning nonbinary graphics journalist at Reuters. They make data-driven visual stories, develop tools, and do backend and frontend development. Their recent visual story on anti-trans bills in the United State provides detailed analysis on the common methods used to restrict gender-affirming care for both adults and minors. Their graphics story on gender-inclusive languages won multiple awards, including Gold from Information is Beautiful, Silver from Society for News Design, and Excellence in Nonbinary and Gender Nonconforming Coverage from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists.

Board-member-at-large Gina Chua is currently Executive Editor at Semafor, a new global news startup. She joined it in May 2022 as part of the founding team led by Ben Smith and Justin Smith. Prior to joining Semafor, she was Executive Editor at Reuters, where she oversaw newsroom operations, logistics, budgets, safety and security, and worked with technology teams to develop newsroom tools, among other responsibilities. Gina was also the editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong; a deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal in New York; a foreign correspondent in Singapore, Manila and Hanoi; and a television and radio journalist in Singapore. She co-founded the Sigma Data Journalism Awards and was the inaugural recipient of the Online News Association’s Impact Award for her dedication to innovation. She’s a regular speaker at journalism conferences and writes occasionally about the future of journalism and the intersection of the industry and technology on her blog.

Board-member-at-large Graph Massara is a freelancer and the editor of the TJA's stylebook. He was most recently a fact-checker with the Associated Press, where he also contributed to the AP Stylebook's entries on LGBTQ+ terminology. Prior to that, he was a newsletter editor at POLITICO. Graph’s professional interests include media criticism and ethics, the viral spread of mis- and disinformation, and online radicalization. He is an alum of UC Berkeley.

Our contractors

Peer Career Network mentorship program co-lead Tat Bellamy-Walker is a communities reporter at the Seattle Times. Their work focuses on social justice, race, economics, and LGBTQIA+ issues in the Pacific Northwest. Tat also serves on the National Association of Hispanic Journalists LGBTQIA+ Task Force, as a member of the Seattle Times Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Social media & community manager Kam Burns is a founding member of the Trans Journalists Association and co-author of the first version of the TJA Style Guide. He served as an interim board member and now manages the TJA newsletter and social media presence.

Social media manager Xan Hart runs the organization's Instagram and designs its social media strategy. Currently, he works as a digital content producer with 13WMAZ. He’s volunteered with his local LGBTQ+ organizations and told stories centering queer voices in Central Georgia. Being a journalist has always been their dream and he’s proud to work in local news where can make people fall in love with their hometown again. Xan is a graduate of Mercer University with a bachelors in Journalism and English. He’s passionate about being involved in his community and telling stories with authenticity and compassion.

Our volunteers

Book club coordinator Salgu Wissmath is a nonbinary Korean American photographer. They are currently a Hearst Photo Fellow at the San Antonio Express-News, and previously worked at The San Francisco Chronicle. They are dedicated to decolonizing visual storytelling by engaging in ethical storytelling by and for people of color and the queer community. Their personal work explores the intersections of mental health, queer identity, and faith from a conceptual documentary approach. Salgu was recognized as AAJA’s 2022 Emerging Journalist of the Year and received the 2023 Curve Award for Emerging Journalists. They are the Communications Director for Diversify Photo, a core team member with Ethical Narrative, and a member of the AAJA, NLGJA, TJA, Women Photograph, and Authority Collective.

Website admin Ændra Rininsland helps build and maintain various pieces of digital infrastructure for the TJA, most notably the freelancer database, and is working to replatform the primary TJA web presence into a portal allowing better communication with membership. She works at the Financial Times as a data journalist-developer with the FT Data and Graphics teams, where she's been since 2016. She's also the co-chair of the Financial Times' award-winning LGBTQ+ employee network, ProudFT, and an InterMediaUK steering committee member.