Misinformation dominates the news landscape when it comes to trans issues. Both the US and the UK have seen a steady loss of trans voices in mainstream news paired with a steep decline in human rights of trans people in both countries.
Two of the transgender news outlets who have stepped forward to fill the gaps and provide trans news and perspectives are Assigned Media of the US and What The Trans?! of the UK. These determined journalists have taken on the Cass Review, the New York Times, and told stories from The UK Parliament, St. Louis, even Finland and Japan.
Now we’re asking for your help to improve both of our websites, enabling our work to continue.
For Assigned Media, this means protection from censorship by moving the website away from a US owned hosting company. The fundraiser will also support What The Trans?! independent journalism with an expanded and improved website.
Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, the fiscal sponsor for Assigned Media, will process invoices to cover our respective estimates of $1000 for WTT and $1300 for Assigned. (The additional budget is for overhead and fees.)
Here’s a word from Assigned Media’s founding editor, Evan Urquhart:
We’ve got big plans for our coverage of trans life and resistance under the Trump administration, but with the appetite we’ve seen for censorship and repression we won’t rest easy until we’re hosted outside of the country. Doing that means moving our site away from Squarespace, which is a tall order since I have no actual web development skills.
Luckily the trans community has web dev skills in spades, but we believe in paying trans people for their work, which is why we’re asking for your help to get us to our combined goal of $2500.
And here’s a statement from WTT?!:
We are What The Trans?! , a trans media outlet reporting the news in the UK. We are run entirely by volunteers and our goal is to cover important news for trans people, by trans people.
We release a fortnightly podcast where we sum up the news and keep our audience up to date. Alongside this, we regularly upload news and opinion stories onto our website. We also go to events and protests and do live reporting on situations as they develop. When the occasion occurs, we interview prominent people involved in politics, healthcare, culture and more, and we also do our best to highlight actions that the community can take to improve the lives of trans people.
However, our website is in desperate need of a refresh. We are hoping to redesign it to match our new branding and add more functionality to help keep our audience informed.
Here are some of the changes that we are hoping to make:
- Improve accessibility
- New features such as an RSS feed, notifications for new article and podcast releases
- Visual redesign
- Implement more ways for people to support us, such as a merch shop
- Improved tagging system
- A way for us to post things on mobile - this will enable live news coverage to be on our website, rather than social media
- Improve the website's robustness and security
We are really excited to join Assigned Media in this joint fundraiser. Their work regularly helps us in keeping up with the unrelenting and fast paced news coming out of the US.
If the goal is reached, we will put together a "quiz show" livestream in which you can test how much information Assigned Media and WTT?! retain when they report on the news.
Thank you for reading and please share widely!
