MOBILE VERSION: The Ten Best (and Five Worst) Pieces of Trans Journalism of 2025
The trans community has been plagued with a surplus of news in 2025. Here’s Assigned Media’s list of the best and worst of journalism on this beat.
by Evan Urquhart
Our round up of the very best, and the worst, in journalism on trans issues for the past year should help you find the journalists who cover trans issues with fairness and nuance, opinion writers who sounded the alarm in a climate of widespread neglect of trans issues, and let you know who in legacy media have continued to inflame public passions against this innocent minority group.
First, our team nominated the best and worst pieces we’d read all year (excluding any from Assigned or our core staff). Then we solicited community submissions to round out the list, voted for our favorites, and came up with this definitive ranked list, to which there can be no dispute.
(This piece was originally laid out for desktop. The desktop version can be found here.)
The Best Journalism on the Trans Community
10. More than 1 in 4 trans people live in states with 'bathroom bans' / Jo Yurcaba
Jo Yurcaba has long been a pillar of trans news coverage, and their overview of trans bathoom restrictions, published in July, does everything right . The story provides clear, usable information with an excellent info graphic, and it interviews trans people, allowing the reader to hear directly from the most affected.
“What happens when the New York Times gets a professor of clinical psychiatry to look at the research on transgenderism and gender identity? Well, apparently the professor gets every study he looked at wrong.”
9. The catastrophically bad New York Times op-ed on transgender research, debunked / German Lopez
Fact checking legacy media continues to be essential due to issues of bias that clog the information ecosystem with pseudoscience and misinformation. And this Vox piece by German Lopez does some yeoman’s work on that front, carefully highlighting the distortions and errors allowed into print by the New York Times Opinion section.
“I could have gone anywhere and lived my life without anyone knowing my story,” she says. “But I stayed in Philadelphia and told it to anyone who would listen.”
8. Harlow’s Still Here / Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez
To hear conservatives talk, it might seem as though trans people emerged out of nowhere a decade ago. This tender profile of a South Philly trans woman who became world famous in the 1960s and went on to define Philadelphia nightlife for a generation says otherwise.
“Providers who want to receive credit for the CME courses must sign up for Genspect’s Substack to the tune of $180 per year.”
7. Michigan State Medical Society Greenlights Anti-Trans Hate Group Genspect to Teach Trans Medicine / S. Baum
Independent media was a breath of fresh air this year when it came to reporting on trans issues. Writing for Erin in the Morning, reporter S. Baum exposed the way an anti-trans group infiltrated medical education in Michigan, resulting in the group losing its certification to promote pseudoscience in place of medical education.
“The consequences for Americans who travel abroad can be dire. If your appearance does not match your gender presentation, you may be unable to move across borders or board planes. No airline wants to take the risk of transporting people who aren’t who they say they are.”
6. The Ruling About Passports Isn’t About ID. It’s About Social Control. / M. Gessen
The New York Times is best known in the trans community for the anti-trans bias found in much of its coverage. However, NYT Opinion columnist M. Gessen, who is nonbinary, has pleasantly surprised our staff this past year by speaking increasingly frequently, and with increasing with eloquence and passion, about the plight of trans Americans. This column, naming the attacks on trans Americans as a denationalization project by the regime was truly excellent.
5. The Transgender Cancer Patient and What She Heard on Tape / Joseph Goldstein
Assigned is perhaps best known for our reporting exposing bias in the New York Times’ leadership and describing the ways in which that colors their coverage. So it may be a surprise that we’ve given a spot in our top five stories of the year to that organization.
This story by Joseph Goldstein, about the experieces of a trans woman who secretly recorded her cancer surgery and discovered that her surgical team made transphobic remarks while she was under anaesthesia, was remarkable. Sensitive, clear, and well-balanced, the piece humanizes the trans woman at its center without neglecting to provide the hospital’s side of the story.
The people at the New York Times should really take note of this excellent New York Times reporting.
“Over this past year, there [was] this big reaction, and then it fizzled,” Adams tells Teen Vogue. “I was talking to my [Two Spirit, nonbinary] kid yesterday about what has happened over the past year, and what that feels like, what it looks like, and they said something like, 'It's weird that the world kept turning. It's weird that things just kept going after that.' People just tend to forget.”
4. Nex Benedict Has Been Gone a Year. What Have We Learned? / Lex McMenamin
It can be difficult to know what to say in the face of widespread public apathy towards the harm being done to trans youth by the conservative ideological project.
That’s why Lex McMenamin’s story for Teen Vogue marking the one year anniversary of the death of Oklahoma trans teen Nex Benadict last February was so remarkable. The piece captures both what is being lost and the lack of urgency about recapturing it in a brilliant bit of reporting and analysis.
3. The roller derby community’s fight to save the inclusive sport they built / SF Boswell
No story of resistance to anti-trans legislation this year was as much fun as this tale of Roller Derby’s enthusiastic inclusion of trans skaters, and their fiery rebellion against one New York county’s attempt to ban them from including trans women. SF Boswell, writing for the superb Canadian LGBTQ+ site Xtra, really shone with this one.
By AyresJMA
2. Trans Health Care “Skeptics” Lost a Key Ally—Now They’re Having a Meltdown / Henry Carnell
Gordon Guyatt is known as the “godfather” of evidence-based medicine. He came out against its use to deprive trans youth of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones this year, causing a crisis among anti-trans activists.
Meticulously reported and fair, but without giving undue weight to the conspiracy theories and pseudoscience of anti-trans activists, this story by Henry Carnell of Mother Jones is among the best science writing of the year, as well as the best trans journalism.
1. Her gender transition set her free. So did her detransition. / Orion Rummler
This rich profile of a detransitioned lesbian, told with curiousity and compassion by Orion Rummler of the 19th, gives voice to a large segment of the gender diverse community whose stories activists may not find politically useful, but are still as real and deserving of attention as anyone else’s. It’s the only story to have been unanimously voted forward by Assigned staff, cleanly earning it the top spot for our list of best trans journalism in 2025.
The Very Worst Journalism on the Trans Community
These stories got it wrong, further endangering approximately 3 million transgender Americans during a year when the US government had openly declared war on their dignity, liberty, and humanity, denying even their basic right to existence.
1. The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine, by Helen Lewis for the Atlantic
Three out of the four of our staff chose this tour-de-force of bad faith from the implacably anti-trans Helen Lewis. Lewis is such a known bad actor that apparently no one bothered to do a fact check, but Julia Serano called out the piece for including an AI hallucination about her, if you need convincing that it’s entirely untethered from reality.
2. Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution, by Sadie Gurman and James Fanelli for the Wall Street Journal
Police bulletins put out in the immediate aftermath of a shooting are highly unreliable and should not be relied on in news coverage. The Wall Street Journal ignored that in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting, running with a story of bullets engraved with “transgender ideology” before being forced to walk it back soon afterwards. I wrote about WSJ’s breach of journalistic ethics for the Objective.
3. How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost, by Nicolas Confessore for the New York Times
The New York Times may be the all time masters of dressing up opinion pieces in the clothing of investigative journalism. This piece was among 6 triumphant stories the NYT ran, celebrating the Supreme Court ruling for upholding discriminatory laws limiting trans healthcare. Every single one of those could make this list, but we’ve chosen the one we considered the most clearly tainted by bias.
4. Linehan cleared of harassing trans activist but guilty of damaging phone, unbylined for the BBC
The BBC’s already robust anti-trans bias has been worsening, and the worst offense is the misgendering of a trans woman who had been harassed and assaulted by Graham Linehan. In a piece without a byline the national news organization slurred the young woman, who was still a minor when Linehan assaulted her, as “born a biological male but identifies as a woman.” It remains unclear if the BBC has officially made hate speech against the trans community part of their house style.
5. Coverage of a Minneapolis mass shooting which focused on the identity of the shooter, multiple reporters, various outlets
Until this year, no mass shooter had ever been perpetrated by a person with a history of having identified as a trans woman. When one shooting was perpetrated by a person with such a history, the right attempted to make the narrative about the shooter’s identity and push the false narrative that trans women are violent and dangerous. Coverage of the shooting was dominated by discussions of the specifics of the shooter’s gender identity, a win for the far right and a loss for the public. The fact that the shooter’s first target was a trans music venue, revealed on Bluesky by a New York Times reporter, was only ever covered by Assigned Media and has never entered the public consciousness.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media. Billie Jean Sweeney, Valorie Van-Dieman, and Aly Gibbs also contributed to the ranking deliberations for this story.