Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros24EntretienInterview with Erin Reed, journal...

Entretien

Interview with Erin Reed, journalist and transgender rights activist (May 7, 2024)

Tamara Boussac et Hugo Bouvard

Texte intégral

1Erin Reed est une journaliste et une militante des droits des personnes trans aux États-Unis. Elle anime depuis 2019 un site internet1 sur la plateforme Substack, où elle recense et cartographie les initiatives législatives visant à restreindre les droits des personnes trans (en termes d’accès aux soins, aux espaces publics, aux compétitions sportives, au changement des marqueurs de sexe sur les documents d’état civil, etc.), qui se sont multipliées depuis la Présidence Trump. Elle diffuse son travail de veille sur plusieurs plateformes de réseaux sociaux, où elle a acquis une visibilité importante (plus de 200 000 abonné·es sur Twitter [X], un demi-million sur Tiktok). Elle est en couple avec une élue démocrate, également trans, Zooey Zephyr, qui siège à l’Assemblée du Montana, et qui a été au printemps 2023 la cible des attaques de ses collègues républicains. Après avoir retracé la trajectoire de Reed, l’entretien évoque cet épisode, puis la façon dont les questions liées aux personnes trans pourraient constituer un enjeu majeur de l’élection présidentielle de l’automne 2024. L’entretien a été réalisé le 7 mai 2024 en visioconférence, puis retranscrit et édité pour en faciliter la lecture.

Tamara Boussac & Hugo Bouvard: Hello. Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Could you please start by telling us a bit about your professional trajectory? You started out as a journalist working for an independent news website and then started writing your own blog. How did you get into journalism and how did you come to start the blog?

Erin Reed: I originally had gotten into what I’m doing now because five and a half years ago, when I had first transitioned—I am a transgender woman—it was very hard for me to find healthcare clinics in my area [Montgomery County, Maryland]. There were plenty of clinics around for trans people, but the resources on how to find them did not exist. I very quickly realized, if I’m having trouble, then other people are probably also having trouble. And I created a resource. I went to all of the Planned Parenthood websites. I put a zip code in the middle, clicked on the drop-down menu. And just if it said “transgender hormone therapy”, I added it to my map. And then I went to all of the forums and I mapped out all of those places as well. And eventually, I created a database, basically a big place where you could find where your closest clinic was.

And that blew up. I released it to the community, and within days, I had dozens of people saying, “Hey, you didn’t have my clinic. Go ahead and add my clinic to your map”. Then the doctors started contacting me and saying, “Hey, I want to be on your map as well”. It became a major resource that has gotten over 8 million views since I launched it in 2019.

And then a year and a half later, we started getting the laws that target all those clinics. I became, just unwittingly, a central nexus where people were giving info, and found myself in a position to where I could give that info back out to the general public. Originally, it was just on Twitter, [X] reporting about the laws and what I was seeing, and then I jumped on a TikTok [channel] where I spoke about the laws, and I would clip videos of the hearings that I would watch because I started watching all of the individual hearings for the laws in state legislatures. Eventually, people really began depending on me for information about these laws. I started tracking them on a spreadsheet2. I started working with others. I spoke to civil rights attorneys and tried to understand what was going on. And eventually, I decided to go ahead and write long forms.

Too many people were depending on me for information, and I felt like I owed it to them to write longer form content. I did, and thankfully, that took off.

T.B. & H.B.: When you started creating those databases, were there other NGOs or trans nonprofits doing this work? Were you the first to try and centralize this information and then redistribute it?

E.R.: Absolutely. There was no centralized project that was doing that. There were small regional groups that sometimes would have a few of the clinics in their area, but nothing national and definitely nothing to the scale that I did with my mapping project.

And that became really useful, I think, for the community, because there are a lot of people in the United States who are trans who now have to make decisions. Am I going to move? Where am I going to move to? We have a lot of trans teenagers who are looking at colleges. Where am I going to apply to college at? Or if you are in a major company, maybe you’re going to hold a conference and you want to make sure that it’s in a place that your trans employees can go to. I come in and I say, “Well, this map shows that Florida might not be the best place to hold your conference. Instead, you might want to hold your conference in Colorado or New York”.

T.B. & H.B.: What kind of feedback did you get from the community? Did people tell you about how they have been able to use the maps?

E.R.: Absolutely. I know that every place that I speak at, people tell me that either they were able to access their care because of me, because they found their clinic on a map or that they were picking their college because of my map.

T.B. & H.B.: Could you tell us more about how you use of social media. In terms of actual labor, could you tell us a little bit about what your typical day looks like in terms of how you gather information and how you distribute it to different platforms (Twitter [X], TikTok, Instagram)?

E.R.: I do speak differently or write differently depending on the medium, and that’s because I’m reaching different audiences. On Twitter [X] I’m going to be reaching a lot of journalists and a lot of professionals. On TikTok, I’m going to be reaching a lot of young people and a lot of people who are the parents of young people. In my newsletter, these are mainly people who are very deeply invested in the topic and so I can go into a lot more depth in my newsletter. And then I’m on Instagram, similar to TikTok, in that I’m mainly explaining to parents. And I even post on LinkedIn, where I’m talking to companies, and companies have a very different message that they need to hear. The good news for me is that while it is a lot of labor and while you do tailor your message depending on which group that you’re speaking with, I’ve lived this for the last five or six years, and so I’m very knowledgeable about what things need to be said and how you need to make the case.

Throughout the day, any little bit of news that gets dropped, sometimes on Twitter [X], sometimes on Google news, but also a lot of times in the legislative hearings themselves, I just add to my list of potential stories to cover. I’ve got a little text file that is constantly tracking the stories that I could potentially write about. The reason why I’ve been able to be so successful is because I’m covering something that so few other people are covering, especially in major media outlets. Throughout the day, I’ve got doctors, civil rights attorneys, and activists in every single state messaging me and telling me, “Hey, look, this just happened in this hearing. You might want to go and watch at minute 18 and 3 seconds”.

If it looks like something is said that is really important, then I’ll clip it and record it for my audience and for my readers. I’ll make sure that I run it by fact checkers, mainly activists that are in the state and attorneys that are in the state. And then I publish it on Substack usually first. My main audience now, my main focus is on Substack because of the fact that I’ve got lots of readers that are journalists. In fact, I would say that my two most common readers are either journalists, local or national, or elected connected officials who read my Substack to a heavy degree.

After that, I’ll jump on to Twitter [X], I’ll jump on to TikTok and Instagram, where I explain things in such a way that I don’t assume that any of my audience knows anything about trans issues. And so I’m hopeful that whenever people watch my content or watch my videos, they can come to a new understanding of what exactly is going on here.

T.B. & H.B.: It looks like you’ve been able to collect lots of data in many different places. Do you feel that some states or areas remain blind spots where you have not been successful in gathering information?

E.R.: Thankfully, I’ve got a list of people whom I can reach out to in all 50 states. I think that my bigger blind spot is international. That’s something that I’m actively trying to fix. One of the things that I’m noting is that the anti-trans forces in the United States rely very heavily on the lack of cultural familiarity that many Americans have with Europe or with other nations. A lot of times, what you’ll see is somebody will report that something big just happened in France that’s anti-trans. In America, it’ll be reported as, “France is pulling back on trans care and trans people, and they're no longer supporting trans people. We now have to follow France”. I don’t have the familiarity with how the deliberative process works in the French legislature. I don’t know how that works. That is a huge blind spot for me, but not just for me. It’s a huge blind spot for all of our LGBTQ organizations, for our civil rights organizations and for our elected officials, and the anti-trans forces in the United States are very heavily exploiting that blind spot. I’m actively trying to grow my contacts in places like France, England, Norway, Sweden, lots of places where they are using the lack of knowledge with those places in order to try to pass anti-trans legislation in the United States.

One of the things that I don’t have a blind spot to are the organizations who are acting in an international fashion. You have groups like the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, SEGM, who is getting funded from Koch money and the Heritage Foundation. These are groups that very famously have been advocating for really heavily conservative restrictions on bodily autonomy, abortion bans, and more. You see, the Southern Poverty Law Center in the United States did an analysis of the funding, and you can see how the Heritage Foundation gets money from the same stream as the SEGMthese groups exploiting that purposefully. They are playing both sides, and they’re trying to play everybody against one another so that they can eventually get their bans passed worldwide.

T.B. & H.B.: How does it translate to the actual language of the bill? Did you notice that the bills that are being introduced in those legislatures across the country are very similar to one another? Does it have to do with the work of these foundations, like the Heritage Foundation? Can you tell us a little bit about how they organize on that level to get those bills voted?

E.R.: I have read over 1,300 bills that have been introduced all across the United States. But in reality, I’ve read 30 bills. I’ve read the same bill 30 times. They’ll change a word here and there, and you can read it and you can see, this is model legislation. There’s been good reporting in the United States on this issue. We know that the Alliance Defending Freedom has written over 130 bills in the United States, and passed 30 of them, many of them are the anti-trans bills. We know that the Heritage Foundation and more, they’re all helping write all of these bills. This is absolutely something that I see. It would be very interesting to also look in other countries about this. We actually saw in the United Kingdom, there’s very similar language around the definition of “sex” for instance. We are seeing this copy-paste legislation in a lot of places.

T.B. & H.B.: Regarding the voting process of these anti-trans bills, does it always play along partisan lines? Is it always Republicans voting as a block in favor of those bills and Democrats voting against or did you see some working across the aisle?

E.R.: In the United States, it is very much split on partisan lines with very few exceptions. I have probably seen 100 different bills voted on, which means really 10,000 or 15,000 votes that have been taken because you’re counting each individual legislator’s vote. I could probably count the number of Democrats that have voted in favor of these bills, it is certainly less than 20. It is not a common thing. We’re talking everything from sports bans3 to parental outing laws. I think here in the United States, we understand that the same groups that are advocating for these laws then also turn around and use these laws to try to target abortion. That’s a major fight here right now with the Dobbs decision4, so we are very aware of the attacks on bodily autonomy here.

You’ll note that my map very much corresponds to all of the states that are Republican-controlled. I understand that this is a little bit different from what we are seeing in places like the United Kingdom and even in other places. But for whatever it’s worth, I think we understand who is pushing the laws here.

T.B. & H.B.: At the same time, one of your primary audiences is elected officials who oppose these anti-trans bills in Republican legislatures. Do you know how the resources you provide have helped them position themselves in the legislative debate?

E.R.: I have up to 100 legislative contacts that I have spoken to literally during debates, handing them information, saying, “this person who is speaking right now, he’s going to say he’s from the American College of Pediatrics. But the American College of Pediatrics is actually a misnamed organization to confuse you with the American Academy of Pediatricians. The American College of Pediatrics is a 200-member conversion therapy organization that named themselves that way to trick you, to make you think that they’re the big professional organization”. I can help live fact-check for legislators. For full disclosure, my fiancée is a trans legislator, Representative Zooey Zephyr from Montana, so I do make a very concerted effort to ensure that the legislators out there have a full grasp of the facts on this issue, because so often there is so much disinformation pushed out about transgender care, and transgender people.

T.B. & H.B.: Do you feel like being in a relationship with a legislator informs the way in which you tailor that message? You went public about your relationship with Zooey Zephyr: was that a political choice, to go public?

E.R.: First of all, we work side by side. She works on a very different thing than I do. She has to maintain knowledge about building roads and bridges and infrastructure and housing. And for me, I write and I talk about these issues from a very different standpoint, from a journalistic standpoint. But I think that we both can learn so much from one another. I see the phone calls that she takes from her constituents, and I understand how much she has to speak to everybody. Whenever she gets a press release or a press request and needs to understand who the organization asking for a comment is, I can contextualize that for her. […] Representative Zooey Zephyr, a Democrat, represents Missoula, Montana. She is the first transgender elected official in that state. She fought really hard against anti-trans legislation in Montana. Despite the fact that there was a Republican supermajority, she was able to speak about what they were doing. The legislature was passing a “gender-affirming care” ban for transgender youth. She said that the legislature should be ashamed for passing this bill. They got really mad at her for saying that they should be ashamed. She responded, “Well, then I hope whenever you do vote on this bill, whenever you look down, you see the blood on your hands”.

Because she said that, they stopped allowing her to speak. There was no rule that actually allowed them to ban her from speaking. They just never acknowledged her. So every time she pressed her little button to speak, they just ignored her. Her constituents started showing up and saying, “Let her speak!” Eventually, they got really upset about not being allowed their voice for representation. Because of that, Republicans kicked her off of the House floor. She was allowed to vote, but she had to vote through her computer.

They tried to block her bench, but then other people came to sit in for her and stop them from blocking her bench. It became a major international issue at the time because it was one of the attacks on a Democratic legislator. This is fairly unprecedented in the United States to not allow a legislator to speak or to kick them off the floor. I think that this whole thing showed to the world that a transgender woman was being punished for saying words that other Republicans have said about other issues. For instance, Marjorie Taylor Green, a very famous Republican in the United States, said that people who support abortion have blood on their hands. Marjorie Taylor Green will not be punished for that comment. I think a lot of people saw the double standard.

For her, it was hard. It was a very difficult moment, but it was also the right thing to do. I’m going to come full circle and say whenever I visited Missoula to be there with her in May, because this was a major thing for her and I just wanted to stand beside her, she had just gotten her engagement ring for me, and I didn’t know it. We went to Queer Prom, which is a dance for people who didn’t get to experience prom in high school because they’re LGBTQ and because we were often shut out from that. At Queer Prom, she got on one knee and proposed to me in front of everybody. It was beautiful. I think that the reason why we went public is because the take home message was that we don’t want people to think that trans people are downtrodden and that we’re just always beat up all the time. No, we have joy, and we showed that joy to everybody.

T.B. & H.B.: Let’s look at the Biden presidency and the legacy of his first term. Would you say that at the national level, there were inroads that were made? Did the administration support the initiatives and activists who were fighting against these bills enough?

  • 5 https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-releases-final-title-ix-regu (...)

E.R.: Because of the principle of separation of powers in the United States, there are certain things that Biden simply can’t do. But he is the leader of the United States, and a lot of people look to him and say, “You got to be doing something more”. Biden certainly has not been actively harmful to the trans community. He’s not pushed any anti-trans legislation. He’s not said anything bad about trans people. He hasn’t made the situation worse in the United States. But there are a lot of instances where people say that he could potentially make things better. We’ve won some major victories because of the Biden administration but a lot of people believe that the Biden administration could be doing more. In terms of the victories that we’ve won, we got self-ID on passports so now trans people can have their ID on passports. Prior to that, it was quite an onerous process to get your ID changed on your passport. Biden revoked the trans military ban. Many trans service members were potentially facing discharge because of that ban. He has installed a Supreme Court justice [Ketanji Brown Jackson] who is almost certainly going to side with transgender people when the time comes. Virtually all of his judges that have heard trans cases at the federal level, at the appellate level, or even at the Supreme Court, have sided with transgender people. We know that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has abolished gender scanning systems in airports, which is a huge deal because previously, a lot of trans people would be patted down in airports. On the other side of things, though, a lot of people thought that Biden’s Title IX policy5 around transgender people was really weak, especially on sports and stuff.

By and large, there’s not a lot, in my opinion, that he can do. There are some big things that he could potentially do. One of them is, honestly, in Florida, where they have banned getting your driver’s license changed in the state for trans people, so you cannot have your driver’s license changed. All of the Democrats in Congress in Florida wrote to the Biden administration asking him to use the “Real ID Act” to mandate that Florida's driver’s license come back in compliance. Biden has not done that. While he doesn’t want to harm the trans community, he might be too afraid to do things that are big to help us.

T.B. & H.B.: Are there any expectations from a potential second term, were Biden to be reelected in November?

E.R.: I think that the biggest thing that comes out of Biden’s [potential] second term, and maybe the main reason why many trans people will still vote for Biden, is the fact that we have two Supreme Court justices that are very old right now, and both of them are Republican Supreme Court justices.

If they retire in the next four years, Biden is going to choose their replacements. These are the people that will eventually be tasked with overturning all of the 1,300 bills that I’ve mentioned. And so regardless of what Biden does actively, I think that the biggest expectation is that we hopefully get more judges in these roles that are going to view our constitutionally protected rights favorably.

T.B. & H.B.: Do you know if, whether on the Democratic side or the Republican side, they want to emphasize trans issues during the campaign? Do you feel it likely that it’s going to emerge as a hot button during the campaign?

E.R.: This is a really good question, and I have tracked the electoral implications of this issue very heavily. On the Republican side, it is a great way to win a primary election against other Republicans to say that you’re going to be the one that represents the Republican Party in any particular race. But it is a horrible way to win a general election. We have seen time and time again that Republicans that focus really, really heavily on trans issues lose their races in the United States. We have a very famous, infamous group of people here called Moms For Liberty. They are a bunch of people who go into school boards and who literally run on banning books or on anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ topics on banning pride flags and more. While they certainly won their primaries in so many different places, they lost 70% of their races across the United States in 2023, and they suffered tremendously.

  • 6 Protasiewicz won her election to the State Supreme Court in 2023 on a pro-LGBTQ and pro-choice plat (...)

We see time and time again that every time they try to make trans issues their big election-winning issue, it doesn’t work. For instance, it happened with Governor Andy Beshear in Kentucky, a Democratic governor in a very red state. They looked at him and they said, “Well, you vetoed a gender affirming care ban in Kentucky in this red state. Now we can run election ads that say how bad you are because you voted for trans people”. They ran election ads with a scissor floating in the air. Governor Beshear won by five more points than he did with his original race. There’s lots of examples of this. There’s Judge Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin. There’s Herschel Walker losing his election after standing with Riley Gaines in Georgia.6 I can just go on and on about this. In Virginia, very recently, [Republican] Governor Glenn Yunkin basically led the whole Republican Party and said that we’re going to make trans issues one of our four biggest issues in Virginia for the elections. Democrats swept the legislature. They won the Senate. They won the House there. So they’ve tried this many times, a lot of times, and it never works.

The reason why it doesn’t work is not because individual people are pro or anti-trans. It’s actually because whenever you look at the polling, people don’t care. They don’t want their politicians to spend a ton of time on this. If you’re a parent and you’re in a school board area and you see that your representative at the school board is spending all of her time on six books to ban rather than teacher retention, test scores, making sure that your kid is getting a good GPA, you’re not going to think, “I really want a book ban”. Now, as for the general election, as for going into the big 2024 election, having said all of that, I still think that this becomes a major issue in the 2024 presidential election. I think that we’re going to hear it in the debates. I think that we’re going to see influencers speak about it. I think we’re going to see campaign ads about it for two reasons. Number one, in the general election, Trump is going to reach out to the Republican base, where this has become a major, hot button issue.

Number two, I don’t think that Republicans can help themselves. I don’t. I think that they, just like with abortion, are so gung-ho on this issue that it doesn’t matter if it’s a winning or a losing issue. And so they’ll take the electoral consequences regardless.

T.B. & H.B.: Is there something that you’d like to share with a French audience?

E.R.: Right now, misinformation and disinformation about transgender people is not limited to the United States. It doesn’t know national borders. It is international in nature. And the only way that we can combat the global drawdown on transgender rights and the mass targeting of transgender people across the globe is through international cooperation. I highly advise any of your readers who has any familiarity with this topic to grow their international connections. Make sure that you are speaking to your international professional societies, make sure that you are aware that these things that sometimes seem like they are organic and they pop up in your country are actually being brought there, imported there from, for lack of a better term, very hateful people that have essentially weaponized the lack of those international ties in order to spread anti-trans laws. I am always open if anybody ever wants to collaborate with me or wants to tell me about what's going on in your own country. You can always email me. We’ll work around language barriers if we have to, but I think that’s a very important message to share.

Haut de page

Notes

1 https://erininthemorning.com/.

2 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x8FDh50ouBldIpxnCdSb745pyYISYLLKp9lJligOQZk/edit?gid=0#gid=0.

3 https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/it-was-never-about-sports-the-strategy.

4 Voir à ce sujet le dossier « Repenser Roe : Cinquante ans de politique en matière d'avortement aux États-Unis », paru dans le numéro 22 de la revue : https://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/ideas/15965.

5 https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-releases-final-title-ix-regulations-providing-vital-protections-against-sex-discrimination. Title IX is a law that bans sex-based discrimination in schools or education programs funded by the federal government.

6 Protasiewicz won her election to the State Supreme Court in 2023 on a pro-LGBTQ and pro-choice platform. Riley Gaines is an anti-trans rights activist who campaigned for Herschel Walker in his (failed) 2022 U.S. Senate bid in Georgia.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Tamara Boussac et Hugo Bouvard, « Interview with Erin Reed, journalist and transgender rights activist (May 7, 2024) »IdeAs [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2024, consulté le 07 février 2025. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/ideas/18110 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/12hss

Haut de page

Auteurs

Tamara Boussac

Docteure en histoire et maîtresse de conférences en études nord-américaines à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (UMR Mondes Américains). Elle est l’autrice de L’affaire de Newburgh. Aux origines du nouveau conservatisme américain (Presses de Sciences Po, août 2023).
Tamara.Boussac[at]univ-paris1.fr

Articles du même auteur

Hugo Bouvard

Docteur en science politique, maître de conférences en histoire et sociologie des États-Unis à Université Paris Cité (LARCA, UMR 8225). Il est l’auteur de Gays et lesbiennes en politique. Représenter les minorités sexuelles en France et aux États-Unis (Presses du Septentrion, novembre 2024).
hugo.bouvard[at]u-paris.fr

Articles du même auteur

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search