About Our Work

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

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 also produce a workplace guide that includes safety resources, newsroom policy best practices, and other resources.

We have supported more than 1,000 trans and gender-expansive journalists through our workplace and coverage resources, and maintain an active membership of about 500.

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.

We're affiliate members of the Institute for Nonprofit News, as well as members of the New York Council of Nonprofits. 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 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 much of our active membership donates to support our work. We also have multiple philanthropic partners, which we disclose according to best practices recommended by the Institute for Nonprofit News.

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 staff

Co-executive director Tre'vell Anderson (they/them) helms the organization full-time. They are an award-winning journalist, noted podcast host, and authoress doing world-changing work around society and culture. Named to Out magazine’s 2023 list of the 100 most impactful LGBTQ+ people and The Root’s 2020 list of the 100 most influential African Americans, they have dedicated their career to centering those in the margins, gray spaces, and at the intersections of life. Founder and Chief Imagination Officer of the social curation and media production house Slayzhon, Tre’vell is also the authoress of “We See Each Other: A Black, Trans Journey Through TV and Film” and co-authoress of the NAACP Image Award-winning “Historically Black Phrases: From ‘I Ain’t One Of Your Lil’ Friends’ to ‘Who All Gon’ Be There?’”

Co-executive director Kae Petrin, who also serves as board treasurer, assists part-time on TJA programming and operations. They cofounded the TJA in 2020 with several dozen other journalists. They currently work full-time as a Data & Graphics Reporter on Civic News Company's data visuals team, where they tell data-driven stories about K-12 education, voting rights, and public health. 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.

Our board of directors

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.

President 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.