Q&A With Erin Reed, Independent Journalist and Activist

Erin Reed discusses how she built her following tracking legislative hearings and misinformation online.

Erin Reed is a transgender journalist, content creator, and activist based in Washington, DC. She covers legislative hearings across the country for anti-LGBTQ bills and tracks risk levels for transgender people and their families state-by-state.

It can be difficult and exhausting to keep track of every anti-LGBTQ+ bill introduced across all levels of government. For context, as of June 2023, state legislatures nationwide have proposed more than 556 anti-trans bills. Of those bills, a staggering 80 have passed (in 2022, 26 of the 174 proposed bills passed). Conservative politicians are making gender reassignment surgery and various transgender rights issues into the culture war’s latest hot topic, spreading dangerous misinformation along the way. Often, legacy news outlets either ignore the stakes at hand or spread misinformation themselves. Reed has built a platform on social media where she provides educational resources and keeps her audience up-to-date on the latest legislative developments. In this conversation with Reed, we discussed social media safety for marginalized activists, combating misinformation online, and how to spot malicious versus accidental misinformation.

In addition to her subscription newsletter, Erin In The Morning, Reed’s work has been featured in the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other major media outlets. You can find her on Twitter and TikTok @ErinInTheMorn. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Study Hall: Tell me the origin story of Erin in the Morning. What made you want to be a journalist and a researcher?

Erin Reed: Almost four years ago, I started tracking healthcare resources for the trans community, and mapping out gender affirming care clinics for trans adults who were looking to get informed consent hormone therapy. As a result of that, I started getting messages that were not just about clinics, but about laws and regulations. I quickly found myself in a position where I was acting as a nexus of information regarding healthcare resources, legal resources, and laws that target the transgender community. 

I soon developed friendships with a lot of the top trans minds in the field of LGBTQ+ legislation and healthcare, and over the course of the next couple of years, I began to track the laws themselves. At first, I reported on the laws just on Twitter, but then eventually on TikTok, too. My following on TikTok grew extremely large as I tried to get the message out to younger people who may not understand how these laws are made or implemented. 

I’m often the only person who reports on these legislative hearings, and there are so many of them happening every single day. I could name probably a dozen stories that never would have gotten into the mainstream media if it weren’t for the fact that I was watching a little hearing somewhere and recording.

SH: You have a huge following on social media, how do you set boundaries with your audience? 

ER: This has been increasingly hard for me. When my following was smaller, I could address each and every person and I could talk to them when they had concerns. I could work with scared parents and youth, and with the people who had ideas for activism. As my platform has grown, I just can’t anymore. There’s too much work to be done and I get too many messages every day.

What I try to do now is get the general feel of the messages I receive — and I still read almost every one — I just can’t reply to them all. I try to create resources that will address large swaths of the community’s concerns. 

SH: What’s your process for screening information, specifically misinformation platformed by legacy media?

ER: When dealing with legacy media, I try to uplift the reporters who are doing good work, who are reporting accurately on the scientific consensus, and who are not misrepresenting what organizations like Genspect and the Society For Evidence-Based Gender Medicine do and where they come from. These organizations that I just mentioned were featured in [some] New York Times articles and represented as groups of concerned parents, but, in reality, these are well-funded political organizations that have been built up for a long time to essentially work towards the elimination of transgender care.

Finding the reporters who are accurately reporting on anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has been crucial to me, and I’m also trying to uplift trans journalists. Our existence is so often politicized and we’re viewed as being unable to report on our own lives and the things that affect us, which shows a tremendous amount of disrespect for the professionalism of transgender people. I know that there are media organizations that will not let trans journalists cover the biggest trans stories. In order to get better reporting, we need to have reporters who know inside and out what the transgender experience is like. 

SH: How does your approach differ, if at all, when identifying unintentional misinformation versus malicious disinformation?

ER: There are a lot of tell-tale signals. You can usually tell by the language being used if a person is acting in bad faith and working off of established talking points, or if a person is genuinely unaware of how a procedure or a law works.  

One of the really common talking points I hear in committee hearings is, “The brain is not finished developing until the age of 25,” and they say it with the same cadence every time! Usually they’ll say that, and then they’ll go into the next line saying, “a Swedish study…” You hear the same phrases over and over, and you realize, Oh, this person is literally copy-pasting and working off of an Alliance Defending Freedom (a conservative legal advocacy group) guide. 

(Editors’ note: Remarks and proposed legislation are often nearly identical from lawmaker to lawmaker because they are written by the same think tanks, advocacy groups, and corporations.) 

Whenever it comes to unintentional misinformation, I find that it’s clumsier. That’s how I make a judgment call on that. 

I will often investigate the person making the claim and see if they have any ties to the organizations that are putting out the disinformation guides. I’ll check to see if they’ve ever disingenuously “reported” on something else before.  

SH: Would you say you’re more focused on addressing unintentional misinformation or malicious disinformation?

ER: I definitely focus on the intentional stuff because I feel like that’s more organized and therefore it’s more important to address. I address the unintentional stuff in a totally different way: I do not focus on debunking unintentional misinformation. Instead, the way that I handle it is through reporting good information. The more good information people have, the more unintentional misinformation can be countered. 

SH: How do your communication strategies differ across platforms?

TikTok subscribers tend to be younger and they tend to not have as much information history and so, for my TikTok subscribers, I will often focus on the basics. Space is limited on Twitter, so I focus on the most impactful bits of information and try to boil things down into three sentences. And then on Substack — I love Substack — I can really dig into an issue in a way that I can’t on any other social media platform, building a case that people can then use anywhere. They can post the link on Facebook, they can post it in response to a question, they can send it to their representatives. 

Because of that, Substack is where I will work for the rest of my career unless something better comes along. I will say, though, that Substack as a platform is no better at protecting marginalized people than Twitter, Facebook, or any of the other platforms. But the biggest benefit of Substack is that I control my work and I have complete ownership over my email list. If anything ever happens to the platform, I have my audience and I can bring them with me wherever I want. 

SH: Are there any new projects on the horizon for you?

ER: The next thing I’m going to be working on is a YouTube channel. A lot of what I do is reporting live threads on trans legislative hearings, and for a long time I’ve considered broadcasting these hearings and commenting on them while they’re happening. I’m also thinking about creating longform YouTube content. 

The last thing I will say is that I’ve been getting book offers, but there’s no way for me to say yes to them right now. This is the legislative season and I’m working!

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