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In 2023, during March Madness, Bud Light hired Dylan Mulvaney, a trans TikTok star, for an ad campaign. Right-wing media went berserk; conservatives staged a boycott. According to findings collected by the Trans News Initiative, a data visualization tool released this week, there was more coverage of the story than there was about pronoun-related firings, the rise of an anti-LGBTQ+ activist organization, or the passage of anti-trans legislation in Florida—all of which happened the same year.

The Trans News Initiative, which tracks coverage of trans communities for the benefit of journalists, media organizations, and researchers, was developed by the Trans Journalists Association (TJA) in association with Polygraph—the data team behind The Pudding, a digital publication focused on data-driven stories—and the University of Miami’s School of Communication. The result is a collection of 190,000 articles organized under thirteen themes—ideology and culture wars, censorship and free speech, and access to public spaces, among others—spanning 2020 to 2025, showing how publications have covered trans stories over time. “We wanted a tool that would be a mirror for journalists,” Kae Petrin, a cofounder and the president of TJA, said.

The data visualizes scale of coverage by representing news events as circles, made up by dots that signify individual articles, on Montana’s drag ban, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic tweets, Donald Trump’s prohibition on trans military members, and many other subjects. Much is revealed in the sense of proportion: the collection of dots representing stories on the military ban, for example, is much bigger than the one for stories about care for transgender people in prison. “One of the things that really stands out to me here is that, despite all the coverage of healthcare, there’s not as much coverage that addresses the conversation about healthcare in the context of bodily autonomy,” Petrin said. “There are very few articles about resilience and resistance solutions in communities to the hostile legislation that has increasingly been passed in states throughout the US—or, now, through the federal measures against trans communities. So there’s a lot of coverage about what’s happening in the political sphere, but less coverage about what trans people are doing.” 

To collect articles—representing print and digital outlets, national and local—the team used data from Media Cloud, an open-source research tool. Work began on the project in October of 2024, and the process of running search queries for any and all coverage of trans people took months to complete; the team needed to sift through, for example, stories about “transportation” in order to wind up with the right material. Once they wrangled the data, patterns started to emerge. Controversies get attention: Dave Chappelle’s anti-trans jokes, and the backlash against them, generate a lot of coverage. Trump’s return to the White House supercharged reporting on federal measures against trans people. The Trans News Initiative includes a button allowing users to filter coverage by date and according to publications’ political leanings. “Visualization is one of the best ways to spot large patterns in data when we have discussions about coverage,” Alberto Cairo, the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at Miami’s School of Communication, said. “Those discussions, if you don’t have data at hand, they’re all going to be based on vibes.”

In some cases, the tool surfaced underappreciated trends, “like the number of things happening internationally I hadn’t been aware of,” Petrin said. “One of the reasons that we added a section specifically on transnationality and this idea of international activity around trans communities and trans rights is because we were seeing some really interesting coverage in the initial dataset around US organizations funding anti-gay legislation in Uganda and a US Marine killing a transgender woman in the Philippines.” 

Something the Trans News Initiative can’t do is “capture what’s slipping through the cracks,” Jan Diehm, a senior journalist-engineer at The Pudding and Polygraph, said. Still, Petrin hopes that the absences will show themselves and inspire better coverage: “Are there new angles, new approaches, or stories that we’re missing,” they wondered aloud, “because we’re focusing on the things that are surface-level?”  

The tool will remain a work in progress. “We’re going to be updating the data going forward on what we hope will be a monthly basis. We want to expand the collections. We want to think about ways to partner with other organizations to use this work to support research and conversation and journalism,” Petrin said. “I’m really excited to see what connections and conversations and work we’ll be able to grow out of this.” 

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