Reporting on transgender people can be a minefield: official data is scarce, public understanding is patchy, and with their rights increasingly contested by politicians and commentators, the community itself is often wary of journalists.
Drawing on Investigate Europe’s project
The Cruel Condition -published with Arte, New Lines, Taz, and others- this session explores how laws across Europe pushed trans people toward sterilising surgeries over decades. It will outline how we compiled first-of-its-kind data to produce an unprecedented cross-border estimate, and share practical insights on building trust with trans sources.
We will also look at other investigations using data to cover LGBT issues (e.g., on money flows to conservative groups), a topic quite often overlooked by data journalists, to consider possible pathways for future investigations amid an intensifying backlash against LGBT rights in many parts of the world. We will look at other examples and invite you to discuss how to be creative with unusual, and sometimes even non-existent, datasets.
