Photo credit: GLAAD

On Saturday, GLAAD’s Transgender Media Program team led a day-long media training for members of L.A.’s Transgender Service Provider Network (TSPN), a network whose members include staff from a number of organizations providing services to transgender people in the Los Angeles area. Program director Nick Adams and senior strategist Alex Schmider conducted the training for 18 trans people who work in the movement every day, advocating for some of the most at-risk members of the transgender community.

The media training started with a broad overview of GLAAD’s longstanding commitment to working with national and local news outlets, TV networks, film studios,  journalists, and reporters to help guide them in their fair and accurate reporting and representation of transgender people. (Check out GLAAD’s resources for Media Professionals.) The traininng continued with specific information about identifying your audience, effective communication tools for reaching those people who are unfamiliar with transgender people, and ended with specific training on how to do media interviews with journalists.

As part of its mission, GLAAD provides free media trainings to empower transgender people, and advocacy groups like TSPN, to effectively share their stories, raise awareness about their work, and, ultimately, create the change needed to bring about full trans equality and acceptance for transgender people.

Ashlee Marie Preston, TSPN’s Communications Working Group Lead, who helped coordinate the media training spoke about the incentive to organize it.

“With trans people being the topic of discussion across the nation, members of LA’s Transgender Service Providers Network collectively expressed interest in taking advantage of a resource that would help us prepare ourselves for media engagement. TSPN approached GLAAD to request an all-day media training for its members. I expected the training to consist of a space in which members of TSPN would learn a few ‘pony tricks’ that would help us become expert interviewees during engagement by the press. Although those were among the many take-aways, we also left better informed around the work GLAAD has done over the years in building rapport with media outlets, and we were educated on how the unpacking of a diverse narrative is key in breaking down barriers, and projecting an accurate representation of who we are as a community. It was a call to action for us to own our stories and to join the conversation. This is only the beginning of our partnership with GLAAD. We fully intend to continue working with them as we move toward societal acceptance and competency around trans identities.”

For more information about some of transgender service providers in the network, check out the links below:

• Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT) 
• AIDS Project Los Angeles
• Bienestar Human Services 
• Children’s Hospital Los Angeles 
• Coalition Against Slavery & Trafficking (CAST) 
• Equality California 
• Friends Research Institute 
• HIV Commission 
• Los Angeles LGBT Center 
• Minority AIDS Project (MAP) 
• Project Red Circle 
• St. John’s Well Child & Family Center 
• The Wall Las Memorias Project 
• Transgender Advisory Board of West Hollywood 
• TransLatina Coalition