Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
In the spring of 2023, Kit O’Connell broke a story for the Texas Observer about the dress code at the Texas Department of Agriculture. The rules stated that, at the TDA office, “pants and Western attire are allowable” for women. Skirts higher than four inches from the knee were not, nor was clothing that encouraged “excessive cleavage.” Men should not wear Crocs or slides, nor tuck their pants into boots. Also, the policy noted, “employees are expected to comply with this dress code in a manner consistent with their biological gender.” If they did not—and refused requests from their supervisors to “change into conforming attire”—they could eventually be fired.
The story got picked up quickly by NPR, NBC News, The Guardian, and beyond. O’Connell’s framing—that this was “anti-LGBTQ+ oppression”—was echoed by those larger outlets, with context on a cascade of recent anti-trans legislation in the state. The TDA didn’t respond to the Observer’s request for comment, but as attention mounted, Sid Miller, the department’s commissioner, provided an interview to Austin’s local Spectrum News channel. “When a man comes dressed in drag, or vice versa, it’s very disruptive. It’s not professional,” he said. “My people need to look and act professional.”
Time slid on. As of this summer, the dress code remained. No major national or international outlets had followed up. O’Connell checked in. “For over a year,” they wrote for the Observer, “employees of the Texas Department of Agriculture have been subject to a dress code that is transphobic and potentially illegal.” In researching the second story, O’Connell combed through internal TDA emails obtained by a nonprofit called American Oversight, which procures government records. The emails about the dress code, O’Connell wrote, showed that “senior agency staff were aware TDA was wading into legally dubious waters and that a number of employees objected to its implementation and felt personally discriminated against.” O’Connell pulled a quote from an employee who noted that “within the past six months, several trans, queer, and/or gender-nonconforming staff have been hired by the TDA. This timing could lead one to conclude that this policy is a direct result of trans visibility in the workplace.”
Recently, I met O’Connell in Austin, which they navigate on an e-bike that easily beats the cars during rush hour. They are forty-six, with graying brown hair and oversize glasses; when we met, they wore a pastel jumpsuit. I asked about the significance of the dress code story. “I think the chilling effect is what we most often see with these kinds of policies,” they replied. “You don’t have to actively fire your trans or nonbinary employees if you just make it really uncomfortable for them to stay there.”
The first article had been a scoop, but the second was something different—a barometric reading of day-to-day reality at a workplace that, like any number of others, counts queer and trans people among its staff. The story had posed a classic reporting challenge: few of the employees would go on the record, fearing for their jobs. So O’Connell built the piece from a collage of sources: an anonymous staffer; an employment lawyer named Natalie Rougeux, who had removed “the issue of bathroom choice and attire” from training she’d conducted for the TDA but who felt that “deliberately deadnaming an individual could still be harassment”; a statement from Chioma Chukwu, the interim executive director of American Oversight. “Kit does this thing where they find stories everywhere, because we are everywhere,” Jacob Reyes, a news and rapid-response coordinator at GLAAD who sometimes works with O’Connell, told me. “We’re not just available during Pride month.”
“As far as specifically Pride goes, I don’t think the national media does a terrible job,” O’Connell said. But outside of June, and between the coastal cities home to establishment media, they do not find the press, by and large, to be “in tune” with the moment, one in which trans and queer people commonly face existential opposition. In Texas, since last May, the state legislature has passed a series of bills that block “sexually explicit performances,” commonly understood as code for drag shows; minors’ access to “procedures and treatments for gender transitioning, gender reassignment, or gender dysphoria”; and “transgender students from competing on teams that do not match their biological sex,” among other things. “There’s all these pressures that have always been there, but they’re growing right now,” O’Connell said. “There’s all this pushback against ground that we thought was already won.”
To be in tune might involve a personal connection, a deep tie to the place from which one is writing, a sense of trust within the community about which one is reporting, and time to watch events develop. If anything, O’Connell is painfully attuned. They identify as a “movement journalist”—a term popularized in 2017 with a report by Anna Simonton for Project South, an Atlanta-based social justice organization. (“When we talk about ‘movements’ we mean people coming together to build the power of all people to collectively control the conditions of our lives and our communities,” Simonton wrote. “Movement journalism, then, is the practice of journalism in the service of this kind of social, political, and economic transformation.”) O’Connell interprets the work as believing in facts, if not objectivity, being transparent about who they are, and not pretending to be detached from the world. “I am open about my beliefs,” they said. “I am part of the queer community and the queer rights movement. I am an anti-fascist; I’m not neutral about fascism. I’m not neutral about genocide. I’m not neutral about the environment, and many other topics.”
There are boundaries: If O’Connell is participating in a protest, they won’t cover it. At times, they may step back from a story—as in March 2022, when O’Connell was supposed to be reporting on a rally for the rights of trans kids, until representatives of InfoWars showed up. “There were families there,” O’Connell said. “Families with queer kids. I see myself in those kids a lot.” Knowing what or what not to do, and when, involves—as always, in journalism—judgment calls. “You end up in situations like, Can I as a nonbinary trans person report on the laws that are trying to make my existence illegal? Is that bias? Well, it is,” O’Connell said. “I’m biased against those laws. I don’t want to be driven out of Austin by the state government. So can I report on those things? I think I should report on those things. But certainly, some publications would have made the argument that I am too biased to report on them.” The stories O’Connell is most drawn to—local news that bobs between the giant, cresting waves of national headlines about marginalized people—have been arising with greater intensity, these days. In life, in work, in Austin, O’Connell is submerged.
When O’Connell landed in Austin, they were not yet twenty. Slacker had come out a few years before, and it showed Austin, to the rest of the world, to be full of “people on the fringes of any meaningful participation in society,” in the words of Richard Linklater, the director—people who had dropped out, essentially, of political and social commitment, in favor of creative flaneuring. The film was a landmark in the city’s cultural history in the sense that it sat cozily with racialized gentrification, displaying a version of Austin’s “margins” that was overwhelmingly apolitical because it could afford to be.
O’Connell fit in to the creative, affordable version of Austin that Slacker came to represent, but they were never apolitical. Originally from Connecticut, they were raised by liberal parents; their mother was involved in anti-war, anti-nuke, and anti-death-penalty work while O’Connell was growing up. Somewhere, there’s a photo of O’Connell as an infant, cradled in their mother’s arms at a protest.
O’Connell’s first Halloween costume was Smurfette. They liked that it had a mask on a stick that they could put over their face, then take off. “That’s where my thinking went,” O’Connell said. It was nice to experiment with whether it was “okay,” “safe,” or “right” to put on a new identity. People asked, “Why is this little boy Smurfette?” That, to O’Connell, was a weird question, or more of a statement: that it was not okay, not safe, and not right to wear this costume. O’Connell wanted to know the whyof that. They didn’t, back then, “have the language to say I was nonbinary”—they just knew that it was confusing when adults conveyed that a pair of sneakers with rainbows and unicorns was off-limits.
They did not study journalism, nor get a college degree. In Austin, they found a place to live full of open mics, live music, art, and like minds; it was a doable city for someone not in the one percent. For a couple of years, O’Connell worked as a customer service representative for an internet provider; they spent time as a bookseller. Then they landed a gig with Firedoglake, the progressive news and action community, where their mother had been a press agent. At Firedoglake, serious political reporting lived cheek by jowl with nocturnally posted music videos. Kevin Gosztola, who covered national security and civil liberties for the site, told me the idea was that “there could be citizen journalism that you didn’t necessarily have to be a trained professional for. And you could, with confidence, potentially perform this role better than somebody who did go to school.” O’Connell was put in charge of a blog called MyFDL, where regular readers could submit essays (“diaries”) for publication. They also produced nightly wrap-up posts (“The Watercooler”) and wrote a steady stream of articles on, among other things, SXSW, the Austin art scene, Burning Man, and local protests.
Around that time, the Occupy movement began to bloom. At the start of winter in 2011, Firedoglake started an initiative—“Occupy Supply”—to provide protesters with jackets, hats, socks, and other materials. O’Connell got involved. A dramatic series of events ensued at the Port of Houston, where Occupy activists blocked the main entrance for about two hours. O’Connell watched from the sidewalk as a group of protesters used lockboxes—stretches of PVC pipe through which they inserted their arms, holding on to a chain strung inside—to create a human barricade. “The police tried to kick us with their steel-toed boots from horseback,” they recalled. “They were so violent towards everyone in that crowd.” The police and fire departments at the port seemed to know how to handle the situation. “They set up a tent,” O’Connell remembered; they disassembled the chain and made arrests.
Word started going around that undercover police had infiltrated Occupy. O’Connell broke the story for Firedoglake: “The use of these devices resulted in these occupiers from Austin, Dallas and Houston facing felony charges instead of the misdemeanors brought against those who simply linked their arms and legs.” As it turned out, at least one of the undercover officers had provided protesters with the lockboxes in the first place. When the case went to trial, an officer was accused of entrapment; he told the judge that he’d deleted his emails about the operation, and that a thumb drive he’d kept with photos had fallen from his pocket into the gutter.
In the aftermath—the felony charges were dropped; the Occupiers pleaded guilty to misdemeanors—O’Connell kept hanging out with the same crowd, chatting people up. Occupy represented “a really powerful tactic, not just for holding space, but for reaching people,” they said. At the encampments, passersby would ask, “What the fuck are you guys doing?” and O’Connell would wait for someone to answer, taking notes. “It created a space that allowed for these conversations,” they recalled. “It allowed for a lot of education and activist training.” As O’Connell wrote a week after the Port of Houston action, “I want to live in a world where I can share a meal with strangers becoming friends, in a park filled with art, without fear of violence, repression, or arrest.”
In the next decade, Occupy faded, and the total rent paid in Austin climbed faster and higher than in any other city in the United States. The same recession fueling Occupy also blazed underneath the rampant shutterings and reshufflings of newspapers, both large and local. It was during this “abrupt failure of newspapers’ financial model,” as Project South put it, that movement journalism caught on—often as an explicit rejection of the way traditional newsrooms had gone about doing things. Coral Feigin—the codirector of Press On, a movement journalism collective—observed that “mainstream journalism is rooted in white supremacy, capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy,” and other forms of oppression. She described the burgeoning approach, by contrast, as one that “challenges oppression, is accountable to movements for liberation, and is produced by and for marginalized communities.” That’s not to call it new; the practice “has existed for generations,” Feigin said. Some connect movement journalism to the Movement newspaper, published by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1964 to 1970; journalists had been inserting themselves into their coverage since well before that, and the history of the Black press, in particular, displayed movement journalism ideals long ahead of the term’s coinage. Crucially, movement journalists “believe that it is impossible for a journalist to be objective,” Feigin told me. “All people have their own biases, identities, and experiences that shape how they report and see the world.”
As O’Connell’s commitment to reporting deepened, they started calling themselves a “gonzo journalist”; they started a newsletter called Gonzo Notes. At some point, though, a colleague introduced the idea of movement journalism to O’Connell, who took it and ran. Even so, these labels “mean pretty much the same thing,” in O’Connell’s view. (Attempting to define Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo” style, the literary-journalism scholar Jason Mosser characterizes it as a desire to “make political writing into art,” borrowing a phrase from George Orwell; “an expression of his leftist-anarchist politics”; and, importantly, “a form of subjective, participatory literary journalism that places the narrator in the center of the narrative.”) To see yourself in a story, to report on something while also being affected by it—for O’Connell (unlike Thompson), that does not necessarily involve the inclusion of a personal pronoun, but rather turning outward, using reporting as a tool.
In 2013, Wendy Davis, a Texas state senator, filibustered in opposition to an anti-abortion bill, and O’Connell helped livestream the event to thousands of people. From there, they maintained a steady presence on Twitter and their personal website. Through their work and writing along several interconnected lines—LGBTQ+ rights, antiracism, reproductive rights, anarchism, anti-fascism, anti-Islamophobia—they became an increasingly familiar name. “I grew up invested in the technocratic fantasy that the internet would turn into a perfect archive of all knowledge, always at our fingertips,” they wrote in Gonzo Notes.
“Of course,” O’Connell also wrote, time on social media is not always productive. Some moments have been “far from stellar.” That has had ramifications for O’Connell offline, too. In June 2017, O’Connell was involved in shutting down an anti-“sharia” demonstration in Austin hosted by ACT for America (the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in the country, per the Southern Poverty Law Center). Afterward, more than two dozen people, many of them members of the Patriot Front (which the SPLC calls a white nationalist hate group), showed up with smoke bombs to an anarchist bookfair in Houston where O’Connell was known to be. Among the Patriot Fronters was Robert Warren Ray (“Azzmador”). “Where is my livestream?” Ray asked, into his megaphone. Then he launched in. O’Connell, he declared, “a world-famous keyboard warrior, who sits behind a keyboard and tells other people—retarded, mentally ill college students and high school students—to go out and punch Nazis, will not come out and confront the very people [they] call Nazis.” He added that O’Connell “seemed confused about their gender often.” (That summer, Ray joined the “Unite the Right” mob in Charlottesville, Virginia. A judge issued a warrant for his arrest and he was on the run for a while; this year, he was reported to have died.)
O’Connell kept scribbling. There was a stint at a news site called Ministry of Hemp, and there were bylines at other hemp-related publications. O’Connell also started to place stories with the Texas Observer, a progressive nonprofit outlet. “From the first,” Ronnie Dugger, the founder, once wrote, “I sought to practice journalism according to three basic standards: accuracy, fairness instead of ‘objectivity,’ and moral seriousness.” The paper stood in Technicolor contrast to the big gray newspapers that O’Connell views as possessing “a stifling fixation on neutrality.”
In 2022, O’Connell became the Observer’s digital editor, aiming to widen and diversify the publication’s readership beyond “the older progressive set.” Achieving that involved, in part, reaching out to networks such as Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky—all of which accounts they managed, along with a newsletter. They also brought a knack for the “otherwise lost” regional-with-big-implications story. On the day that Texas enacted Senate Bill 14, which banned gender-affirming care for minors, O’Connell published a story on how it was already having an effect: “I had several patients admitted to ICUs or hospitals for suicide attempts,” a doctor said. Another article began, “In Texas, Dolly Parton can read books to children, but it could soon be illegal for a drag queen to dress up as the famous singer and philanthropist and do the same.”
O’Connell likes to foreground the everyday experiences of people who, at a larger, national level, might be rendered as abstract or even symbolic. That still leaves room to pull back—to explain, say, a series of somewhat complex legislative maneuvers as context for the harassment of a drag queen named Bandit. Their work exemplifies how Feigin sees movement journalism’s value in trans coverage, by centering trans people. “If one side of a story believes that trans people should have rights and healthcare and the other side of a story believes that trans people do not exist, there is a clear power dynamic at play,” Feigin said. “We don’t think that a narrative that claims trans people do not exist should be platformed in any way, as it is a narrative that exists solely to uphold anti-trans oppression.”
One of O’Connell’s highest-profile pieces was a rebuke of a New York Times article by Emily Bazelon, “The Battle over Gender Therapy,” which was cited by the State of Texas in court documents concerning gender-affirming care for minors. Bazelon’s story—which came to play in legislation in other states, too—drew from, among a few dozen others, interviews with Genspect, a group that other sources contacted by the Times deemed both “predatory” and focused on regret-themed narratives of gender transition. O’Connell’s article, “There Is No Legitimate ‘Debate’ over Gender-Affirming Healthcare,” argued that Bazelon had elevated “a handful of outliers and their discredited theories about trans people to prominence they do not enjoy among the medical community.” The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have all endorsed gender-affirming care, O’Connell pointed out. “Articles like Bazelon’s help make transphobic ideas more acceptable to a mainstream liberal audience.”
O’Connell’s piece resonated with readers, including fellow journalists who had their own frustrations with the paper’s handling of the subject at large. Within several months, nearly a thousand Times contributors, joined by tens of thousands of readers, signed an open letter to the paper’s standards editor condemning its coverage of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. “Plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly,” the letter stated. Still, the newsroom “has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.” (In an internal memo, Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the Times, and Kathleen Kingsbury, the opinion editor, defended the paper’s coverage of trans people as “important, deeply reported and sensitively written.” When reached for comment, a spokesperson said, “We reject the premise of the criticism,” and attested to hundreds of articles that have been published on “the full spectrum of trans life in America.”)
“If you go back to the eighties, the Times’coverage of queer people is strikingly similar to the Times’ coverage of trans people now,” O’Connell told me. “You know, just asking questions about whether it’s appropriate for ‘them’ to teach in schools. Things like that. I think the Times works so aggressively to position itself in the middle that it really reaches the point of obtuseness.” They were hesitant to paint with a wide brush, however; O’Connell admires many journalists at the Times, they said, and regularly reads the paper for its investigative stories.
The problem is not so much with the Times in particular, O’Connell told me, but that mainstream journalists in general tend to approach the trans community with a degree of contrived “impartial” skepticism, akin to outdated reporting on the climate crisis. “Twenty years ago,” O’Connell said, “if you looked at climate change topics, they would often feel this pressure to get somebody who denied climate change on. And you’d end up having these debates.” The question was: “Is it happening or not?” Clearly, trans people are “happening.” More productive, then, O’Connell suggested, are questions like “What does it mean to explore gender through youth? What does it mean to explore identities as young people?” As they put it in their essay responding to the Times, “We’ll keep seeing these kinds of stories appear as long as cisgender journalists approach trans rights by questioning if our existence should be supported rather than a more compassionate approach that centers our voices and asks how we can be supported.”
One day, I met up with O’Connell not far from the former site of the Austin American-Statesman—the city’s major daily, now owned by Gannett; the old office building is being turned into a luxury development. Lately, the city’s journalism has been contracting. The Austin Chronicle does “extraordinary work with what they have,” O’Connell said, “but they’re less resourced than they used to be.” The Observer has suffered badly, too: In March 2023, the Texas Democracy Foundation, the nonprofit that sat behind the Observer, voted to close the paper for financial reasons. The staff, taken by surprise, staged a resuscitation campaign; a GoFundMe raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. O’Connell spoke in a video about how the Observer “lets queer people hold politicians accountable for the harm they do.” But the circumstances were insurmountable, and about a year later O’Connell, along with other top editors, lost their job. The publication still exists, albeit in a shrunken form.
“I was happy that I was able to do a lot of really important work at the Observer that established my bona fides,” O’Connell told me. They left with stories in the pipeline and a keen sense of mission: Austin was becoming less affordable, harder to live in—and yet a city contains multitudes. “At the same time they were debating at the capitol whether or not they were going to ban certain types of drag performance,” they said, “you could go and see a drag performance every night in the city, if you wanted to.”
That would change one evening this past June, with an email reading We will bomb the Brewtorium. Its pseudonymous sender announced that a pipe bomb had been placed at the Brewtorium, a pub in central Austin that often hosts live performances, including drag shows; one was set to start in an hour. Staff promptly evacuated three hundred people from the premises. O’Connell wrote about it for the Austin Free Press, a new publication that has set out to “equip Austinites to make informed decisions through independent, investigative reporting, diverse opinions, and civil dialogue.” O’Connell’s article contained a survey of anti-drag efforts in Texas, reactions to the Brewtorium’s evacuation, and links to the Instagram pages of people who were prevented from taking the stage. The performers felt that “the show must go on,” the piece noted—and O’Connell made an important connection, that there were at least four bomb threats across the US at drag shows, all in a single weekend. They learned that from a statement they collected from GLAAD, which had referred to threats, plural. For the most part, O’Connell told me, “I did not see the national media connect the dots at all” among the geographically dispersed threats. While their story was local, it was also an important data point in a broader landscape.
The Free Press was a good fit for the piece. “Our mission, our reason for being, what we saw, was the need for two main things,” Andrew Wheat, the outlet’s managing editor, told me. “More coverage of traditionally underserved communities in Austin and more in-depth reporting on the changes occurring in this city.” The Free Press partners with Huston-Tillotson, a historically Black university whose campus sits in one of the most gentrified zip codes in the country. O’Connell has become a frequent contributor, writing on a disability-rights protest, a challenge to a new two-minute speaking limit at the Austin City Council, and the city’s cash payments to low-income Austinites. “It’s been a good philosophical match,” Wheat said. “Kit came with extensive contacts and experience in the LGBTQ+ community—and also with a curiosity and sensitivity with what’s been going on with communities of color and low-income populations.”
As it happened, O’Connell wrote the first article ever published by the Free Press. The piece featured interviews with community advocates working against a city initiative called HOME, which proposed reducing Austin’s minimum lot size to allow for the construction of more, smaller houses. Critics viewed the plan as a means by which developers could displace low- and middle-income people. Two organizers, Misael Ramos and Chris Page, met with O’Connell to talk about it; I tagged along. Why, Ramos asked, didn’t the city consider something different for people in East Austin—“a solution that allows them to actually build upon their own land so they can keep all of it and be entitled to all of those things?”
Ramos and Page spoke in passionate soliloquies. O’Connell told them that they wanted the resulting piece to “reflect the concerns of the community” and “reflect the data, which shows that this kind of thing doesn’t have a great history in Austin.” Their objectives echoed those in the Project South report about movement journalism: how it “eliminates hierarchies between reporters and sources,” how it “trains stakeholders to be journalists, and journalists to be stakeholders.” Within such a paradigm, traditional reporting roles fall away. Journalism starts to reveal itself as no more, really, than simply being a person living and breathing in a place—and then writing, directly, from the shared language that you’ve developed with your neighbors.
Later that month, the HOME initiative would pass. But in the moment, Page told O’Connell that he was “grateful that y’all are, you know, giving voice to communities that are not finding voice on the dais right now.” Then he added, “God, do we need good journalism.” The conversation wound down, and we all got up to leave. Page looked at O’Connell and me. “Please,” he said, and it was either a directive or a plea, “be good at your jobs.”
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
