If Tat Bellamy-Walker hadn’t been a journalist, they likely would have waited to change their name. But when the Black, genderfluid trans man covered breaking news at a major news network, their feminine birth name quickly became a problem. They spent their days reporting on crises such as Flint, Michigan’s contaminated drinking water. It was grueling, emotionally charged work, made harder still by the immense psychological toll of constant misgendering from colleagues, editors, and sources. “I was in very fast-paced reporting situations. At a certain point, I just gave up on having people understand what my gender is,” says Bellamy-Walker, who now manages digital safety training at PEN America. The pain of the misgendering became intolerable. Like many trans people, Bellamy-Walker eventually changed their name to align with their gender identity.
Honoring a trans journalist’s byline (and pronouns) is not just professional courtesy. Being misgendered in the workplace affected Bellamy-Walker’s ability to do their job and risked their safety by inadvertently outing them and opening them up to harassment. Studies have shown that using a trans person’s chosen name reduces depressive episodes and suicide risk. Changing a name is a very personal decision—and unfortunately for trans journalists, it’s a decision that has to occur in public. You can’t be a journalist without a byline stamped atop a story or on a masthead. But what if you don’t want that name anymore?
Trying to figure out the vagaries of your gender identity while also sussing out the best strategy for communicating that identity to your employer, your colleagues, and scores of internet strangers is, well, hard, as I experienced recently. It’s a tricky decision, further complicated by the undeniable reality that trans people are living in a frightening time. Trans journalists routinely face abuse and harassment from colleagues and readers, and trans people in many parts of the world are facing heightened anti-trans rhetoric and even the rollback of their rights. The Trump administration has instructed federal agencies to, effectively, remove transgender and nonbinary people from American society.
Trans perspectives and stories have never been more important. And trans reporters need a safe perch from which to write these stories. Not every trans person changes their name. Some trans people simply like their birth name. Sometimes changing your byline is not possible, either because of the risk of abuse from newsroom colleagues or because an outlet has a policy that prohibits such changes or lacks a clear policy or procedure for how to do so. In some countries, being transgender is criminalized (even to the point of sometimes being punishable by death), which obviously complicates a journalist’s ability to live openly.
But if a trans journalist can and wants to change their byline, it can be a welcome boost to their mental health and safety. “When you have access to updating your name and affirming your gender to your name, you feel better during the course of the day,” says Bellamy-Walker. “If you don’t feel safe, it’s going to be difficult to do your job.”
While journalists, as public figures, are subject to harassment and unwelcomed scrutiny, we are also a vector of power. We have audiences that institutions want to tap, so people have an incentive to call you by your name. And more people consume their news through content creators, a continuous byline helps you build a brand. “With the decline of mainstream media, people are more and more paying attention to who the journalist is and to what that byline is,” says Evan Urquhart, the founding editor of the trans-focused publication Assigned Media. “You want your name to be associated with trust and with continuity.
So You Want to Change Your Byline
The first step to changing your byline is, often, picking a new name. Your byline is usually a source or potential employer’s first point of information about you, so be prepared for people to make assumptions about your gender based on the name you select. That’s part of the reason I chose “Rose.” The classically feminine name means I now get cold emails addressed to “Ms.” rather than “Mr. Broderick.”
Although seeing that salutation in my inbox still makes me smile, I almost didn’t change my byline at all. When I first started going by Rose, in May 2024, I detested the idea of having to publicly come out. But day after day of living a double life turned out to be too much cognitive dissonance for me. I realized I wanted to marry my public and private selves.
When I asked other trans journalists about how they’d transition in this political moment, most of the advice boiled down to: Do whatever makes you feel safe and happy.
That led me to the next big decision: Deciding how I wanted to come out with my new name. (I have been out as trans since 2022, but I had kept my birth name and used they/them pronouns.) There are a million ways to come out, but once you have a name (or even before you’ve settled on one), the best thing you can do is to have an honest conversation with yourself about how public you want to be. Do you want to announce the change on social media? Just tell existing sources as needed?
When I asked other trans journalists about how they’d transition in this political moment, most of the advice boiled down to: Do whatever makes you feel safe and happy. You don’t need to tell every person you’ve ever quoted in an article. You can also not tell a soul. Different approaches work for different journalists, each with their own tradeoffs depending on your personality and how frequently you need to talk with sources.
When Kae Petrin, co-executive director of the Trans Journalists Association (TJA), left* a previous position at St. Louis Magazine, they simply altered their name in the website’s content management system, without asking for permission, a step that Petrin took without censure; emulate at your own risk! On the other end of the spectrum, Emily St. James, a novelist and television writer, sent a lengthy, playful email to hundreds of contacts the week before she publicly came out in an essay about The Handmaid’s Tale in 2019. The email was equal parts fun (a dramatic reveal of her name) and informative (her new email address, along with pleas to spread the word about the change).
While there are many ways to change a byline, it’s probably best to send the email informing colleagues and sources just before your byline change. Too far in advance and it can confuse people or place too much of an unwanted “spotlight” on your gender transition, says Urquhart.
Here’s what I ended up doing: In the month leading up to my transition, I told a few trusted colleagues and my editor about the impending decision, but I asked them to refer to me using my old name until I announced the change to the wider newsroom in a Slack message. I also connected with my publication’s HR and IT departments, so I could get everything squared away for a low-key public announcement in STAT’s daily newsletter, which I occasionally write. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about performing my transition for more than 100,000 strangers, so I kept it to a single line in an email (“Also, new name (Rose), same me.”) with much more exciting news.
As I’ve contacted old sources for stories, I’ve been giving them my new name, pronouns, and email. It’s as simple as including a few casual sentences: “Also, I am using a new name! You can expect the same coverage, but I go by Rose now. Pronouns below. This is my new email.” I’ve found that most sources have briefly acknowledged it—“congrats on the new name!” or some such—and then returned to the interview or story at hand.
Hunting Down Your Old Name
Armed with a new name and a plan for coming out, the next step is to use your journalistic sleuthing skills to find instances of your old name online. If you are fine with leaving vestiges of your old name on the internet or don’t have time to turn over every rock, skip to the next section. If you aren’t, here’s what I did: I opened up a blank document and began stalking myself, tracking the various publications and digital spaces where my name appears. My trans journalist friends who had publicly transitioned pointed me to TJA, which has a helpful list of rabbit holes where your name might hide outside a traditional byline or author page. I have spotted my name squirreled away in story URLs, metadata tags, podcast transcripts, and more. To find it, I used different search engines, put my byline in quotes, and deployed various Boolean operators to narrow my search.
If you’re not transitioning in the early years of your career, it can be extremely tedious to contact every publication you’ve written for and, like a journalist Roomba, remove every speck of dirt in the carpet. “I would have had to hunt down every single publication in the Midwest that republished any of my public radio work over a four- or five-year period, which sounded like a pain. So I kind of did it on a case-by-case basis. If I knew somebody there, I was pretty sure they’d be able to get it done,” says Petrin, a former reporter at St. Louis Public Radio.
Be kind to yourself. Eventually, you will publish enough stories that your new byline will bury your old one and you can replace those improperly bylined clips with fresher ones.
Like Petrin, you may find that you have to pick and choose which bylines to target for amending. In addition to publications where a familiar face may be able to help facilitate the change, make sure to prioritize publications that have your prized clips—those four or five clips you always use when sending out an application.
But also prepare yourself for a slog. Many publications lack a codified process for byline changes. It took just over 30 minutes to change my byline at one place. For others, I’m still waiting to hear back, months later. You could spend months hounding old editors and excising outdated pictures, only to find that a publication’s ancient CMS can’t accommodate a byline change. Which is a bummer, certainly, but not exactly a surprise, given that we’ve found fossils from 3.5 billion years ago. Life has a way of imprinting itself in odd places; the internet is no exception.
Journalists who work with a wire service or with publications that have republishing or syndication agreements might encounter complications specific to those outlets. When Ellis Ng contemplated changing her byline at Reuters in 2022, she concluded that doing so could add scores of old stories back into the feed. (Newswire services send stories written by their reporters to subscribers, including other publications, to publish.) While there was no certainty that publications that subscribed to Reuters would republish these stories, she balked at announcing her transition so widely.
“If there was a world where this change could happen overnight, or [where] this change can happen gradually, without people noticing or without people knowing, then I would have done that,” says Ng, a Singapore-based freelance reporter. Instead, she has had to accept the fact that work under her old name will likely exist in perpetuity. “It’s definitive proof that I transitioned at this point in my life,” she says. “I can’t hide it. So I’m just going to let it be.”
Ng’s story is a good reminder to be kind to yourself. Eventually, you will publish enough stories that your new byline will bury your old one and you can replace those improperly bylined clips with fresher ones. In the meantime, if a publication can’t or won’t change your byline and you need to use it for an application, there’s no need to draw excess attention to it. “You don’t have to explain yourself,” Petrin says. “You can just sort of note, ‘Reported X under a past byline’ and link to it. You don’t need to make it a whole disclosure.”
Handling Coming-Out Complications
When I came out in STAT’s daily newsletter, I thankfully did not receive any transphobic responses. I am incredibly lucky to have received a ton of support from my current publication—and most of my past publications, too. The backing of my peers and editors made me feel a lot safer adopting “Rose” as a public persona. Unfortunately, many trans journalists are not so fortunate. Safety is not a guarantee, but editors can help reporters deal with the harassment and abuse that sometimes follow a name change.
If a freelancer posts on social media that they’re changing their name and/or pronouns, reach out to ask them if they want the change implemented at your publication. Proactively suggest a potential change to the byline or bio, rather than forcing the reporter to do the work. (Copying and pasting their existing bio with the new name and pronouns might be sufficient.) Editors can also push to add language to workplace policies or union contracts, spelling out how byline changes—whether for trans people or for people getting married or divorced or changing their name for any reason—should proceed. And if a reporter you work with receives a flood of hateful messages, suggest installing email filters to divert them to spam.
If you don’t have backing from your editors, it can be daunting to try to persuade editors and publishers to change outdated info on your own. On request, the Trans Journalists Association can advocate for trans journalists pushing for a byline change.
If you encounter an obstinate outlet that refuses to change past bylines, ask them what purpose the unchanged byline serves.
If the situation escalates and you want to push back against your employer, it’s important to know your rights. A 2020 Supreme Court ruling, Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, cemented workplace protections for trans people. These include hiring and firing decisions, healthcare benefits, and workplace harassment. Refusal to acknowledge changes to an employee’s byline and/or pronouns falls under those harassment protections under certain circumstances, according to Andrew Ortiz, senior policy attorney at the Transgender Law Center. A May 2025 federal court decision may eventually imperil these protections, but Bostock still remains the law—if you’re employed by a company with at least 15 employees. For journalists at smaller publications and for freelance journalists, Bostock doesn’t pertain, but state and local laws might offer relevant protections, Ortiz says.
Even if you’re not going to go down a legal road with your employer, it’s important to know your rights and to know what workplace harassment looks and feels like. Some publications still haven’t updated Bellamy-Walker’s byline. Strangers have harassed them on numerous occasions by emailing them these articles with their birth name. “It feels like this never-ending barrage of hate, and that it doesn’t matter what steps you take to affirm your identity at times, the sexism and transphobia is so powerful,” they say.
Sometimes a lack of support can even cause a trans journalist to rethink a byline change. When Jen Byers approached a professor in journalism graduate school about the possibility of changing their name in 2023, their professor dismissed the idea, suggesting that because they hadn’t medically transitioned to look more masculine, there was no need to change their byline. Byers, a nonbinary freelance investigative journalist, felt invalidated and says the experience deterred them from pursuing a name change professionally. As a result, they still use their given name—even though, they say, they find it “so grating.”
I only had one significant complication when I started shopping my new name around to old clients. My first journalism job was with a relatively conservative outlet, so I knew I might be pressing my luck with my request. My old colleague said that I would need to keep my old name on my stories because that was my identity at the time of publishing, though we agreed to take my bio page down. Another colleague said my request started a “serious and caring conversation” about the topic at the publication, but I am not holding my breath for further developments. When I told Bellamy-Walker about this response, they were indignant. “Who does this protect? Who is this helping? Who is this supporting? Because it’s not supporting the trans person.”
Those are questions worth sitting with. If you encounter an obstinate outlet that refuses to change past bylines, ask them what purpose the unchanged byline serves. Urquhart argues that refusing to change a reporter’s byline is at odds with the clarity that is a hallmark of good journalism. “The role of journalism is to serve the reader, and you don’t serve the reader by giving them a confusing byline,” he says. “It is actually in much better accord with the principle of ensuring that records are accurate.”
* Correction 7/22/25: An earlier version of this story stated that when Kae Petrin started a previous position at St. Louis Magazine, they altered their name in the website’s content management system. In fact, they altered their name when they left that position.
O. Rose Broderick is the disability in health care reporting fellow at STAT. She previously worked at WNYC’s Radiolab and Scientific American, and her story debunking a bogus theory about transgender kids was nominated for a 2024 GLAAD Media Award. You can find Rose on Bluesky at @rosebroderick.bsky.social or riding her bike around Brooklyn.