Hey fam, it's me Amara. Welcome to the TransLash podcast, a show where we tell trans stories to save trans lives.

The media landscape is changing out there really fast. Outlets are shrinking, DEI initiatives, which include trans voices or being rolled back, and moreover,

the voices of all marginalized communities are often the first to be cut.

In the middle of this is the fact that queer and trans media is fighting to survive, to adapt,

and to carve out new spaces for our stories to be told.

That's why I'm excited to talk with the new editor-in-chief of them, Fran Chirado.

With years of experience shaping career, culture through writing, editing, and producing,

Fran is stepping into this role at a time when LGBTQ plus journalism

faces both enormous challenges and unprecedented opportunities.

We are often a guide for getting free, a guide for getting free, not just for LGBTQ people, but for all people, because all people actually do get inspired by our lives and our personhoods and our slang and our style and our aesthetic and the culture that we invent.

But before we get to our important conversation with Fran, let's start out as always with some trans joy.

Journalism can be a tool for visibility, justice and joy.

And Horae Dung is using it just for that.

Hooray is a Los Angeles-based multimedia journalist whose reporting has appeared in outlets like The Guardian, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, NPR, and the Los Angeles Times.

A former LA Times fellow, Horae, is now a general assignment and video reporter at LA Public Press

and co-directs the Asian American Journalist Association's LGBTQIA Plus Affinity Group.

And just earlier this year, they were honored by the Association of LGBTQ Journalists

for their piece on a transmasculine wrestling event in L.A.

Here's hooray to tell us more.

If you saw me there in the crowd, I was like screaming my head off.

And I also had my notepad out.

And I was like writing notes.

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