If you have ever read a hard news article, or even a non-serious article where a person was interviewed, you would be well aware of the heavy-set gender binary throughout today’s news media. As a person who identifies as gender-fluid/queer, I firmly believe that the non-binary and/or queer community deserves more recognition in modern media platforms.

As of the current moment, there are no pronouns set to identify someone who is outside of the gender binary. If a person is interviewed and their gender identity is not specified, they are referred to as “herself/himself”. This enforces the outdated, strict, two- that hundreds of thousands of people can’t identify with. Since the US Government doesn’t do a census on transgender Americans, I instead opted for the rough national average, which is approximately 900,000. That means that at least some genderqueer or transgender people read the news.

With popular news media continuing to ignore non-binary identities, erasure is imminent. With erasure, most, if not all of us will be forced back into the closet once again, and we will have to restart the painstaking process of coming out once again. Is this really what we want? LGBTQ+ people all around the world have worked insanely hard to bring recognition to the community, only for us to be potentially erased by common news media.

The first time news made it to paper was in 1690. Nearly 329 years have passed since the first ever news article was published; since the gender binary was relevant and followed. How is this still being tolerated? It’s time to take a stand. Stand against the erasure of outer-binary identities.