When Texas pastor Mark Wingfield penned a piece for the Dallas Morning News titled "Baptist pastor from Dallas shares 7 things he's learning about transgender people," he had no idea it would capture the attention of national news outlets. In fact, NPR host Rachel Martin asked him whether he had anticipated taking the religious lead in an effort to promote greater understanding of the trans experience. He responded:
I told my wife the other day if I made a list of the top 10 things I would like to be an advocate for just because they're my natural passions, being an advocate for transgender persons would not be in the top 10. Sometimes we don't get to pick.
Sometimes we don’t get to pick—rather, something chooses us. It stuck with me as a lesbian because none of us who fall under the LGBTQ umbrella choose it. We certainly have a choice about whether to live a muted life in secrecy or to embrace our authentic selves. But frankly, it’s hardly any choice at all once you’re on the other side of it.
It got me thinking about how personal responsibility often comes in ways and at times we don’t expect, usually altering the course of our lives. For me, that call came while I was covering LGBT issues as White House correspondent for The Advocate. Before I began reporting on LGBT issues, I had been a classically trained journalist—starting out in smaller local markets covering business and eventually receiving my master’s degree in journalism from Berkeley. One of the central tenets of that training was objectivity: The journalistic ideal that a reporter shouldn’t pick sides but rather pursue stories as a blank canvas, open to the brush strokes of any relevant source.
But after years of reporting for the LGBT constituency, I lost that bearing. Originally, I figured I was simply a reporter working a gay beat, just like one might cover health care or education. But the longer I covered the issues, the more I witnessed how the laws were stacked against LGBTQ Americans and doing them real harm in their daily lives. These were people who went to work, met their civic responsibilities, and did their best every day to make a contribution while carving out a little piece of happiness for themselves.
In essence, the story changed me. I traded in the Holy Grail of objectivity in order to advocate for the truth I had come to know. Journalists are, in fact, advocates for truth. We don’t know who Woodward and Bernstein are because they were objective—we know them because they advocated for the truth.
In my case, I focused on the truth of whether Washington politicians were actually making good on their promises to the LGBTQ community. Were the president and his aides really striving to pass the legislation they said they would on the campaign trail? I worked to bring as much transparency to the system as possible while still being fair, if not objective.
My real break with journalism came in 2011 when I started using the platform I had developed as part of the White House press corps in 2009-2010 to push politicians and President Obama, in particular, toward embracing marriage equality. It was not a comfortable decision for me—I’m not a natural activist. I tend to be more deliberative about things and am not always convinced I have the right answers. In many ways, I’d still rather go on a fact-finding mission than necessarily say what I think.
But I had one window in 2011, I figured, to use whatever political capital I had earned in Washington to make a difference, and I chose to use it. Alternatively, I likely could have shopped around for a mainstream news outlet to join at the time. Had I gone that route, I’d probably still be reporting in Washington today.
Recently, I made note of another journalist who chose to take sides: Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston, who wrote a heartwarming dedication to his newly transitioned son, Jake.
This week, Maddy went to court, bravely told a judge why she wanted to be a male and wanted her birth certificate changed, too. After the hearing, when it was finally real, when he called me, I don’t think I have ever heard my kid sound so happy. And he wanted the story told.
Ralston chose his son in that column, even though he admitted that he still tears up sometimes looking at old pictures of them together. That call to personal responsibility likely won’t change the course of Ralston’s professional life the way it did mine, but I can guarantee it will change the course of his son’s life.
I once shared a similar moment with my father when I first began dating women in my early 20s. After visiting him in Michigan, I handed him a letter with tears in my eyes before boarding a flight back to South Carolina. He took some time, cleared his head, read it, and then dialed me up. And back in the era of actual answering machines, I listened to his response in my blazing hot attic apartment as he told me, “You’re an adult now and you have to make decisions about what will make you happy. I never would have chosen this for you because I think it will be difficult, but I support you and I love you.”
As a 45-year-old now looking back, I can safely say that was one of the most definitive moments of my adult life, without a doubt. I didn’t choose it and neither did he. But in that moment, he chose me as I was—not as he had wished me to be—and that has made all the difference.
Kerry Eleveld is the author of “Don’t Tell Me To Wait: How the fight for gay rights changed America and transformed Obama’s presidency.”