Tuck Woodstock
Podcaster, Educator, Cofounder of Sylveon Consulting
Educating newsrooms on vulnerable communities and gender issues
There are many ways to describe Tuck Woodstock: Journalist. Gender educator. Gender detective. Sagittarius.
As the host and creator of the podcast “Gender Reveal,” Woodstock interviews guests on the different facets of the trans experience and unpacks the idea of gender. The podcast has also awarded more than $350,000 in combined mutual aid and grant support for trans artists and activists of color.
Woodstock also provides training and resources to help organizations and individuals tell trans-inclusive stories through Sylveon Consulting.
Woodstock studied journalism in college before working at several media outlets in Portland, Oregon. He is a founding member of the Trans Journalists Association. Recognizing that trans journalists are underrepresented in American newsrooms, the group launched in 2020 to provide professional support for working trans journalists.
By Tiffany Chang
I say I’m a gender educator and not a consultant. I see “consultant” as someone who pops in and pops out and just offers tips on SEO or something. I’m trying to do the opposite: an exchange of information that is leading you to think differently about the world, rather than just a style-guide tip sheet that I could send in an email.
Our niche is working with journalists, podcasters, radio hosts, even novelists. It’s a hybrid of everything that I love: talking about trans people and gender, journalism, and about how those intersect.
It’s also an opportunity to try to make the world less bad for trans people.
Challenging Journalists to Do Better
Sylveon was the formalization of work that I found myself already doing.
Many trans people inside and outside of journalism find themselves to be one of the only — or sometimes the only — out trans people in their company. Their employers will either ignore gendering them correctly, or they will use that person for a lot of unpaid extra DEI labor. They ask things like, “Oh, you’re asking me to do better for trans people? Well, why don’t you just teach an hour-long workshop?”
When I do training in newsrooms, I try to give a holistic view of conceptualizing gender because there’s a lot of reporting on trans people done without actually interrogating what gender is or what it means in their own lives. You’re a better reporter if you’re seeing gender as not just something that happens to other people, but also as something that happens to you and that affects the way that we all live.
It’s constantly the same story: “Did you know trans people exist?” Maybe that story is needed, but it certainly doesn’t need to be rewritten every two weeks.
When I’m pushing reporters to tell a story beyond that, it’s not just because I want something more interesting to read (even though that is true!), it’s because I think they will be doing better, more interesting, and more challenging journalism if they push themselves beyond the most obvious idea.
The direction of the coverage of trans people has been strange because at first, it was sort of a neutral topic. Now, it’s so polarized that everything is framed as, “What politically is the choice that we should make to appease the largest group of readers without being accused of being either right wing or left wing in some way?”
But you can’t really do that with trans coverage. To talk about trans people as humans is an inherently political act because so many people are trying to kill us.
Using a Podcast as an Educational Tool
There’s this device in podcasting and other journalism called “Columbusing” where instead of bringing in experienced voices that are more informed about a topic, people who don’t know anything about it use themselves as the endpoint for the audience and explain it as if they’ve discovered something new. That’s why a function of “Gender Reveal” was to bring in people who knew more to teach me things.
I went to a podcasting conference aimed at women in October 2017. The conversations there around gender seemed one dimensional. “Wow, it’s so bad that women make less money than men,” but with no further analysis of identities within that.
You’re a better reporter if you’re seeing gender as not just something that happens to other people, but also as something that happens to you and that affects the way that we all live.
There was a clear lack of consistently made, moderately produced podcasts around queer and trans issues. So I created “Gender Reveal.”
The concept of the show was to bring the really interesting conversations that I was having with my friends about gender into a space where cis and trans people who can’t access those conversations can listen to, learn from, and (to some extent) participate in.
The “explanatory comma” is a term coined by the podcast “Code Switch” several years ago for what we choose to over-explain in our stories and what we choose as assumed knowledge. When stories stop every time there’s a single trans person and pause the entire narrative to explain what pronouns are, what being nonbinary is, it’s just alienating to trans people. It distracts from the narrative of the story. I don’t have time to do that. I don’t have the interest to do that.
A lot of my work is just saying, “If we can skip the part where we explain over and over what trans people are, what conversations could we have?”