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"This introductory chapter opens with a description of the National Center for Transgender Equality's (NCTE) work on the day President Donald J. Trump announced his ban on transgender military service. In doing so, it illustrates in brief the range of communicative activities practiced by NCTE and how they fit together into a coherent set of strategic practices aimed at saturating the communication system with voices in support of transgender equality. Building on this example, the chapter analyzes how the transition to a networked public sphere and related changes in the structure of the contemporary communication system have required social movements to develop of new activism strategies. In encapsulating the system-level argument in one extended case, this chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book to unfold by taking apart and deeply analyzing the system's component pieces"--

In Voices for Transgender Equality, Thomas J Billard offers an insider's view into transgender activism during the first two years of the Trump administration. Drawing on ethnographic research at the National Center for Transgender Equality, Billard shows how these activists developed an unlikely blend of online and offline strategies to saturate a diverse ecology of national news outlets, local media outlets across the country, and both public and private conversations across multiple social media platforms with voices in support of their cause. Including rich storytelling and insightful analysis, Billard makes a compelling case of what it takes to make social and political change in a world transformed by digital media.

Abstract
This article examines the emergence of a national transgender rights movement in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first century. Drawing on newly available materials from the Trans Equality Archive at the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington, DC, this study shows that the transgender movement has been neither wholly independent of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement, nor simply a subdivision of it. Through a process of hybridization, the transgender movement became simultaneously its own independent movement and a constituent of the LGBT movement. In building this argument, this article tells an untold story about the history of the movement. First, I narrate the emergence of a shared transgender collective identity separate from LGB identity. Second, I describe the burgeoning of a transgender movement and detail its continued distinction from the LGB movement. Third, I explain how the transgender movement pushed to turn the "LGB" movement into the "LGBT" movement, while still maintaining its independence. The article sheds light on the complex dynamics of contention among national advocacy organizations that gave shape to the contemporary transgender rights movement. It also contributes to the scholarship by tracing the distinctive evolution of the national transgender movement, which has operated alongside grassroots trans movements.

Whereas social movement–media relations were, in the era of mass media, a dialogic relationship of mutual, albeit asymmetric, dependency between news makers and social movement organizations, the hybridization of the media system has complicated matters considerably. The dialogic tensions that drove organizations' access to the political information environment have been supplanted by new tensions—tensions that have transformed organizations' media work routines. Organizations must now manage tensions over the temporality of issue emergence, tensions between identity and policy knowledge as sources of expertise, tensions between emotional charge and informational novelty as criteria of newsworthiness for journalists, and tensions between policy demands and media demands in the formation of communications strategy. And these new tensions demand new work practices oriented toward addressing multiple audiences concurrently and via multiple media streams. Because the discourses of social media influence the press to such an extent, the successful management of press discourse requires both direct influence via routine media work targeting journalists and indirect influence via steering digital media discourse—the combination of which presents significant resource costs to movement organizations. This article draws on an ethnographic case study of media work in the U.S. transgender rights movement to extend theorizations of movement–media relations to account for the structuring influence of the hybrid media system, illustrating these news tensions in the context of the panic over transgender passport policy that erupted in the summer of 2018.

This study investigated the influence of television consumption patterns on changes in attitudes toward depicted social out-groups. Participants were randomly assigned to view six episodes of Amazon's Transparent, a comedy-drama program about a family whose father comes out as a transgender woman, in either one 3-hr ("binge-watching") session or six weekly half-hour ("appointment-viewing") sessions. Across both groups, we found exposure to the narrative reduced anti-transgender prejudice. Counter to the predictions of the extended elaboration likelihood model and the entertainment overcoming resistance model, however, improvement in prejudice toward transgender people was not predicted by narrative or character involvement. Rather, reduction in prejudice was an outcome of viewing condition, such that those who viewed the program on a schedule of one episode per week exhibited lower levels of postexposure prejudice than those who binge-watched, and their attitudinal changes were more persistent 3 weeks later. Results are discussed in the context of the original elaboration likelihood model, proposing mechanisms for further testing.

The 2016 presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump saw citizen typography emerge in highly visible and highly impactful ways, particularly as the candidates made seemingly little attempt to maintain full control over their visual brand identities. But what does the surprising significance of typography in this recent campaign reveal about marketing and citizen participation in politics, about political brand management in a networked media environment and about typography's role as a key pillar of branded political communication? This essay offers two key concepts: the networking of political brands and an emerging logic of participatory aesthetics – both of which point to a decentralization of traditional 'brand management' in favour of affectively driven political engagement through visual communications disseminated over communication networks.

This study examines representations of transgender individuals and identity in mainstream U.S. newspapers in an effort to understand the extent to which the transgender community is legitimized or delegitimized by news media. To do so, 200 articles from 13 of the 25 most circulated daily newspapers in the United States were coded for the presence or absence of "legitimacy indicators." The study finds that mainstream newspaper coverage of the transgender community is extremely limited. Moreover, the coverage that does exist contains a significant amount of delegitimizing language, which it is argued will detrimentally impact both the projected legitimacy of transgender claims in the political arena and public perceptions of the transgender community.