A top editor becomes her ‘true self’

2021-06-05 10:19:37
Katie Robertson writes:
Chua, 60, transitioned genders in 2020, using the time away from the office to, as she describes it, “grow into this skin.” On Dec 18, she wrote to her colleagues at Reuters to inform them of the change.

“For some time now I’ve been on a journey,” she said in the email. “It’s mostly been private, internal and exploratory, but it’s time to move beyond that and mark a new milestone in that passage. I’m transgender. And beginning today I’ll be living and presenting as what I know to be my true self 100% of the time.”

Chua is perhaps the most senior transgender journalist in the country. She said that she was speaking publicly because “it’s good to just have people be able to say, ‘Here is an example of somebody who can transition and not get fired.’”

“There are a lot of people who are 14 years old who would like to know that this is not a death sentence,” she said. “It’s not a millstone. It’s something you can be proud of, it’s something you can celebrate and something you can live with.”

Chua was promoted last month to the newly created executive editor role at Reuters, overseeing all editorial operations for the multimedia news organisation, which has 2,500 journalists in 200 locations globally. She reports to Alessandra Galloni, who was named editor-in-chief in April and is the first woman to hold that role in the news agency’s 170-year history.

Galloni and Chua are at the helm at a time when many news organisations are grappling with how the perspectives of newsroom leadership can shape coverage, and working to improve the diversity in senior editor ranks. Reuters appears to have had more success than others in delivering on those goals.

“We reach billions of people as an industry, and I think we have a responsibility to ensure that the stories we tell are representative, truly representative, of the world that we live in,” Chua said.

Chua is central to an expanded vision for Reuters. About half of Reuters’ revenue comes from a financial data service, called Refinitiv, that it once owned. Reuters gets at least $325 million annually for supplying news to Refinitiv’s customers, making financial news a critical part of its business.

Reuters is now trying to offer a livelier product to a more general audience of professionals in the vein of its competitors, which include Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. It announced in April that it would put its website behind a paywall, though that plan has been postponed amid a dispute with Refinitiv. Chua is charged with spearheading tech initiatives that will help the company find new audiences. It’s a tall order, and one she says she is focusing on with the added benefit of having “freed up 20% of my brain” that had been devoted to thinking about her transition.

Growing up in a Catholic household in Singapore in the 1960s, Chua said, she had always had “a sense of disquiet and uncertainty” but did not at the time know of the concept of being trans.

“Back in the day there was no internet, there was nothing to read up on. How could you know?” she said. But she wrestled with a feeling of “What is this, why aren’t I more like other people?”

After completing a bachelor’s in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Chua worked at the Singapore Broadcasting Corp., where she fell in love with journalism. She received a master’s degree from Columbia, and then worked as a reporter throughout Southeast Asia in the 1990s before becoming the editor-in-chief of the Asia edition of The Wall Street Journal.

In 2005, Chua moved to New York City for a senior editing job at the Journal, eventually running the publication’s graphics and design departments. It was upon her return to the United States that she began to accept that she was trans, she said.

“I was still saying to myself: ‘Fine, but I’m not transitioning. That’s too hard, and it can’t be done,’” Chua said. “And you live this double life, and that’s painful. You grow up through that period with two sets of friends, two sets of weekends, two sets of activities.”

After a stint as the editor-in-chief of The South China Morning Post, Chua took a job at Reuters in New York in 2011 as the editor for data.

Chua credits her close circle of trans friends in New York, who all work outside the media industry, with helping her to see that a transition could be possible.

“I think part of the decision was, ‘I can do it and not get killed. I can do it and mostly not get killed and still go to the bathroom,’” she said. “But the entire thinking is really around the question of, I want to stop hiding. I want to be able to live in the sunlight.”

About two years ago, she started to confide in people about her intention to transition, including her boss at the time, Stephen J. Adler, who was the editor-in-chief of Reuters for a decade and retired in April.

“I did not have any sense of it before she told me, so it was definitely a surprise, but a happy surprise because she clearly was feeling very positive about it and very excited about being able to be herself,” Adler said.

After her December email, Chua was surprised by the number of people who reached out to share their own experiences or those of friends and family members.

“Everybody who knows me says I’m smiling a lot more,” Chua said.

At a time when transgender issues are regularly in the news, with a recent flood of bills being introduced in mostly Republican-led states that aim to restrict transgender rights, Chua said her own experience had led her to think more deeply about how the media covers stories like hers.
“You have to be careful who your sources are,” Chua said. “There are organisations who purport to speak for one side or the other and they are not the right ones, even if they are the loudest ones.”

While there are no statistics on how many American journalists identify as LGBTQ, an industry body that represents them has more than 1,000 members, while the relatively new Trans Journalists Association counts about 400 members.

Chua warned of the danger of portraying trans people or those in minority communities as victims, rather than people “as fully fleshed out as they would be in any other story.”

Her friends are seeing her fully fleshed out in her own life, too.

“I loved her before, but there’s just this extra level of comfort now,” said Anya Schiffrin, a media scholar at Columbia who first met Chua in Southeast Asia in the early 1990s. Schiffrin said she was delighted Chua was willing to talk about her experiences.

“All of this talking about her personal life and her feelings is really a new thing for all of us,” she said, adding: “We have a few friends whose kids are transitioning, and she’s said she’s happy to talk to them.”

Chua is preparing for a return to the Reuters office in July amid significant changes: A new job and a new public identity. It will require some adaptation, a skill that she sees as necessary for the news media business as a whole.

“We’re getting closer to rethinking what stories are about, who they are for, or what matters,” she said. “And I think that’s driven in some part by the audience changing and the way stories are being distributed. There are many more avenues for people to call out stories that they feel are lacking.”
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