Monica Roberts Uses Her Blog to Bring Justice to the Trans Community

Monica Roberts is one of The Advocate's Women of the Year. View the full list from the current issue of the magazine.

No reporter this year has covered the breadth of Black trans women's lives -- and very often, deaths -- the way this journalist has been since her blog, TransGriot, was launched 15 years ago.

Monica Roberts is one of the first people -- not just among reporters, but activists as well -- on the story when a killing strikes in the trans or gender-expressive communities. She knows enough by now to sift through mainstream news reports and detect trans lives while local reporters are still butchering their stories and deadnaming the victims.

Roberts also knows when a rumor needs to be verified before publishing. Those skills are unmatched in most media, and certainly among citizen journalists.

She was given the Susan J Hyde Award for Longevity in the Movement at Creating Change last year, HRC's John Walzel Equality Award in 2017, and outstanding blog at the GLAAD Media Awards in 2018. The awards are far too few, but that will never stop Roberts, a mover in Texas politics, from reporting the truth of this very often invisible community.