This week, a television reporter from Des Moines publicly announced that she would identify as a transgender woman.
Nora J.S. Reichardt of WOI-TV stated that she didn’t believe she would be able to announce her identity on air for a very long time.
“I didn’t know if there was a place and a space for me to do this sort of work that I’ve come to love and enjoy while also getting to be myself while I do it,” she stated on the same day that she officially filed for a change of name with the Iowa courts.
She is hardly the first journalist to announce that. In August, M.A. Voepel, an ESPN journalist, tweeted his switch to using male pronouns.
Reichardt revealed in an interview with a friend who is a former reporter for the station that she had considered her gender identity in high school. She added that she “didn’t even have the language to articulate what I was experiencing” since her hometown was in rural Minnesota.
She claimed that wearing slacks and button-up shirts to work made her feel like “I was someone I didn’t truly feel like.”
“A while after I started being on air, I kind of just reached a personal breaking point where I thought, ‘Why don’t I like the person I see every time I go out in the field? Why don’t I connect with that person? Why don’t I want to be that person?'”
In September 2021, Reichardt began a medical transition process after coming to terms with her status as a transgender woman over several years.
“To gradually come into a role where I am feeling more and more at home in my body than I ever did before has been amazing to get to experience and share with people,” she said.
