A Conversation with Journalist Ellis Ng
Queerious #1 : An interview series with queer community leaders
Hello - and happy October!
Just in case you forgot who we are - and we don’t blame you - we’re Queering About, a queer newsletter. We curate the most important queer news from the web for you.
We restarted our newsletter in June, and then went on something of a forced hiatus as both your newsletter writers dealt with big life changes. We’re still settling in to all of it - but we’re finally in a place to try and get back into the swing of things.
So, we’re starting Queerious - a series of interviews in which we talk to community leaders about their work. The interviews will come in-between our regular letters, which, for now, will come once a month, featuring the most important queer news, announcements, memorials, and, of course pop-culture moments to binge on.
Today’s leader is Singapore-based journalist Ellis Ng.
Ellis Ng, by their own description, is somewhat stressed out. The 29-year-old was working in social media newsgathering at a wire news agency for four years, and were part of a team that won an Honourable Mention at the Society of Publishers in Asia awards in 2023 for their reporting. They are currently volunteering for TransgenderSG and the Trans Journalists Association. In 2021, they took time to understand their gender, but they're still not very willing to take on the "woman" label, despite being a non-binary, transfeminine person.
Your newsletter writers, who were at one point Ellis’s colleagues, have admired them for years. For the inaugural edition of this series, we caught up with them over WhatsApp. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
QA: Tell us a little about your background. How’d you become involved in journalism? Had you ever considered any other careers?
EN: It was something borne out of an interest in my teenage years. When I was 18, I thought I could change the world through stories. Also, having lived in a household where we spoke Mandarin by default, it was seen as impressive for me to excel in English. I did think about doing social work, briefly, but my mother put her foot down and said that I wouldn't earn a lot. Hence, the pivot to journalism.
I still ended up doing community work at the side. First, I volunteered for a migrant workers’ rights group; then spent nearly eight years at a cat shelter. Now I'm volunteering to help the transgender community in Singapore (city maybe would help here?); I'm a content lead for TransgenderSG working on a revamp of its online resource database.
As a teenage boy who thought they were cis and heterosexual I never really thought of life as difficult- discrimination was just a concept that seemed far away and not a lived experience. I even spoke about it in this way, like I shouldn't be the person to weigh in on issues of discrimination because of my own identity.
But now is a different story. My partner and I occasionally notice the looks people give us when we hold hands as two femme-presenting people in public. I hear of friends struggling to get housing. I have a friend who's homeless and I can't do much for her except send what I can spare. I think of friends whose parents don't welcome them and can't accept that they're trans, and it's way worse.
You can be a man or woman or a non-binary person until you commit a crime, and then you're legally male or female in the eyes of the court and the court reporter present. And I think changing that as a journalist is going to be a long and difficult thing to do.
QA: How has your identity as a transfemme person intersected with your work?
EN: I think the greatest woe of being a trans woman in journalism is knowing how much you can actually change things. I was proud of my colleagues who refused to misgender the student involved in the incident that sparked the #FixSchoolsNotStudents (movement) in Singapore. These little things - from deadnaming to using the correct pronouns - they help people feel seen.
But they also highlight how society views us. You can be a man or woman or a non-binary person until you commit a crime, and then you're legally male or female in the eyes of the court and the court reporter present. And I think changing that as a journalist is going to be a long and difficult thing to do.
I did push, though, for the use of gender-neutral pronouns where I worked, or for the use of the right pronouns at least.
(W)hen I realised I was trans, things became slightly different. I remember waking up one day and checking my email to see a notification from the Trans Journalists Association about reporting on yet another shooter in March and seeing that police misgendered him even in death. I wrote a long vent in response to that.
I remember also working on a story about a shooting in the U.S. in May last year, and going home to see misinformation about the shooter being a trans woman crop up. Someone had stolen photos of a trans woman on Reddit, used it to claim that she was the shooter, and that she, like all of us, had a motive. I remember going home rather tired that day and passing on these claims to the agencies’ fact-checking department…and just realising that this was going to be part of my life now.
Resources, and where they are available, shouldn't be whispered from ear to ear, from generation to generation, but easily accessible for anyone who wishes to embark on a journey of self-discovery.
QA: What are all the community endeavours you’re involved in? Why are they important to you?
EN: The psychiatrist who was well-known for seeing trans patients left the public sector (in Singapore). It’s easy now to see why: she had a long backlog of patients to see because everyone who wanted gender-affirming care was funnelled through her. But the time after her announcement was relatively chaotic, with no clear routes on where to go. I had just started my transition then, and wanted a more stable source of HRT (hormone replacement therapy). So I started working on a little library project on a city-wide trans Discord server.
And that led to updating and compiling resources for the community and revamping TransgenderSG’s online databases - making sure everything is as clear as we can make it to be. Some parts had to be kept private because it was important for people to not go and harass hairdressers, beauticians, doctors or hospitals who would quietly support us.
My desire as a librarian has been and would always be to empower the community to make decisions on their own. Resources, and where they are available, shouldn't be whispered from ear to ear, from generation to generation, but easily accessible for anyone who wishes to embark on a journey of self-discovery.
QA: Singapore and India have similar colonial legacies with regards to laws about LGBTQIA+ people. How do you see employers improving D&I initiatives that does more than just “hiring x number of people from y”?
EN: I think there's still some ignorance when it comes to what D&I really involves. It’s about accepting same-sex relationships as normal and supporting someone's partner as their spouse. It’s accepting trans people in single-sex spaces even if they don't pass. Don’t make it a hassle for us to go to the bathroom. That's where D&I initiatives should start, by outlining things that they can do to include us.
It's the small things that should be normalised - they're a mere extension, too, of older practices. We used to have honorifics in email signatures - why not have pronouns in them? Gender-affirming care is just healthcare that employees will need. Things like that have to first come with a cultural understanding, that we are humans only with different needs.