Since the story on Roberta Cowell in 1954 and the outing of April Ashley in 1961, the interest of British press in the lives of trans* people has only increased. Despite the drive for greater inclusion in society, a greater understanding of the diversity of trans* people’s identities, and an increase in legal rights, the media’s coverage of trans* people is largely the same as it was six decades ago. Trans* people have been identified as one of the groups targeted by the press, and past experience does not give us much hope that their ways are likely to change in the near future.

The Daily Mail publishes a story about trans* people once a day, sensationalising our lives, questioning our right to medical care and jumping at any story where a trans* person has committed a crime. But it is not just the tabloids who act like this: at the beginning of this year, a piece by Julie Burchill, which was so full of hatred and slurs that it was later classified as a hate incident, was published and then retracted by the Observer only to be republished by the Telegraph.

Closer to home, our very own student papers have also been complicit in this, demonstrating just how deeply ingrained this behaviour is. Even news about increased inclusion, such as when the NUS LGBT campaign rephrased its language about women to specifically include some non-binary identities, is not free of this. Headlines like the Tab’s “NUS campaign changes definition of ‘woman’” twist the real meaning of the story and mislead the reader into believing vast, inconvenient and unnecessary changes have been made at the behest of the pushy trans* people. This constant onslaught has led to over half of trans* people identifying the media as having a negative effect on their wellbeing.

For decades the media have had complete control over how trans* people are portrayed and they have not been kind. If I asked you to describe trans* people, without using the archaic and misleading soundbites “trapped in the wrong body” or “sex change”, would you be able to?

Would you have remembered that not everyone identifies as male or female, or that not everyone wants medical or surgical intervention? Could you tell me what the difference between transsexual and transgender is? You might think that this is all superfluous knowledge but it’s this lack of basic understanding that forms the basis for so much transphobic hatred.

The true reality of trans* people’s experiences has been ignored and erased by the press, replaced by an easily digestible fabrication, designed for the sole purpose of selling papers. Strict templates are used to reduce us to one-dimensional characters – the sobstory, the beauty queen or the criminal – and on issues that really affect us, our voices are disregarded in favour of cisgender ‘experts’. While the silencing of an entire minority may seem like something out of an Orwellian dystopia, this may be closer to the truth than we let ourselves realise.

Our student newspapers should not be perpetuating this state of affairs as it simply boils down to bad journalism, alienating parts of its readership and unfairly and inaccurately reporting the news through under-research. With The Tab’s rapid expansion, TCS’s history of success, and Varsity’s impressive list of former editors and writers – including Gaby Hinsliff , Archie Bland, Amol Rajan and Jeremy Paxman to name but a few – changes we make here may well go on to have a lasting effect on the British press. Growing our own culture of inclusive journalism would not only improve our papers but would also instil fantastic values in the next great journalists-to-be.

As clichéd as it is, every one of us will have an effect on our society and if we choose to ignore our ignorance, we will teach those around us to do the same. History will show whether we chose to seek enlightenment or if we buried our heads in the sand and let time pass us by.

It’s time we stopped telling each other myths, as if they were fact, and it’s time we stop letting the press do the same to us. The diversity of human experience is a story worth telling so let’s tell it right, free of slurs and sensationalist half-truths.