Trans panic: An interview with Parker Molloy

Why trans people are the right-wing media’s boogeyman.

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.

---

Parker Molloy

Parker Molloy

is a time-traveling astronaut who writes fascinating stuff about media. That’s sort of all I knew about her for a while. Recently, we started chatting on Twitter, and we ended up on the phone. 

I wanted to talk media and Substack with the woman who named her Substack The Present Age, after a text by Kierkegaard. Molloy, 36, is trans and writes cutting articles like this one, which told the White House press corps to “stop being a gigantic embarrassment.” Other posts critique the right-wing media’s treatment of trans people, and draw on her years of experience at Media Matters, a nonprofit media watchdog. We started there, at her job in 2018, and ventured into what Molloy is an expert at: the zeitgeist, the press and what being queer in 2023 means.