'I was someone I didn't really feel like': Iowa TV reporter Nora JS Reichardt comes out as transgender woman
DES MOINES, IOWA: Local news reporter from Iowa, Nora JS Reichardt has come out as a transgender woman during a special on-air report. She talked at length about her transition and why she chose this time to come public. She has been associated with Local 5 news WOI-TV since July 2021 with a different name. Reichardt believed that she "won’t be able to ever reveal her identity on air."
"I didn't know if there was a place and a space for me to do this sort of work that I've really come to love and enjoy, while also getting to be myself while I do it," she said. However, she didn’t have to wait long, and just after a year, 24-year-old Reichardt hit a reset button, by filing for a new name with the Iowa courts. It was during a newscast especially curated for her to share her transitioning experience.
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Reichardt revealed that started her medical transition process in September 2021 and has been on hormone replacement therapy. “To gradually come into a role where I am feeling more and more at home in my body than I really ever did before has been amazing to get to experience and share with people,'' she said.
She opened up to a friend in an interview — KARE 11's Eva Andersen, a former reporter for Local 5 News, and said, during her school years she had thoughts about being transgender. But she claimed that as her hometown in Minnesota is rural and she "didn't even have the language to describe what I was feeling.”
Reichardt added that at work she felt like "I was someone I didn't really feel like" when she dressed in button-up shirts slacks. “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 that I am seeing every time I am going out in the field? Why don't I connect with that person? Why don't I want to be that person?” as per the Daily Mail report.
She concluded her special interview on-air by saying, “I'm still someone who I think is inquisitive, passionate about what I do...and I'd like to think I'm pretty friendly. “One of my biggest guiding principles is that I hope everyone I meet is happy they met me, whatever the context of that interaction is. I just hope that I am a positive part in people's lives, big or small. And as long as that can stay true through all of this, the rest is noise.”
Reichardt isn't the first news reporter to come out with that announcement, MA Voepel, a ESPN journalist announced in August via a tweet that he is transitioning and would be using male pronouns.