Podcast Summary:
During Women’s History Month, the conversation often leaves out trans women entirely. Journalist Oosheen Yadav sits down with Siri, also known as Sirizi Beats, a South Asian trans woman, cancer survivor, music artist, and content creator from Connecticut, to talk about growing up suppressing her identity, finding herself through college courses in women’s and gender studies, using music as a vehicle for self-expression, and facing discrimination during a job interview where her pronouns were dismissed before she could even answer a question. Siri’s story is not just about survival. It is about building a platform so the next generation of trans kids has someone to look up to.
How I Made It: The Reporting and Production Process
By Oosheen Yadav
This story began with a question I kept asking myself during Women’s History Month: whose history are we actually celebrating?
The answer, too often, is incomplete. Trans women are frequently excluded from the broader conversation about women’s rights and women’s experiences, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by omission. I wanted to report on that gap directly, and I wanted to do it through one person’s story rather than through statistics alone.
Siri, known online as Sirizi Beats, was the right person to tell that story.
Finding the Story
The 1.4 million Americans who identify as transgender are not a monolith. Within that number, 38.5% identify as trans women, according to the Williams Institute. And within that group, trans women of color, particularly South Asian trans women, are almost never centered in mainstream media coverage of transgender issues.
Siri sat at that specific intersection: South Asian, trans, a cancer survivor, a musician, an advocate, and a content creator using Instagram and TikTok to build community and visibility for people who look like her. That combination of lived experience and public platform made her both an important voice and an accessible one for an audio audience.
The Pre-Interview
Before I recorded anything I had a conversation with Siri about what the piece was trying to do. I told her this was not going to be a tragedy narrative. I was not looking for a story of suffering. I was looking for a story of a full human life, one that included struggle but was not defined entirely by it.
That framing mattered. It shifted the interview away from a recitation of hardships and toward something more honest and more interesting: the specific, textured details of what it actually feels like to grow up knowing you are different and not having the language or the safety to say it out loud.
The Interview
I asked Siri to take me back to specific moments rather than general feelings. That approach consistently produces the most honest tape.
She talked about high school, suppressing her identity in an environment that did not feel safe. She talked about her first two years of college, automatically roomed with two male students, feeling stuck, wanting to escape but having nowhere to go. She talked about COVID, which most people experienced as a crisis, but which gave her the unexpected gift of moving back home and finally beginning to explore who she actually was.
She talked about the women’s and gender studies classes she took as a college minor and how those courses were the first time an institution explicitly told her that trans women are women, that her identity was real and valid. She said that was deeply ingrained in her and gave her confidence she had not had before.
She talked about the job interview in her senior year of college, applying for software engineering positions, her pronouns listed in her bio as they/them. She described the interviewer as dismissive from the start, not asking her much, clearly influenced by what he saw in her bio rather than what she could actually do. After that interview she removed her pronouns from all professional materials and went through the rest of her job search, in her words, in the closet.
That detail landed hard. Not because it was dramatic but because it was so ordinary. That is the thing about discrimination in hiring. It rarely announces itself. It just closes a door quietly and moves on.
The Cancer Survivor Angle
Siri is also a cancer survivor. I did not lead with that because I did not want it to define the story or overshadow everything else she had built and become. But it mattered as context. Resilience is a word that gets used lazily in profiles. In Siri’s case it is literal. She has navigated her gender identity, discrimination, public visibility, and a cancer diagnosis. The fact that she is still making music and building a platform for the next generation of trans kids is not incidental. It is the whole point.
Writing the Script
This piece aired as part of the Morning Wake-Up Call on WRHU, which meant the script had to be tight, clear, and immediate. Morning radio does not have room for long setups or complicated framing. You have to earn the listener’s attention in the first sentence and keep it.
I opened with Women’s History Month and the gap at the center of it: trans women are overlooked, sometimes accused of not being real women at all. That is a direct and uncomfortable statement. It is also true, and starting there told the listener immediately that this was not going to be a soft feature.
I let Siri’s own words carry the emotional weight of the piece. My narration connected her story to the broader context, the Williams Institute data on transgender identification in the U.S., the documented discrimination trans people face in employment, education, and health care, and the significance of Women’s History Month as a frame. But the heart of the piece was her voice, her specific memories, her own articulation of what she wants her platform to mean.
Her closing statement became the natural end of the piece. She said her goal is to be representation for the next generation of trans women and trans kids, so they can see themselves reflected somewhere and know they are allowed to follow their dreams. She said the more representation exists, the safer the world becomes for trans people.
That is a clean, clear, earned ending. It did not need anything after it.
What This Story Meant
Reporting on trans identity during Women’s History Month is not a niche editorial choice. It is a basic act of accuracy. Women’s history includes trans women’s history. Leaving that out is not neutral. It is a decision, and it has consequences for who feels seen and who does not.
Siri’s story is one data point in a much larger picture. But data points with names and voices and specific memories are how audiences actually understand issues that might otherwise feel abstract. She was generous, honest, and clear about what she has been through and what she is building toward.
That is all you need to make a story worth telling.
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