Lauren McGaughy

Lauren McGaughy is the winner of the 2024 Randy Shilts Award for LGBTQ+ Coverage.

McGaughy is an investigative reporter and editor for The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration of NPR member stations in Texas. Her specialty areas include criminal justice, governmental ethics and queer issues. Previous to joining the Texas Newsroom, McGaughy worked for The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle and New Orleans Times-Picayune.

McGaughy has covered the LGBTQ+ community for more than a dozen years, first as a politics reporter in Louisiana and later as a statehouse and investigative reporter in Texas. In 2022, she began covering the issue full-time as the gender, sexuality and politics reporter at The Dallas Morning News. In that role, which she conceived and pitched to her superiors, she covered the targeting of drag queens, bills outlawing gender-affirming care for transgender minors and lawsuits attacking bisexual rights in the workplace. As an openly queer woman in Texas, she sought to cover these issues with the nuance they deserve, with an eye toward empathy and honesty.

She published a three-part series about a black trans man fighting the Texas bathroom bill in 2017. She profiled the largest gathering of black trans Americans and explained why it actually makes sense that it happens in Dallas. She wrote about transgender kids and their parents years before their stories regularly made their way to other mainstream media outlets. In 2019, she exposed that Texas has the highest number of murders of transgender people by far, even when compared with other big states like California and Florida. She was nominated for a GLAAD award for this coverage. From an accountability angle, she revealed the anti-LGBTQ underpinnings of state legislation and that the Texas lawyer behind the state’s abortion ban was turning his eye to queer rights. She then covered his cases, including those against gay marriage, bisexual rights and access to HIV prevention drugs. She wrote about the state’s botched roll out of its decision to investigate parents who provide their children with gender-affirming care. She has profiled drag queens and politicians and inmates and patients. She is grateful to each of them for their stories.