TV Reporter Comes Out as Trans Woman in On-Air Broadcast
Des Moines TV reporter Nora J.S. Reichardt has come out as a transgender woman, introducing herself to viewers by saying, “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.”Reichardt came out Tuesday on WOI’s 6 p.m.
news broadcast. A graduate of Drake University in Des Moines, she has been a reporter for the station, an ABC affiliate, since July 2021, originally under a different name and presenting as male, and she began her transition in September 2021.
She discussed her journey in an interview with her friend Eva Anderson, a former WOI reporter now with a different station.Reichardt, now 24, said she began questioning her gender identity when she was in high school in the small town of Hanover, Minn. “It was at a time growing up in a pretty rural area that I didn’t even have the language to describe what I was feeling,” she said.“Especially early on, it’s hard to place that sense of wrongness — like I’m a person who’s wearing my body and not a person who's living in it.
I thought I was just depressed, I thought I was just anxious. And I’ve had those feelings almost as long as I can remember.” There were times when a day at work felt like “a dress-up day,” she said, noting that she was “telling all my coworkers and the people I was meeting out in the field that I was someone I didn’t really feel like.”As she went through her transition, there came a time when everyone in her life knew her as Nora except for the WOI audience.
