The data requirements ask for age, demographics, any diagnoses and prescriptions, as well as the provision and duration of gender-affirming medical intervention which broadly speaking includes a very large list of potential interventions. It additionally seeks information on people who discontinue treatment or detransition. The data is exhaustive, and the Governor intends to publish it in aggregate every six months. While the government assures anyone reading this that the information thus collected will be de-identified, there’s ample reason to distrust that this will be true.

A week ago, I posted a dataset that had been compiling over the course of a year based on a series of RSS feeds I’d set up and mostly forgotten about. After merging the data and sifting through them, I find myself left with far more questions somehow than I had come in with. But most of all, what I can’t get out of my mind is the sheer volume of articles.

At first, I thought it was an artifact of the data collection process. Setting the alerts to any news article using the “as-it-happens” frequency setting means that the second Google indexes a news story, it gets pushed to the feed, and that is understandably a lot given the sheer size of the internet.

A year ago, after noticing an alarming shift in both the number and tone of news articles being served search engines like Google and Bing, I cobbled together a system that would log news stories as they were added to Google News in real time. The project garnered a decent amount of attention, and led to a representative from Google reaching out to check my claims that Google was serving extremist content.

Last night, I reran the code and aggregated a full year’s worth of data which is available for free to researchers here.

At any given time for the past two years, dozens of bills have been proposed before state legislatures which seek to overturn privacy policies which have been enacted in the past decade to facilitate safe social transitions at school without “outing” students either to their peers or parents. One recent example, Missouri Senate Bill 827 introduced on January 3, 2024 by Republican state senator Andrew Koenig, would require school personnel to notify parents within 24 hours if a student requests the use of a different pronoun or name.

For trans people in Ohio, the last several days have been, to be blunt, terrifying. On December 29th, after concerted public pressure, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine vetoed HB 68, a combination gender-affirming care ban and ban on trans girls participation in sports. The response was enormous, prompting conservative groups like the Center for Christian Virtue, a key driver of the Ohio SAFE Act, to call for an emergency veto override alongside bill sponsor Gary Click. At this time, Click and colleagues intend to hold an emergency session to push the override through.

Before long, from somewhere in my limbic system a semipredictable parade of emotions streams out in costume, each hiding among the throngs of other students to present unique challenges throughout the dream. For the next several hours I plod and scrape my way through some mundane setting that only I can see is a screaming hellscape. My voice comes out wrong. I drop things constantly, my thumbs don’t work right. Every third person I meet is actually three life-lessons in a trenchcoat come to drag me through a sidescrolling haunted house of childhood trauma. I wake up in a sweaty mess of anachronicity and confusion that lays like a thick fog atop the rest of my day.

Yet for transgender people, the consensus belief in our continual, uninterrupted existence is questioned constantly. When we share with the world who we are, the world decides if it is willing to accommodate the clear fact of existence, often independent of how such accommodation or lack thereof will affect us. Many of us have had someone tell us we are dead to them. Many of us have had to completely uproot our lives and come into fresh settings to start anew. We must constantly beg for the healthcare we need by offering substantial proof that its absence will kill us, and from people who deadpan tell us that they could wish for nothing else. Even in subtle, often benign ways such as by loved ones who hang pictures of us prior to transition in their homes.

This past month marked my third gender-affirming surgery. And while it was the third, it has certainly also been the most complex and the hardest recovery. It is also the first one where I experienced complications that had the potential to be severe, including life-threatening blood loss requiring blood transfusions, and with that has come an enormous amount of pain, far in excess of what I anticipated.

Like most people, I have a complicated relationship with Barbie. I was in the single digits in the 80’s, and in high school in the 90’s. I remember the first studies which came out showing how profoundly the franchise had accelerated already impossible beauty standards, amplifying an already out-of-control epidemic of disordered eating and body image challenges. I remember when someone sat down and did the math, from which several eating disorder specialists postulated that based on the proportions of her untenably long legs, tiny waist and enormous bust, she would have spinal problems before she was middle-aged.

There’s a curious talking point that won’t seem to die right now that just got a major boost from everyone’s least favorite author. In shorthand, you’ll most likely see the narrative referred to as “medicalized homophobia”, which posits a conspiracy theory that asserts that gender transition of any kind is an elaborate attempt to convert lesbians and gay men to heterosexuality through hormones and surgical intervention. Despite being baseless on its face, it’s an incredibly popular talking point and certain to come up in any discussion where an anti-trans campaigner wishes to dodge the accusation of being anti-LGBTQ.

There is an emergency in Florida right now, but you wouldn’t know it if you opened the average news website. While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which institutional failing made it possible for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to implement a near-total ban on gender-affirming care for all ages across the state, I suspect at least some of the blame should land at the feet of the very same media that has since completely failed to cover it.

As much as I like getting in a good dig, it has a much darker side than just vapid articles on “hook-up culture” and whatever some junior Jordan Peterson sees as an immutable psychological difference between men and women. Psychology today is actually host to an extraordinary number of conversion therapists. But before you can understand that, first you need to know a little bit about the conversion therapy ecosystem.

Monday, Republican Florida state representative Webster Barnaby made headlines after an unhinged tirade during a hearing on HB1421 where he referred to trans people as “mutants”, “demons” and “imps”. Then it went downhill from there.

Re-authoring is the process of exploring subjugated storylines buried by the dominant stories given to us by those in our lives with more power. It seeks not to replace or supplant dominant narratives, but rather to explore alternative ways of understanding more congruent to the people we know ourselves to be.

I write this at 4am on March 31st, what is internationally known as Trans Day of Visibility.

It is 12 hours after I emerged from my second gender-affirming surgery. Like a lot of people, my impulse to accelerate transition goals has escalated over the past year as a growing unease fills my body every day that one day, my body and the care it needs, will soon be outlawed— or as is more likely in states like Massachusetts, will no longer be covered under Massachusetts’ implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

While more than 1 in 5 U.S. states having passed laws or enacted policies banning live-saving medical care for trans youth, nearly 1 in 12 states have passed laws banning trans students from bathrooms in accordance with their gender. By the end of this legislative session, that proportion has the potential to reach 1 in 4.

Beginning with Jean-Martin Charcot, modern psychiatry began largely with the study and control of the other. A French neurologist, Charcot routinely saw women of all ages in his clinic for any manner of perceived ills. And ultimately, in part due to his now infamous student Sigmund Freud, It was his focus in this area that gave rise to psychoanalysis.

One of the projects I’ve been working on in the background as I try and keep up with the maelstrom is figuring out how to get notifications in real-time about bills being introduced. I’m still working the bugs out, but this calendar is based on an IFTTT applet using the same general principle as the news tracker, part of the GayAgenda suite of tools.

You can read more about the main project — which tracks news coverage of trans-related topics and generates data visualizations — here, or visit the GitHub repo here.

Well, I did it. I finally switched completely to a “dark mode” dashboard. I sort of had to, after downloading this absolutely gorgeous RStudio theme. Regardless, there’s something about seeing things slightly differently that affords you different perspective and I’m starting to get the impression that there is something truly, terrifyingly wrong with the way Google serves and curates news items in the index.

When I search for “google news content guidelines” I get the official Google News content policy where they claim that Google will not provide content for hate sites or sites that peddle disinformation (written here as misinformation). But is that really true?

A week ago someone asked me who I would support for president if it wasn’t Joe Biden. To be quite honest, try as I did I literally couldn't answer the question because I'm so perpetually unimpressed with the American political landscape. I finally have an answer. I would follow Nebraska State Senator Machaela Cavanaugh to the freaking moon if she asked me to.