For many years, the social services have been an under-reported battleground in the fight over LGBTQ youth. Spanning adoption, foster care, and the systems most frequently referred to as “child protection” and “child welfare”, social services straddle the line between public and private more than any other domain of government. Despite the widespread attention focused on attacking inclusive education and gender-affirming care, battles over the social services predate much of the current moral panic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As usual, the trans news tracker, started as one of those “I wonder if…” projects. Partially inspired by the potential imminent demise of twitter, and having recently started using automation platform IFTTT for tracking the hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills sweeping the country, I wanted to see how easy it would be to create a dashboard that would visualize the discourse in real-time.