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.

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.