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.

Within less than 24 hours, the Trump regime began doing exactly what it promised and enacted an immediate and comprehensive campaign of erasure of transgender people unlike anything in United States history.

Within days, any mention of transgender and nonbinary people was eliminated from government systems, with multiple executive orders demanding the removal and opposition of transgender people in all spheres of life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With the unprecedented onslaught of hateful anti-trans bills and policies waging war on trans youth happening right now, I see a lot of rampant speculation about social transition in school, and an equal number of claims around "clusters of kids" doing the same. Any number of “concerned parents” groups, op-ed columnists and headline-starved science writers are swearing up and down that entire friend groups are suddenly declaring themselves with different names, pronouns and descriptors related to gender and sexual orientation. And for the right-wing, this offers a perfect platform to inject fear into an already hostile climate as they prepare to dismantle every inch of progress made over the past forty or so years.