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.

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.