Which Nightmare Do I Write About Today?

On the cost of paying attention — and the strategy behind making it this hard.

If any of you are readers who also follow me on social media, you may have noticed that I don’t post about specific bills very often anymore.

In the past, I might have posted about several in one day, to rally people to make phone calls or go to hearings to testify. I posted explanations of the language used in different bills, explained where they were in the legislative process, and how they might affect families if they passed.

It isn’t that I don’t care anymore. It isn’t that moving out of the country means I’m not paying attention.

It’s for protection — both mine and yours. Because there are too many to name now, too many to fight, and the hard, ugly truth is that too many will pass — do pass — no matter how hard we fight them.

I still read everything. I still track everything. But at some point I had to make a decision about what I could carry, and what I was doing to the people around me by putting it all on their doorstep every single day.

This week broke me a little. Let me tell you what I was watching.

The Week(s) in Question

Idaho’s governor signed a bathroom bill into law. Not just a bathroom bill — the most extreme in the country. A first offense is a misdemeanor. A second offense within five years is a felony. And under Idaho’s persistent violator statute, a fourth violation — the third felony — carries a mandatory minimum of five years and up to life in prison. Life in prison. For using a bathroom.

And if a trans person was already convicted under another state’s bathroom ban, their first offense in Idaho counts as their second. The escalation clock starts before they ever set foot in the state.

In Tennessee, the state House passed House Bill 754, framed as an insurance fairness measure, but privacy advocates say it functions as something else entirely: a de facto registry. Under the bill, every gender clinic in the state would be required to report to the Department of Health the date of care, the specific medications prescribed including dosage and duration, the patient’s age and biological sex, their county of residence, and their full psychiatric diagnosis history. That data would be published in a public annual report. Advocates warn that in small counties, the level of detail makes individuals identifiable even without a name attached. You don’t need a name when you have everything else.

The Supreme Court blocked California’s law that had prevented schools from automatically disclosing a student’s gender identity to their parents without the student’s consent. California passed that law because research consistently shows that trans youth who are outed to non-affirming families face elevated risks of rejection, abuse, and homelessness. The Supreme Court, in an emergency ruling, set it aside while the case continues. So in California, a state that fought hard for this protection, schools can now out trans students.

Also on March 31 — Transgender Day of Visibility — the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors violates a therapist’s First Amendment rights. The practice — which attempts to change a young person’s sexual orientation or gender identity — has been condemned as harmful and ineffective by every major medical organization in the country. LGBTQ youth subjected to it are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide compared to their peers. The Court did not strike down Colorado’s ban outright, but ruled that it constitutes viewpoint-based regulation of speech and sent it back to a lower court to be reviewed under a higher standard of scrutiny — a standard conversion therapy bans are unlikely to survive. More than 20 states have similar laws. None of them have been struck down yet, but all of them just got significantly harder to defend.

And on April 6th, two days ago, the Department of Education terminated civil rights settlements that previous administrations had reached with five school districts and a college to protect transgender students. Legal experts say this is without precedent — the federal government has never before terminated civil rights settlements it had already reached with schools. One of those districts, in rural Pennsylvania, had already voted to roll back its anti-discrimination protections for trans students after receiving the Trump administration’s letter in February.

Then there was Kentucky. A state senator proposed an amendment that would have effectively classified trans people as mentally ill — using diagnostic language discarded by psychiatry in 2013 — and barred trans teachers from holding certification. It spread everywhere. It alarmed everyone. And then it died, withdrawn before a vote ever happened. Kentucky’s session ended without passing any new anti-LGBTQ+ legislation this year. But here is the thing: I had to look that up to confirm it. I had been carrying the alarm of it without knowing the outcome. That is what this volume does. It is impossible to track not just what passes, but what fails. The fear arrives instantly. The correction travels slower, and quieter, if it travels at all.

And two days before all of that, the International Olympic Committee announced that transgender women will be banned from competing in women’s events at the Olympics, starting with the 2028 Los Angeles Games. The ban is based on mandatory genetic screening — the same SRY gene test that the scientist who discovered the gene in 1990 has publicly said should not be used to determine biological sex. The IOC’s own policy acknowledges that human rights experts, including UN Special Rapporteurs, object to mandatory genetic sex testing on the grounds of privacy, bodily integrity, and informed consent. None of that stopped the policy. Critics have noted the timing — the decision comes ahead of games hosted in the United States, under a president who issued an executive order demanding exactly this outcome. The IOC denied political pressure played a role. Transgender women have competed in exactly one Olympic Games in recorded history. One athlete. No medals.

That’s seven things. In roughly two weeks. And those are just the ones I had the capacity to absorb.

Oh, and in the middle of all of it, we held our collective breath for several days wondering if a military strike would trigger a third world war, or if a nuclear bomb was actually about to be dropped.

Which nightmare do you pay attention to? When every headline is catastrophic, how do you decide which one gets your energy, your phone calls, your presence at a hearing, your words?

This Is Not an Accident

I want to name something clearly, because I think it helps to understand it even when understanding it doesn’t make it easier to bear.

The volume is a strategy. We’ve all been living with this strategy affecting us in real time for the last 14 months.

There is a term in political science — “flooding the zone” — that describes the deliberate tactic of releasing so much damaging news, so many policy changes, so many outrages simultaneously, that no single thing can be tracked, organized against, or held in public attention long enough to generate sustained resistance. When everything is urgent, nothing can be treated as urgent. When everywhere is on fire, you can’t figure out where to aim the hose.

This is not paranoia. It is documented. It is practiced. And it works particularly well against advocates and community members who are already running on depleted reserves, who care deeply about every single person affected by every single bill, and who have nervous systems that were not designed to metabolize this much threat on a continuous basis.

The exhaustion you feel is not a personal failing. It is a predictable human response to an inhuman situation. And it is, at least in part, the intended result.

What It Costs

There’s a name for what sustained exposure to other people’s trauma does to you over time: vicarious trauma, or secondary traumatic stress. Advocates, therapists, journalists, parents of kids in crisis — people who spend their days in close proximity to harm, even when that harm isn’t directly happening to them — can develop symptoms that look a lot like PTSD. Hypervigilance. Difficulty sleeping. A flattening of emotional response, or the opposite: an inability to regulate it. A sense that there is no safe place to put anything down.

If you’ve been following the trans rights movement for any length of time — if you have a trans family member, if you’re a trans person navigating this moment yourself, if you’ve been an ally since before there were this many bills to track — I want you to consider whether any of that sounds familiar.

And I want you to know: it is not weakness. It is the cost of caring in a moment that is designed to make caring unsustainable.

Triage Is Not Abandonment

I’ve had to make peace with something I still find uncomfortable: I cannot track everything, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make me more effective. It makes me less.

Triage is a medical term. It means assessing the urgency of multiple situations simultaneously and making hard decisions about where to direct limited resources, knowing that you cannot treat everyone at once. It does not mean the people you don’t reach first don’t matter. It means you are working within the reality of what is possible.

We are all triaging right now. Every advocate, every parent, every trans person deciding what news to read today and what to scroll past. That’s not disengagement. That’s survival strategy. And survival has value.

What I’ve found is that it helps to pick a lane — not because the other lanes don’t matter, but because depth is more sustainable than breadth when you’re in it for the long haul. Pick the bill that’s in your state. The issue that affects your family most directly. The organization that’s doing the most urgent work where you live. Give that your phone calls and your dollars and your testimony, when you have it to give.

And on the days when you have nothing to give? Rest without guilt. The movement needs you next week, too.

I’m Still Here

I moved my family to Spain. I have a quieter daily life than I did in the middle of America’s most heated legislative sessions. And I still wake up some mornings with that specific weight on my chest that comes from knowing what’s happening and being far away from it. Or I drag myself through the day, exhausted, because I have a habit of listening to the U.S. evening news shows under my pillow overnight resulting in a serious lack of sleep.

I’m not going anywhere. I’m still writing. Still watching. Still saying the things that are true even when they’re hard to say.

But I’ve stopped trying to document every fire. Not because the fires don’t matter. Because the people I’m writing for need more than a list of things to be afraid of. They need someone to help them figure out how to breathe while the world is doing this.

That’s what I’m trying to be.

If you’re struggling right now — if the weight of this week, or this month, or this year has been too much — I see that. I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be okay, because I don’t know that, and you deserve more than false comfort.

What I can tell you is that you are not alone in feeling it. And that the people fighting hardest for trans lives right now — the lawyers, the legislators, the parents, the trans people themselves who keep showing up — they’re still here, too. Tired, grief-stricken, and still here.

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What have you had to stop tracking because there was simply too much? And what did it cost you to make that decision?

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If you know someone who has gone quiet lately — an advocate who used to post constantly, a parent who used to go to every hearing, a trans friend who seems worn down in a way they can't quite name — this essay is for them. Not because it fixes anything. Because it names what's happening, and sometimes that's enough to help someone feel less alone in it.