Evidence as Survival

How to write trans advocacy that outlasts the news cycle

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Originally published on Medium for consideration as a speaker at Medium Day 2026.

When you are the subject of the disinformation, source-first writing is the only armor that holds. The other kind, the heartfelt kind, the lived-experience kind unaccompanied by a citation chain, gets eaten alive by a hostile committee staffer in about ninety seconds. I know. I have watched it happen. I used to write the heartfelt kind myself.

I’m a 60-year-old transgender woman in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I came out at 53. I publish on Medium and Substack about trans identity, biological sex, health informatics, federal counterterrorism policy, theology, and the slow procedural machinery that converts a culture-war slogan into a state-code revision. My pieces sometimes run 15,000 to 20,000 words. They get cited by attorneys filing amicus briefs, journalists covering bills nobody else is covering, and committee staffers writing memos for legislators who haven’t read the actual text of what they are voting on.

I want to tell you what I do, why I do it that way, and what I want to teach at Medium Day this September.

The problem

The phrase “gender ideology” was coined in the 1980s by Vatican intellectuals, refined through European and Latin American conservative networks across the 1990s and 2000s, and imported into American politics by organizations whose annual budgets run past $100 million. By the time it lands on cable news as a fact about you, it has been moving through institutional channels for forty years. It arrives with footnotes. The footnotes are bad, but they are there.

Most advocacy writing on the other side does not arrive with footnotes. It arrives with feeling. The feeling is real, justified, and will not survive contact with a 47-page committee report. This isn’t a moral failure of the advocacy writer. It is a structural mismatch. One side is doing citations, and the other side is doing testimony, and committee staffers, federal program officers, and state legislators read citations.

The other side has built infrastructure. I built the infrastructure back.

The pipeline

I run a set of custom scripts that pull from federal databases, state legislative trackers, peer-reviewed journals, agency budget documents, court filings, and news archives twenty-four hours a day. Overnight, the scripts collect. When I wake up, the morning’s raw material is already on disk. I sorted it. I read it. I write about it.

This sounds more glamorous than it is. Originally, the scripts were not AI. They were scrapers, RSS aggregators, and a small library of regex patterns that flagged the kind of language I have learned to look for. I added Claude Cowork & Claude Code to my workflow earlier this year. I’m still running both systems side by side, and sometimes Claude will find what my scripts didn’t. I’ll take the advantages where I can get them. The infrastructure is unglamorous. The discipline that uses it is the thing.

The discipline runs in five parts.

Source before sentence

I do not write a paragraph until the citation for it exists on my desk. This isn’t a virtue. It’s a defense. The first time you publish a piece on a bill and a hostile reader emails to say your claim is wrong, you need to be able to send back, the same hour, the Senate Judiciary Committee report page number that proves you right. The reader won’t apologize. That was never the point. The point is that the next hostile reader, watching the exchange, learns that you can’t be moved by bluster. After enough of those, the bluster stops arriving. Source-first writing is a long game, and the long game is reputational armor.

Authority in the clause

I do not write “studies show.” I write the name of the source, the year, and the sample size, inside the sentence. The 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey reports 92,329 respondents. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that 30 percent of trans adults have experienced homelessness at some point. The 2024 study by Lee and colleagues in Nature Human Behaviour, using a difference-in-differences design across 35,196 transgender and nonbinary young people aged 13 to 17, found up to a 72 percent increase in past-year suicide attempts in states that enacted anti-trans laws.

A hostile reader can’t dismiss the Williams Institute without dismissing UCLA, and they can’t dismiss Nature Human Behaviour without dismissing a Nature title. They will sometimes try. They look worse when they try than when you cite the source casually. Put the credential inside the sentence so it carries the weight.

Doors, not one building

A 15,000-word policy analysis is not how most people read. I know that. So every long piece gets distilled, in the same week, into three shorter versions. A 2,000-word summary article for outlets that can carry a longer piece. A 1,000-word breakdown for platforms that want substance without scale. A 500-word post for social. Each tier links back to the full piece. Each tier is sourced as cleanly as the full piece.

This is the move I am proudest of; the math underneath it is honest. A reader who came in through a 500-word Threads post and a reader who came in through a 22,000-word footnoted research article are the same reader at different doors. The work is built to receive both.

Take the opponent’s strongest slogan.

“Parental rights” is a phrase that means parents have the right to make medical decisions for their children. The bans on gender-affirming care for adolescents remove that right. The phrase, used honestly, is a phrase that condemns the bans. I write the piece that uses the phrase honestly, in front of the readers for whom the phrase still means what it used to mean.

“Big Government.” “Biological truth.” “Common sense.” Every one of these has a structural reframe inside it, waiting for somebody willing to write the piece that puts the slogan back on its actual referent. The unconvinced reader is moved by the reframe in a way no amount of moral assertion will move them. The reframe has the advantage of being true.

The personal stake comes last

If the first thing the reader meets is your body, the citation chain has to do twice the work to earn back the ground. The personal stake earns the most when it shows up after the case has already been carried by the evidence. The unconvinced reader doesn’t yet trust your lived experience. They’ll trust it more after they have watched you handle eighteen federal documents without flinching.

So the structure goes evidence, evidence, evidence, then the writer’s body, then the close. The close is short.

What it’s for

In December 2025, Attorney General Pamela Bondi issued an implementing memorandum to federal prosecutors and the FBI on National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. The administration’s FY27 budget request, submitted April 4, 2026, asked Congress for $166.1 million to fund what the document calls the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center. The budget language describes the work in four verbs.

Map. Identify. Cripple. Neutralize.

The criteria the JMC will use to map and identify, written into appropriations language, include “extremism on migration, race, and gender.” The category includes writers, advocates, and trans Americans whose public output, by the framework’s own taxonomy, marks us as targets of the proactive surveillance the $166.1 million is for.

Read that paragraph again.

The federal government has put four verbs and a dollar figure on a workflow that aims at people in the category I belong to. The verbs are the policy. The dollar figure is the appropriation. A footnote doesn’t stop a federal budget. A footnote slows down the conversion of the budget into a precedent that survives the next administration. A footnote earns the next reporter, the next staffer, the next judge a place to stand.

The stake

I’m writing this from Sioux Falls, which is where I live, and where, in early 2026, the state legislature passed HB 1184 by a House vote of 57 to 9 and a Senate Judiciary Committee vote of 7 to 0. The bill codifies biological essentialism into multiple chapters of state code. The South Dakota Supreme Court ruled in March 2026 that trans people cannot alter the sex marker on their birth certificate. Lucky for me, I was born in Minnesota where my birth certificate is safe, but my existence is no less under threat.

I have Type 1 diabetes, weekly estradiol injections, and a small set of girlfriends who let me know when it’s safe to be in a public space. I came out at 53. I do not get those thirty years back. What I can do is be honest about them on the page, and put the honesty on a citation rail strong enough that the next person who tries to dismiss the testimony has to dismiss the apparatus around it first.

Map. Identify. Cripple. Neutralize. The verbs are the policy. The footnotes are the answer. Not the only answer. The answer that survives the news cycle.

What I want to teach

At Medium Day 2026, in the Identity and Social Justice slot of the Perspectives track, I want to walk attendees through the workflow. The aggregator setup, the source-first paragraph discipline, the tiered distillation, the slogan reframe, the placement of the personal stake. I want attendees to leave with a working version of what I do, scaled to whatever advocacy they are already trying to write. Not the trans-rights version. The methodology underneath it, which travels to any beat where the disinformation has a citation chain attached.

If you write about climate, public health, criminal justice, disability, immigration, or any other beat where the bad-faith framing is funded and footnoted, this workflow is for you. If you write about the beat you are the subject of, this workflow may be the thing that lets you keep writing.

The scripts are running. So am I.

Author Note:

Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA and PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She corrects all her papers and articles with Grammarly, because even though she has deep thoughts, she has shallow patience for punctuation. She uses Anthropic’s Claude in Research mode for source location and verification on cited factual claims; all interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.