When I published the first issue of Well Beings News in early May 2025 to a basically empty email list, I already had the word. I just couldn't make myself write it. I'd been reporting on LGBTQ+ health for a decade. I knew what I was looking at. But genocide is the kind of word that, the moment you use it, it changes you — not just in the eyes of readers, for whom I might have become someone not to be taken seriously, but for myself. It would mean becoming someone living through a genocide of my own people.

A year later, we have 220 subscribers. Well Beings News has published 52 news roundups, 24 reported stories, and 40+ column installations. I've created multiple premium downloadable resources and earned just under $2000 USD from memberships and donations — enough to keep the lights on. We are creeping closer to sustainability, a goal for which I will be running an intense new subscriber marketing campaign in May and June, followed by a celebratory paid membership drive in July.

This is not a greatest-hits column. It's a chronicle of how the year came at us, and the company I kept while writing through it.

I started publishing into a world already feeling hostile. I had failed to gain a grant for another project I'd hoped to launch, one focused on queer trans love and joy. Executive Order 14187 had been on the books since January, calling our care "mutilation." On May 1, HHS released its 400-page report claiming gender-affirming care for minors lacked evidence — authored, we'd later learn, by anti-trans activists. By the time I published The LGBTQ+ Health Data Gap is Widening on May 15, federal data infrastructure for LGBTQ+ populations was already being dismantled.

Then, on June 18, the Supreme Court handed down Skrmetti. I launched Queer in Practice that week with Dr. Syd Young, a nonbinary physical therapist in Austin, on radical safety, on refusing to compromise our spaces for bigots, and forging community despite every attempt to tear us down. Two weeks later came the first Peer Reviewed column: sociologist Willow Sipling on SOGICE on conversion therapy, which the same lawmakers were now promoting as a "less invasive alternative" in the wake of the care ban Skrmetti had just upheld.

June was a wildly nourishing month for me. I celebrated Pride with an incredible group of friends. I had the best birthday party I have ever thrown, and my heart was absolutely overflowing with queer joy. I hold that joy so close to my spirit these days. "I can be so brave for this," I told myself then.

And I have been.

And I will be.

In June, I reported No Safe Space, braiding two threads I hadn't expected to belong together. On one side: Sammy, a Ugandan trans woman displaced to South Sudan. On the other: dozen of trans Americans on Reddit calculating whether they could afford to leave. Some of them became part of the 400,000 trans people who relocated after Trump's second inauguration.

In July, Ohio made it nearly impossible for trans people to access mental health care on Medicaid. And later that month, I sat with Dr. Sean Arayasirikul, who had lost four major NIH grants — including the first training program ever focused on trans population health — to administration cuts. The people best equipped to produce the evidence anti-trans lawmakers claimed to want were the first to lose their funding.

Leaves fall. And so do empires.

In August, I published X Files: the Nonbinary Struggle with Healthcare Data Software, which wasn't really about software — it was about how the architecture of the systems that hold us already encoded the assumption that we don't exist. By November, that architecture would be weaponized into formal federal policy: the administration ordered cancer registries to drop trans options from sex categorization, effectively erasing trans patients from cancer surveillance data.

In late September, I interviewed Lasara Firefox Allen, who had built the first known gender-affirming menopause care certification program out of pocket: 6 Million Genderqueer People Face Menopause Without Adequate Healthcare. I saw in them my own experience of perimenopause, bringing on new questions about gender. Stories of medication shortages began to hit my feeds, impacting cis and trans people alike.

The administration was running a single play with two hands: demand better evidence, defund the means to produce it. In November, I published Research in Crisis with psychologist Luke Allen, who spent an unfunded year deliberately replicating his own 2019 study on hormone therapy and suicidality.

In December, I sat with Nicole Gress for Speaking for Ourselves. Gress had quit both her clinical jobs in 2020 after realizing her patients were teaching her techniques from YouTube creators who'd given up on the medical system.

That same month, the HHS report's nine authors were finally named — confirmed paid opponents of the care they'd been asked to evaluate, affiliated with SEGM, the Manhattan Institute, and groups the SPLC has classified as anti-LGBTQ hate organizations.

In January, I had the great pleasure of being able to speak at the Oaxaca Lending Library about gender dysphoria. My YouTube video of the talk doesn't quite capture the energy and joy of being able to share this work in front of a live audience, or the horror and pain of speaking publicly about a genocide happening to people I know and love.

On February 27, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a legal opinion making any therapist who affirmed a trans youth subject to license revocation, loss of Medicaid, and potential child abuse charges. In mid-March, I published Texas Therapy Rooms Set to Become Crime Scenes. And I knew that I had to keep saying the word. A week later, I published Reclaiming Transsexuality in Trans Genocide.

I'm not naive about how that word lands. Genocide. I know there are people who will close the tab the moment they see it, and people who will read the rest of the piece looking for evidence that I'm being hysterical, and people who will simply roll their eyes. There are days when I wonder if writing any of this matters — whether documenting a thing while it's being done makes any difference at all, if there really is a way to help, to make health and wellness care better for queer and trans people, to fight against what some days feels like an inevitability of rising fascism. Whether I'm just keeping records for a future no one will even be around to read.

But I keep going because the people in this archive keep going. Because you keep going. I am still here, in a year that has tried to convince me over and over of the futility of this fight, because you, my reader, and each of my sources over these last twelve months have shown me what it means to persist and resist.

Thank you, all of you, for sticking with me.