About

The Trans Data Initiative tracks legislation, litigation, executive action and public spending that affect transgender people in the United States. This site is the public edition of the team's research database. Every page is built from that database by a publisher that copies only fields cleared for publication and checks each release for anything that must stay private before it goes live.

Bills. Legislation is tracked and curated by hand by Liz Saila, in the team's legislative tracking sheets, which record each bill's subject, status and whether it would restrict or protect the rights of transgender people. Bill texts and statuses come from a combination of LegiScan, Open States, GovInfo and, for some states, the legislature's own website. A bill appears here only when we hold its text. Statuses and texts are refreshed as legislatures act; the date at the foot of each page says when the data was last published.

Model legislation and lineage. Bills that share substantial text are grouped into families by n-gram shingle analysis: each bill's text is broken into overlapping eight-word sequences, and bills are compared by the sequences they share. We publish a family only when it links at least three bills, and we trace lineage only for bills that restrict transgender people's rights.

Litigation. The cases tracked are selected by hand by Alejandra Caraballo. Their dockets and court documents come from federal and state court records, pulled from CourtListener and its RECAP archive. Court documents are published as filed. Expert profiles cover only experts retained to defend restrictions.

Federal actions, settlements and organizations. Federal executive actions are logged from agency and White House publications, each linked to its source. Settlements are drawn from the Justice Department's and state attorneys general's own announcements. Organization finances come from the organizations' public IRS filings.

Hearings, polling, spending and the policy atlas. Hearing pages link to the official video; transcripts are not yet published. The polling archive collects published public-opinion surveys with their sponsors and methods. Television ad spending appears only as national yearly totals, under the terms of our data licences. The Trans Policy Atlas draws on Transitics' CATPALM, built by Aleksandra Vaca, and on the team's own research.

Privacy. We name legislators, officials acting in their official capacity, and people and organizations acting publicly for the measures we track. We do not publish the names of members of the public, minors, or private individuals who appear in our records.

Corrections and updates are made in the research database and reach this site with the next release.

We correct errors of fact promptly. If you find a mistake, such as a wrong status, a misattributed document or a broken source link, write to us with the page address and what you believe is wrong, with a source if you have one. We review every request. When we make a substantive correction, the change appears with the next release.

This site is the public edition of the Trans Data Initiative's research database. The full version holds more than is published here, including items still under review and records withheld from the public edition. Researchers, journalists, advocates and others can request access by writing to us with your name, your affiliation and what you would use it for. Access is granted at the discretion of the Trans Data Initiative team.

If a page publishes personal information about a private individual, or something you believe should not be public, write to us with the page address and the reason. We review takedown requests quickly and may take a page offline while we do. A takedown removes the item from this public site; it does not alter court records or other public sources we cite.