When I first wrote Anatomy of a moral panic in February 2024, I had only a faint glimmer of what was to come.The astronomical rise in stories about trans people that I’d collected over the previous year told a different story. This massive, messy dataset I had collected was brimming with increasingly vile discussions that only seemed to metastasize with time. 2023 was nothing compared to 2024, and 2025 showed no signs of slowing down. Two years later we know how the story turns out.