For my honors thesis, I followed a transgender high school athlete in New Hampshire over more than a year, tracing how anti-trans legislation shapes adolescent health and development in real time, not in the abstract. I combined in-depth interviews with her, her family, and her support network with an analysis of legislative bills, testimony, court filings, and multi-year national policy datasets, then tested her individual story against population-level research in public health and developmental science using thematic coding, assessing if I could connect what I was hearing on the ground with the broader pattern, and where it diverged. I trained in trauma-informed interviewing practices specific to working with minors and trans communities before starting fieldwork.

Context

Duration: longitudinal, spanning over a year of reporting alongside coursework
Format: long-form nonfiction narrative