Editor's Note:
This story has updated for timeliness and republished.
Trans community leaders, activists, and experts warn that President Donald Trump’s hostile anti-trans executive orders will snowball into an avalanche of consequences for trans and cisgender people alike.
The deluge of draconian anti-trans measures started on Trump’s first day in office when he signed the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order, which aims to validate strictly two sexes: male and female. One week later, he issued four more executive orders pertaining to the military, one of which, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” bars trans people from enlisting and serving. The following day, he signed “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” an additional anti-trans executive order was signed, aimed to restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender children and teens under 19. Another executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” was issued targeting inclusive curriculum and threatens to punish public school employees who affirm their LGBTQ+ students.
Despite the outrage and fear felt across the trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming communities, they have braced for this possibility during the 2024 election cycle. On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to challenge “radical gender ideology,” alluding to trans and gender-expansive people. Mere weeks after his victory against Democratic nominee then-Vice President Kamala Harris — Trump made his next step clear. “With a stroke of my pen on day one, we are going to end the transgender lunacy,” he said bluntly to an applauding crowd during a speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference for right-wing students.
‘Biological truths’ propaganda perpetuates harms
Trump’s slew of executive orders are part of “a propaganda campaign that appeals to the general public” and a mere taste of the road ahead, said Cathy Renna, communications director of the National LGBTQ Task Force. Trump’s executive order enforcing a sex binary has been painted as a return to “biological truths,” which flies in the face of established evidence. The intersex community has continuously stressed external sex anatomy, internal reproductive organs, hormones, and chromosomes have never always perfectly fallen within either “male” or “female” categories. Four days before Trump took office, President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services published a trailblazing report on the existence and health-related challenges faced by intersex individuals in the country, highlighting that more than 5 million intersex people in the U.S. were born with varying sex characteristics or reproductive anatomy.
Meanwhile, Trump’s legally-challenged directive to prohibit gender-affirming health care for people younger than 19 preempts the U.S. Supreme Court’s highly anticipated ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti — a landmark case for not only trans health care, but the constitutionality of gender-expansive people at large. Trump’s executive order also threatens to criminalize families who flee to sanctuary and safe-haven states which previously established protection for those seeking refuge from their hostile home states.
Even the executive order depicting gender-affirming health care as “surgical mutilation” doubles down on an already-debunked misconception that young people accessing trans-related health care is untested and experimental rather than scientifically backed and carefully approached by trained physicians and mental health experts. In actuality, access to puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is only available to a small percentage of the trans community, according to a recent peer-reviewed study from researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, and FOLX Health.
Despite what science, community testimony, and research convey, none of it seems to bear significance to the right-wing agenda.
“Yes, not knowing — really deeply knowing — people who are trans is preventing us from progress, but actually, it’s really about people not knowing themselves and recognizing that deeply ingrained sexism and misogyny are holding us back,” Renna said. “We have to look at our own stuff, because it’s deep in the soil.”
Oklahoma a prologue of times to come
The state of Oklahoma leads the nation in the number of anti-trans measures proposed — 60 last year alone — it is a harbinger of things to come.
The state was home to Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary teen, who was brutally beaten last year inside a Owasso High School’s bathroom and died the next day. Their death spoke to trans youths’ vulnerability in the current political climate.
Nationally, 670 anti-trans bills were introduced at the state legislative level last year, dwarfing the 143 introduced in 2021, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker.
In the wake of Benedict’s death, and in a moment where threats are increasingly compounding, trans advocacy groups in Oklahoma have come up with innovative community organizing and engagement efforts such as scholarships, virtual community groups, and educational sessions. Freedom Oklahoma, a statewide political advocacy group for LGBTQ+ people led by executive director Nicole McAfee, is one of such organizations. Community groups are working to expand more direct service support through mutual aid grants.
Unintended consequences signal ‘dark times’ ahead
Anti-trans policies have a broad reach, experts and activists said.
Contrary to right-wing rhetoric, gender-affirming surgeries for minors are almost always performed for cisgender youth, according to a study published last year in the online Journal of the American Medical Association network. The study took a cross-section of U.S. medical data from 2019 to examine the overall rates of gender-affirming surgeries, both with and without a gender dysphoria diagnosis that year. Researchers found that about 97% of surgeries were chest reduction surgeries, performed on cis male youth.
“Gender-affirming care reaches far outside of the trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming communities,” said Toni-Michelle Williams, executive director of Solutions NOT Punishment Collaborative (SnapCo.), a Black trans and queer-led organization. “Cis women utilize hormone replacement therapy for a slew of critical medical purposes.”
As anti-trans rhetoric becomes increasingly toxic, cisgender women athletes of color, including Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, to South African runner Caster Semenya, and even the legendary American tennis sister-duo Venus and Serena Williams, have faced scrutiny over their gender. This is especially the case for Black female athletes, who already battle racist stereotypes that hypermasculinize them.
“At a very base level, anti-trans policies feed into a harmful rhetoric that begins to limit our views on gender and enables these more limited definitions that will and have inevitably also harmed cis people,” SnapCo.’s Williams said.
In the meantime, the trans community is preparing.
In November, SnapCo. partnered with the nonprofit Trans SOCIAL and hosted a passport clinic in Atlanta. As a result, 136 trans and nonbinary people secured their gender-affirming passports needed to travel more safely.
“[Identification is] critical to our ability to obtain housing, jobs, and to navigate the world around us without immense fear,” Williams said.
For Aaryn Lang, a Midwest-based consultant and former organizer focused on the Black trans community, “it’s a dark time.”
“We can’t afford to wait this out for four years,” she said. “We don’t have four years to survive this.”
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