Protect Trans Rights and Gender-Affirming Care

Since his first day in office, Trump has been attacking transgender individuals by signing various executive orders to dehumanize and strip them of their rights. Trump and his allies have targeted what they call “Gender Ideology Extremism”, seeking to erase trans and nonbinary people by asserting that males and females “are not changeable,” a viewpoint that ignores extensive scientific evidence. Trump’s numerous executive anti-transgender orders have subsequently paved the way for further federal attacks:

• Trans service members have had benefits revoked after the Supreme Court allowed Trump’s transgender military ban take effect.

• The House voted to ban Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care for trans youth and to ban all gender-affirming care nationwide, making it a felony offense to undergo life-saving treatment

• The Department of HHS proposed new actions that will remove gender dysmorphia as a federally-protected “disability” and block federal funding for any hospital that provides gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Similar medical treatment for cisgender children will still be deemed safe.

• House Republicans have introduced H.R. 7661, the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, to withhold funding from any K-12 school that teaches materials addressing gender or sexuality. Tucked within the bill’s vague language is a essentially nationwide book ban on anything that broadly contains “sexually oriented material.”

• The Federal Bureau of Prisons has begun testing conversion therapy on incarcerated trans people, making no exceptions in spite of “the Constitution’s 8th Amendment (which requires prison systems to provide necessary medical care)” and leading to speculation regarding other human experimentation.

Many states, too, have been attacking trans rights and access to medical care in recent months, with states like Kansas invalidating the government IDs of transgender people, and Ohio prohibiting widely accepted treatment for gender dysphoria—issues that have already been signed into legislation but are now being fought in court.

The White House claims these attacks on transgender people “bring back American values”, but they only serve to uphold pernicious, unjustified, and misogynistic gender norms that harm everyone regardless of gender, dehumanizing the people who do not fit them perfectly. These egregious attempts to demonize and erase transgender people must be resisted.