setbacks

While a joint partnership between Brazilian aerospace company Embraer and L3Harris Technologies to outfit Embraer’s KC-390 Millennium tanker-transport with U.S. systems and a custom refueling boom was formally declared dead late last year, the company is advancing a fresh effort to sell the Millennium to the Air Force.

You can read all about the compelling case for a boom-equipped KC-390 that fits within the Air Force’s emerging battle concept in this past feature.

At the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber conference this week, Embraer displayed a model of the twin jet medium-lift aircraft in full Air Force livery and touted its American-made parts. With more than half the components built in the U.S., including a flight data recorder from L3Harris, and much of the guts, like its V2500-E5 engine’s avionics made by RTX-owned companies, the aircraft is Buy American Act compliant and capable of serving as as a tactical transport or a tanker in the austere environments where the Air Force expects to concentrate significant aspects of its future combat operations. The KC-390 has loosely similar lifting capabilities as the C-130J Super Hercules.

Embraer is also evaluating site locations in the U.S. for a KC-390 manufacturing facility, the company said. It now operates out of nine U.S. locations, including Jacksonville, Florida, where it conducts final assembly for the A-29 Super Tucano.

The KC-390 marks a decade since its first flight this year and now serves 11 international customers, many of them within NATO, Frederico Lemos, chief commercial officer for Defense and Security, told The War Zone. While Embraer has made public overtures to sell a variant of the aircraft to the U.S. Air Force for several years, it’s now touting an additional selling point: a U.S. demonstration tour completed earlier this year, in which the Millennium participated in a spectrum of defense, disaster response, and space-focused events.

“The aircraft showcased its unmatched versatility and readiness to support the U.S. Department of Defense in addressing critical air refueling challenges,” Embraer said in a release distributed at the tradeshow. “Its performance and cargo capacity also make it ideal for rescue missions, space logistics, and special operations.”

Lemos cited one successful test last July in which U.S. and Portuguese airmen at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, conducted a cold-load training – meaning a loading exercise with the engines off – on a KC-390 using a U.S. Army M142 HIMARS launcher. Embraer saw this as not only a validation of the load capacity of the aircraft but also a mission proof-of-concept.

“They’re able to prepare the airfields, deploy the HIMARS, come back to the airplane and move away as fast as possible,” Lemos said. 

Lemos said the KC-390 is capable of taking off on a strip as short as 1,000 meters (3,280 feet). The company also claims the aircraft can be reconfigured for all nine missions it offers – from aerial resupply and aerial assault to special operations, search-and-rescue, and medevac – within three hours. 

It’s not clear if the recent mission demonstration tour has made the Air Force any more interested in investing in the aircraft. For the tanking mission, the service this year reaffirmed its commitment to keeping its KC-135 in service until at least the 2050s, though Air Mobility Command Commander Gen. John Lamontagne said in a Defense One interview that doing so may require a recapitalization program. The yet-to-be-selected Next-Gen Air Refueling System, or NGAS, is ultimately expected to replace the KC-135.

Still Embraer sees daylight to make its case.

“We see that the tanking needs of the U.S. Air Force are there. There’s an aging fleet that is coming to the end of its service life, and the challenges [of] the mission that we see for the future is different from the past. So you need the combination of capabilities. You need strategic tanking, but you also need tactical tanking, and more than that, you need to have assets that can do multiple missions from areas that you don’t have,” he said. “All the logistics and preparedness in terms of airfields that you used to have. You need to operate from remote locations, small islands, small airfields. And the KC-390 fits in that role …So more missions with less assets that are more affordable and with a lower life-cycle cost throughout its life.”

Embraer also touts KC-390’s readiness for the Air Force with its full operational capability status and its contemporary design, with high customizability and open-architecture construction to meet customers needs.

“You can select the mission mode, so the behavior of the aircraft depends on the type of mission,” Lemos said. “You have a lot of connectivity, compatible with the latest generation of fighters … we have ISR that can be used for reconnaissance but also for laser designation and target identification, to be combined with kinetic effects … or to send information to other fighters or other assets in the zone.”

Lemos wouldn’t describe any feedback he’s getting from the Air Force on its Millennium pitch, but he acknowledged modifications would need to be made.

“What we need to do is to listen, from the Air Force, what specific connectivity they would like to add on top of the 390 to make it more interoperable,” he said.

The boom may also make a return. While current product imagery of the KC-390 show drogues, Lemos said earlier this year, according to a Breaking Defense report, that it would be willing to self-fund a refueling boom for an Air Force tanker variant – effectively a necessity, given the number of Air Force planes requiring one – if the service NGAS assessments made space for the possibility of Millennium adoption.

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WASHINGTON — Facing viral rumors of his imminent death, President Trump emerged in the Oval Office on Tuesday alive and scowling. Core tenets of his economic policies were under strain. Flashy diplomatic overtures to Moscow appeared to be backfiring. And a scandal over a notorious sexual abuser that has fixated his base was roaring back to life in Washington.

It was a challenging week for the president, whose aggressive approach to his second term has begun to hit significant roadblocks with the public and the courts, and overseas, with longstanding U.S. adversaries Trump once hoped to coax to his will.

The president called for an expedited Supreme Court review of an appellate court ruling that he had exceeded his authority by issuing sweeping global tariffs last spring — a decision that, if left standing, could upend the foundation of his economic agenda. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued jobs numbers showing a contraction of the labor market in July, a first since the depths of the pandemic in 2020.

New art lining a hallway in the West Wing features photographs of Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, where Trump said the Russian president had agreed to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to discuss an end to the war. Yet, three weeks on, Russia had launched its most intense bombardment of Kyiv in years, and Putin traveled to Beijing for a military parade hosted by Xi Jinping, which Russian state media used to mock the U.S. president.

During an appearance in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon, Trump said reaching a deal to end the war between Russia and Ukraine has turned out to be “a little bit more difficult” than he initially thought.

And a rare spree of bipartisanship broke out on Capitol Hill — in opposition to Trump’s causes.

A tense hearing at the Senate Finance Committee with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laid bare concern over the direction of federal vaccination policy and public health recommendations under his leadership across party lines.

Trump declined to stand behind him wholeheartedly after the hearing. “He’s got some little different ideas,” Trump told reporters, adding: “It’s not your standard talk.”

On Wednesday, moments after a group of more than 100 women pleaded for Trump’s help from the steps of the Capitol seeking transparency over the investigation of their alleged abuser, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump dismissed the matter as a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats.

“The Department of Justice has done its job, they have given everything requested of them,” Trump repeated on Truth Social on Friday. “It’s time to end the Democrat Epstein Hoax.”

Trump was close friends with Epstein for more than a decade. But his base has repeatedly called for the release of thousands of files in his case — and some of Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress are set to vote against his wishes for a discharge petition directing the Justice Department to do so in the coming days.

A far-right political activist released hidden camera footage this week of a Justice Department official claiming the agency would redact the names of Republicans, but not Democrats, identified in the files. In the video, the DOJ official also suggested that Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell was recently moved to a lower-security prison as part of a deal to keep her quiet.

Public support for Trump has appeared stable since July, with roughly 42% of Americans approving of his job performance across a series of high quality polls. But the end of the August recess in Washington — and the oncoming flu and COVID-19 season — could return public attention to subjects that have proved politically perilous for the president this week.

Polls show that a majority of the president’s Republican voters support vaccines. They oppose Putin and increasingly support Ukraine. And across the political spectrum, Americans want the Epstein files released, unredacted and in full.

A string of court losses

The president’s agenda suffered several setbacks this week, as federal judges across the country ruled his administration had broken the law in various instances.

In San Francisco, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of military troops in Los Angeles was illegal and barred soldiers from aiding immigration arrests in California in an order set to take effect next week.

In Boston, a federal judge said the Trump administration broke the law when it froze billions of dollars in research funds awarded to Harvard University. In another court ruling, a judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting dozens of unaccompanied migrant children to Guatemala.

And on Friday afternoon, a federal judge stopped the Trump administration from taking away the deportation protections under Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians living in the United States.

While the court decisions represent a snag for key portions of the administration’s agenda, the cases continue to play out in court — and could ultimately turn in favor of Trump.

Legal experts are closely watching those decisions. In the case of the military troop deployments, for instance, some fear a reversal on appeal could ultimately hand the president broader power to send troops to American cities.

Trump has floated additional federal deployments — to Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans — in recent days.

Trump reacts to a bad week

Trump greeted the waves of bad news with a characteristic mix of deflection, finger-pointing and anger.

He warned that losing his appeal on tariff policy at the Supreme Court would render the United States a “third world country,” telling reporters, “if we don’t win that case, our country is going to suffer so greatly.” And he said he was “very disappointed” in Putin.

After the parade in Beijing — which was also attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a longstanding U.S. ally now ostracized by Trump’s tariffs — drew widespread media attention, Trump wrote on social media that the countries were conspiring together against the United States.

“We’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China,” he wrote.

In another lengthy social media post on Friday, Trump accused Democrats of fueling the Epstein “hoax” as a means to “distract from the great success of a Republican President.”

Days earlier, survivors of Epstein’s sexual abuse publicly pressured lawmakers to back a legislative measure to force the release of the sex trafficking investigation into the late financier.

“This is about ending secrecy wherever abuse of power takes root,” said Anouska De Georgiou, who was among the Epstein victims who held a news conference on Capitol Hill.

A few high-profile Republicans also broke with Trump on the Epstein issue, calling for more transparency on the investigation. Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said she is willing to expose those who are tied to Epstein’s sex trafficking case.

On a phone call with Trump on Wednesday morning, Greene suggested he meet with Epstein’s victims at the White House while they were gathered in town. He was noncommittal, the congresswoman told reporters.

The survivors left town without a meeting. At the direction of the White House, Republican leadership continues to press Republican members to oppose efforts to release the files.

The Trump administration immigration sweeps that have roiled Southern California have shown few signs of slowing despite lawsuits, a court order and growing indications the aggressive actions are not popular with the public.

The operations, which began in early June in the Los Angeles area, largely focused on small-scale targets such as car washes, strip malls and Home Depot parking lots before authorities hit their biggest target last week — two farms for one of the largest cannabis companies in California. One worker died after falling from a greenhouse roof during the raid, while 361 others were arrested.

Responding to the death, President Trump’s chief border policy advisor, Tom Homan, called the situation “sad.”

“It’s obviously unfortunate when there’s deaths,” he told CNN. “No one wants to see people die.”

“He wasn’t in ICE custody,” Homan said. “ICE did not have hands on this person.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said authorities plan to intensify immigration crackdowns thanks to more funding from the recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” spending plan from Congress.

The budget bill infuses roughly $150 billion into Trump’s immigration and border enforcement plans, including funding for ICE and Border Patrol staffing, building and operating immigrant detention facilities, and reimbursing states and local governments for immigration-related costs.

“We’re going to come harder and faster, and we’re going to take these criminals down with even more strength than we ever have before,” Noem said at a news conference over the weekend. Trump, she added, “has a mandate from the American people to clean up our streets, to help make our communities safer.”

But there are some signs that support might be slipping.

A Gallup poll published this month shows that fewer Americans than in June 2024 back strict border enforcement measures and more now favor offering undocumented immigrants living in the country pathways to citizenship. The percentage of respondents who want immigration reduced dropped from 55% in 2024 to 30% in the current poll, reversing a years-long trend of rising immigration concerns.

While the desire for less immigration has declined among all major political parties, the decrease among Republicans was significant — down 40% from last year. Among independents, the preference for less immigration is down 21%, and among Democrats it’s down 12%, according to the poll.

The poll also showed that a record-high 79% of adults consider immigration beneficial to the country and only 17% believe it is a negative, a record low for the poll.

Meanwhile, a Quinnipiac University poll published in June indicates that 38% of voters approve of the way Trump is handling the presidency, while 54% disapprove. On immigration, 54% of those polled disapprove of Trump’s handling of the issue and 56% disapprove of deportations.

At the same time, growing legal challenges have threatened to hamper the Trump administration’s efforts.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, an appointee of President Biden, temporarily blocked federal agents in the Southland from using racial profiling to carry out immigration arrests after she found sufficient evidence that agents were using race, a person’s job or their location, and their language to form “reasonable suspicion” — the legal standard needed to detain an individual.

But the Trump administration vowed to fight back.

“No federal judge has the authority to dictate immigration policy — that authority rests with Congress and the president,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman. “Enforcement operations require careful planning and execution; skills far beyond the purview or jurisdiction of any judge. We expect this gross overstep of judicial authority to be corrected on appeal.”

On Monday, the administration asked a federal appeals court to overturn the judge’s order, allowing it to resume the raids across seven California counties.

Legal experts say it’s hard to say just how successful the federal government will be in getting a stay on the temporary order, given the current political climate.

“This is different from a lot of the other kinds of Trump litigation because the law is so clear in the fact finding by the district court,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “So if you follow basic legal principles, this is a very weak case for the government on appeal, but it’s so hard to predict what will happen because everything is so ideological.”

In the past, legal scholars say, it would be extremely uncommon for an appeals court to weigh in on such an order. But recent events suggest it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing the federal government to deport convicted criminals to “third countries” even if they lack a prior connection to those countries.

That same month, it also ruled 6 to 3 to limit the ability of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders blocking the president’s policies, which was frequently a check on executive power.

Still, it’s not an easy case for the government, said Ahilan Arulanantham, professor of practice and co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law.

“I think one thing which makes this case maybe a little bit harder for the government than some of the other shadow docket cases is it really does affect citizens in an important way,” he said. “Obviously the immigration agent doesn’t know in advance when they come up to somebody whether they’re a citizen or a noncitizen or if they’re lawfully present or not.”

The continued sweeps have resulted in a wave of other lawsuits challenging the Trump administration. Amid the legal battles, there are also signs of upheaval within the federal government.

Reuters reported on Monday that the Justice Department unit charged with defending legal challenges to the administration’s policies, including restricting birthright citizenship, has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff.

The administration has also faced scrutiny from Democrats and activists over its handling of last week’s raids at the marijuana cultivation farms, which were part of a legal and highly regulated industry in California.

“It was disproportionate, overkill,” Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) said of the operation.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles) criticized Trump for targeting immigrant farmworkers as the administration continues to publicly state that its targets are people with criminal records.

“How many MS-13 gang members are waking up at 3 a.m. to pick strawberries? O’yeah, zero! Trump said he’d go after ‘bad hombres,’ but he’s targeting the immigrant farm workers who feed America. Either he lied — or he can’t tell the difference,” Gomez wrote on X.

The White House clapped back in a post on X: “That ain’t produce, holmes. THAT’S PRODUCT.”

Over the weekend, Jaime Alanís Garcia, 57, the cannabis farmworker who was gravely injured after he fell off a roof amid the mayhem of the Camarillo raid, was taken off life support, according to his family.

Alanís’ family said he was fleeing immigration agents at the Glass House Farms cannabis operation in Camarillo on Thursday when he climbed atop a greenhouse and accidentally fell 30 feet, suffering catastrophic injury. The Department of Homeland Security said Alanís was not among those being pursued.

His niece announced his death Saturday on a GoFundMe page, which described him as a husband and father and the family’s sole provider. The page had raised more than $159,000 by Monday afternoon, well over its initial $50,000 goal.

“They took one of our family members. We need justice,” the niece wrote.

Times staff writers Sonja Sharp, Dakota Smith and Jeanette Marantos contributed to this report.

When the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Obergefell vs. Hodges case 10 years ago that same-sex couples have a right to marry nationwide, the sense of triumph was palpable. Celebrations broke out in the streets, and courthouses were flooded with newlyweds.

But that wasn’t the only response.

Opponents of LGBTQ+ rights immediately began implementing new strategies to limit the decision’s reach and reverse the broader momentum toward LGBTQ+ acceptance, including by casting a small, less understood subset of the queer community — transgender people — as a growing threat to American families and values.

“Right after Obergefell, every effort to advance any equality measure was met with an anti-trans backlash,” said Chase Strangio, a transgender attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the nation’s leading voices on LGBTQ+ legal rights.

In statehouses and governors’ mansions across the country, the number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights have increased year after year, with 800 being introduced this year alone. The Trump administration also has embraced the shift, with federal agencies aggressively investigating California and threatening its funding over its trans-inclusive policies. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that states may ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The White House is lighted in rainbow colors in 2015 after the Supreme Court’s ruling to legalize same-sex marriage.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

The strategy has delighted many conservatives. But it has also frightened a community that had seen itself as being on a path toward progress, reviving discussions about the legacy of the Obergefell decision and igniting a fierce debate within the community about the wisdom of its political strategy over the past decade.

Some have questioned whether the efforts since Obergefell to broaden transgender rights were pursued too fast, too soon, playing into the hands of the movement’s political foes. Others say those concerns sound strikingly similar to ones raised during the fight for marriage equality, when some argued that same-sex couples should settle for civil unions to avoid alienating religious moderates.

The conversation is not a comfortable one. Nerves are raw and fear is palpable. Some worry that pointing the finger will further embolden those working to dismantle LGBTQ+ rights. But others argue that a strategic reassessment is necessary after years of setbacks.

“This can be an inflection point for how we move forward — whether we galvanize resources in [an] aligned effort to push back, [or] continue to let ourselves be divided by campaigns and movements and strategies that seek to divide us,” Strangio said. “That’s the real question for this moment.”

The shifting debate

Strangio, now co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, had worked on the Obergefell case and was outside the Supreme Court the day the decision came down. He thought about his younger self, and how impossible such a ruling would have seemed just years before — when state marriage bans were sweeping the country.

But he didn’t have much time to dwell on the victory, he said, as it became clear “within minutes” that anti-LGBTQ+ forces were already regrouping and preparing for the next fight.

One of their first targets was transgender people’s use of public bathrooms. Within months of the Obergefell decision, voters in Houston rejected an anti-discrimination measure after opponents falsely claimed that the ordinance’s gender-identity protections would allow sexual predators to enter women’s bathrooms.

In 2016, North Carolina passed the nation’s first law barring transgender people from using bathrooms aligned with their identities. The measure sparked huge backlash and statewide boycotts, led in part by corporate America — and the bill was rolled back in 2017.

People gather in North Carolina in 2016 to protest the state’s restrictive bathroom bill.

(Emery P. Dalesio / Associated Press)

LGBTQ+ activists were jubilant, viewing North Carolina’s embarrassment as a clear sign that history was on their side and that expanded transgender rights and protections were inevitable. And there would be big wins to come — including the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ+ employees from workplace discrimination nationwide.

However, the tide was already beginning to shift, including as right-wing groups began to identify specific transgender issues that resonated with voters more than bathrooms, and as Trump — in his first term — began taking aim at transgender rights.

Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said his organization “poll tested all of these issues, the bathrooms, the showers, the locker rooms,” and found that many were “incredibly unpopular to voters” — but some more than others.

One of the issues that resonated the most, Schilling said, was kids’ healthcare and competition in girls sports. So his group ran with that, including in the 2019 race for governor in Kentucky, when it ran an ad suggesting the Democratic candidate and ultimate victor — Andy Beshear — supported boys competing in girls’ wrestling competitions, when in fact Beshear supported policies barring discrimination based on kids’ gender identity.

Schilling said it was “the left’s insistence that we need to start trans’ing kids” that made the issue a political one. But his group’s strategy in Kentucky helped wake conservatives up to the political value of highlighting it.

“We’re really just tapping into a real vulnerability that Democrats started for themselves,” Schilling said.

Trump had pursued various anti-transgender policies during his first term, including a ban on transgender service members. But during his campaign for reelection, he centered transgender issues like never before, dumping millions of dollars into anti-transgender ads that cast his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as an extreme progressive on such issues.

“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you,” one ad said.

Once in office, Trump moved even more aggressively against transgender rights than the community had feared — prompting various lawsuits from LGBTQ+ organizations that are still pending.

He issued an executive order declaring there are only two genders, and suggesting transgender people don’t actually exist. He again banned transgender people from serving in the military. He threatened the funding of states such as California with trans-inclusive school policies. He ordered transgender athletes out of youth sports. He said federal law enforcement would target those who provide gender-affirming care to minors. And his administration said it would stop providing transgender people with passports reflecting their identities.

President Trump signs an executive order in February banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.

(Jabin Botsford / Washington Post via Getty Images)

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the American people “voted for a return to common sense,” and Trump was “delivering on every campaign promise.”

“President Trump’s historic reelection and the overall MAGA movement is a big tent welcome for all and home to a large swath of the American people,” Fields said.

From offense to defense

Reggie Greer, who served as a senior advisor on LGBTQI+ Persons at the State Department in the Biden administration, remembers being in North Carolina during the 2016 bathroom bill fight. While local Democrats were pleased with how it had backfired on Republicans, it was clear to him that “hate is lucrative,” Greer said — with the anti-rights groups raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

He now sees the episode as an early warning of what was to come.

Nick Hutchins handled public affairs around the Obergefell case before joining the Human Rights Campaign, where he worked on state affairs and communications. Traveling through conservative states, he watched as more Republicans began seizing on LGBTQ+ issues after Trump’s 2016 victory.

“It was a moment when Republicans saw an opening and wanted to chip away at LGBTQ rights in any way they could,” Hutchins said. “That’s where you began to see a spaghetti-against-the-wall approach from their end, pursuing the bathroom bills that evolved into various education-focused bills, and healthcare.”

Inside the HRC during Trump’s first term, leadership felt confident that public opinion remained on their side. LGBTQ+ rights organizations had secured victories in statehouses on bathroom and healthcare issues, and were buoyed by Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020.

Yet, several warning signs emerged. Internal state polling by the HRC found large majorities of Americans supported trans rights, but a plurality opposed allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports.

One former HRC staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the organization had not paid much attention to the issue until a series of political attacks in conservative states. The governor’s race in Kentucky was one, followed by a statehouse push in Louisiana.

Still, other battles — including “confronting whiteness in the movement” — took precedent, the former staffer recalled.

“There were significant generational divides within the organization between the older teams and their younger staff that were more diverse on these issues,” the staffer said. “It was a distraction.”

Hutchins said LGBTQ+ organizations today are having “autopsy conversations” to take stock of how things have played out in recent years and identify lessons to be learned.

Leaders look ahead

Among the most prominent leaders of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, there is consensus on many things.

It’s a scary time for LGBTQ+ people and other vulnerable groups, including immigrants and women. Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. The LGBTQ+ rights movement needs more resources to continue fighting back. Nobody is going to throw transgender people under the bus just because some Democrats have suggested it would help them rebound politically.

“No one person, no one community, is expendable. End of story,” said Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the marriage case.

The actor Laverne Cox, one of the most recognizable transgender women in the country, said the marriage victory in 2015 left the right in need of “a new boogeyman,” and they picked transgender people — a tiny portion of the U.S. population, at around 1%.

They further picked on transgender people in sports — an even tinier group — in order to focus the conversation on “hormones and physical ability,” which is “a great way to objectify trans people, to reduce us to our bodies, and thus dehumanize us,” Cox said.

The best way to fight back, she said, is to refocus the conversation on transgender people’s humanity by allowing them to tell their own stories — rather than allowing their narratives to be “hijacked by propaganda.”

The actor Laverne Cox, shown in April, said trans people should be able to tell their own stories.

(Andy Kropa / Invision / Associated Press)

“We’re just like everybody else in terms of what we want, need, desire, our hopes and fears,” she said. “Living authentically and being able to be oneself is where the focus should be.”

Evan Wolfson, an attorney and founder of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, which is widely credited with securing the 2015 victory in the Obergefell case, said there are “three significant factors” that got the country to where it is today on transgender issues.

The “most important factor by far,” he said, “is the right-wing attack machine and the political agenda of some who are trying to attack and scapegoat and divide” the country around transgender issues.

A second factor, he said, is that transgender identities are still a “relatively new” concept for many Americans, and “that conversation is just not as far along as the very long conversation about who gay people are.”

A third and far less significant factor, he said, are the “missteps” by LGBTQ+ advocates in the last decade, including some vocally renouncing anyone who is not 100% supportive of trans rights.

“We worked hard in the Freedom to Marry campaign to bring people along and to distinguish between those who were our true opponents, those who were really anti-gay, anti-rights, anti-inclusion on the one hand, and those who I called the ‘reachable but not yet reached’ — people who weren’t with us, but weren’t our true opponents, people who were still wrestling with the question,” Wolfson said.

Allowing people a bit more time and space to be brought along on transgender issues will be necessary moving forward, he said — though he stressed that does not mean that advocates should slow down or pull back.

Wolfson rejected the idea that the LGBTQ+ community is moving too fast on transgender rights, which was also argued about marriage, and the idea that transgender rights should be abandoned as a political liability. “There is no reason to believe that we would profit from selling out our principles and doing the wrong thing just to avoid this tough moment,” Wolfson said.

Strangio said the fight for LGBTQ+ rights today cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and that zooming out, “there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about basic constitutional principles and civil rights protections” for all sorts of vulnerable people under the Trump administration.

Still, he said, he believes in the queer community’s “ability to move through setbacks” and come out on ahead of the “billion-dollar global campaigns to undermine equality protections” that began after the Obergefell decision.

“Fighting back was the right course,” he said, “and continuing to assess how we can effectively build support for the entire community is going to be a critical part of this next decade.”