SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed legislation to study inequalities in youth sports, a move likely to draw ire from Republicans who believe the measure is intended to support transgender athletes.
The legislation, Assembly Bill 749, creates a commission to examine whether a new state board or department is needed to improve access to sports regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, income or geographic location.
In an open letter last month to the governor, Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R-Santee) zeroed in on the term “gender identity.”
“The author and supporters of [this legislation] know if they were upfront and put forth a straightforward bill allowing biological males to compete against young women and girls, it would be easily defeated,” Jones wrote on Sept. 26. “So instead they are trying to establish a stacked commission to indirectly rig the issue in their favor.”
Jones urged Newsom to veto the bill and referenced the governor’s previous remarks about transgender athletes. During the first episode of his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom,” the governor — a longtime ally of the LGBTQ+ community — acknowledged the struggle faced by transgender people but called transgender women’s participation in women’s sports “deeply unfair” and warned it was hurting Democrats at the polls.
Assemblymember Tina S. McKinnor, who introduced the bill, said Jones should keep his focus on Washington.
“Senator Brian Jones’ time would be better spent writing to the Republican controlled Congress to end the Trump Shutdown and reopen the federal government, rather than attacking trans students,” McKinnor (D-Hawthorne) wrote in an email to The Times.
Legislation referencing gender identity tends to be a lightning rod for controversy nationwide, with opinion polls suggesting Americans hold complex views on transgender issues.
A survey conducted this year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found 66% of U.S. adults favor laws requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth. At the same time, 56% of adults supported policies protecting transgender people from discrimination in jobs and public spaces.
During legislative committee hearings on the bill, McKinnor focused on the legislation’s potential racial impact. She said last year’s Play Equity Report found 59% of white youth participated in structured sports programs, compared with 47% of Black youth and 45% of Latino youth.
“Participation in youth sports remains unequal despite the well-documented physical, mental and academic benefits,” McKinnor told the Senate Health Committee in July. “These disparities stem from systemic barriers such as financial limitations, uneven program quality, outdated physical education standards and the lack of a coordinated statewide strategy.”
More than two dozen organizations endorsed the bill, including the Los Angeles Rams, city of San Diego, USC Schwarzenegger Institute, YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles and the Boys and Girls Clubs of West San Gabriel Valley and Eastside.
The legislation directs the state public health officer to convene the commission, which will be composed of 10 members appointed by the governor and three appointed by each the speaker of the Assembly and the Senate Committee on Rules. The health officer will also sit on the panel, or appoint their own designee.
Newsom did not issue a statement when his office announced a slate of bills he signed on Monday.
In March, Newsom infuriated the progressive wing of his party when, while hosting conservatives commentator Charlie Kirk on the governor’s podcast, he broke away from many Democrats on the issue of transgender athletes. Newsom, an outspoken champion of LGBTQ+ rights since he was mayor of San Francisco, publicly criticized the “unfairness” of transgender athletes participating in women’s sports.
San Diego City Councilmember Marni von Wilpert doesn’t generally agree with political parties redrawing congressional maps to gain power.
But after President Trump persuaded Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redraw his state’s maps in order to improve Republican chances of retaining control of Congress in 2026, Von Wilpert said she decided California’s only option was to fight back with new maps of its own, favoring Democrats.
There’s too much at stake for LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized Californians to do otherwise, said Von Wilpert — who is bisexual and running to unseat Republican incumbent Rep. Darrell Issa, a Trump ally whose district in San Diego and Riverside counties will be redrawn if voters approve the plan.
“We can’t sit on the sidelines anymore and just hope that the far right will play fair or play by the rule book,” said Von Wilpert, 42. “If we don’t fight back now, I don’t know what democracy is going to be left for us to fight for in the future.”
San Diego City Councilmember Marni von Wilpert is challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Darrell Issa, whose Southern California district would be redrawn if voters approve the redistricting plan of California Democrats.
They are running to counter those efforts, but also to resist other administration policies that they believe threaten democracy and equality more broadly, and to advocate around local issues that are important to them and their neighbors, said Elliot Imse, executive director of the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute.
The institute, which has trained queer people on running for and holding political office since 1991, has already provided 450 people with in-person training so far this year, compared with 290 people all of last year, Imse said. It recently had to cap a training in Los Angeles at 54 people — its largest cohort in more than a decade — and a first-of-its-kind training for transgender candidates at 12 people, despite more than 50 applying.
“LGBTQ+ people have been extremely motivated to run for office across the country because of the attacks on their equality,” Imse said. “They know the risk, they know the potential for harassment, but those fears are really overcome by the desire to make a difference in this moment.”
“This isn’t about screaming we are trans, this is about screaming we are human — and showing that we are here, that we are competent leaders,” said Josie Caballero, voting and elections director at Advocates for Trans Equality, which helped run the training.
Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) at the DC Blockchain Summit in Washington on March 26, 2025. The summit brings together policymakers and influencers to discuss important issues facing the crypto industry.
(Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Across the country
Queer candidates still face stiff resistance in some parts of the country. But they are winning elections elsewhere like never before — Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware became the first out transgender member of Congress last year — and increasingly deciding to run.
Some are Republicans who support Trump and credit him with kicking open the political door for people like them by installing gay leaders in his administration, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Ed Williams, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, an LGBTQ+ organization, said his group has seen “a surge in interest” under Trump, with “new members and chapters springing up across the country.” He said that “LGBT conservatives stand with President Trump’s fight for commonsense policies that support our schools and parents, put America first, and create opportunities for all Americans.”
Ryan Sheridan, 35, a gay psychiatric nurse practitioner challenging fellow Republican incumbent Rep. Ann Wagner for her House seat in Missouri, said Trump has made the Republican Party a “more welcoming environment” for gay people. He said he agrees with Trump that medical interventions for transgender youth should be stopped, but also believes others in the LGBTQ+ community misunderstand the president’s perspective.
“I do not believe that he is anti-trans. I do not believe he is anti-gay,” Sheridan said. “I understand the fear might be real, but I would encourage anybody that is deeply fearful to explore some alternative points of view.”
Many more LGBTQ+ candidates, however, are Democrats or progressives — and say they were driven to run in part by their disdain for Trump and his policies.
LGBTQ+ candidates and prospective candidates listen to speakers at an LGBTQ+ Victory Institute training in downtown Los Angeles in September.
(David Butow / For The Times)
JoAnna Mendoza, a bisexual retired U.S. Marine, said she is running to unseat Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) because she took an oath to defend the U.S. and its values, and she believes those values are under threat from an administration with no respect for LGBTQ+ service members, immigrants or other vulnerable groups.
Mike Simmons, the first out LGBTQ+ state senator in Illinois, is running for the House seat of retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and leaning into his outsider persona as a gay Black man and the son of an Ethiopian asylum seeker. “I symbolize everything Donald Trump is trying to erase.”
Texas state Rep. Jolanda Jones, who is a lesbian, said she is running for the House seat of the late Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas), in a historically Black district being redrawn in Houston, because she believes “we need more gay people — but specifically Black gay people — to run and be in a position to challenge Trump.”
Colorado state Rep. Brianna Titone, who is running for Colorado treasurer, said it is critical for LGBTQ+ people — especially transgender people like her — to run, including locally. Trump is looking for ways to attack blue state economies, she said, and queer people need to help ensure resistance strategies don’t include abandoning LGBTQ+ rights.
“We’re going to be extorted, and our economy is going to suffer for that, and we’re going to have to withstand that,” she said.
Rep. Brianna Titone speaks during the general assembly at the Colorado State Capitol on April 23, 2025.
(AAron Ontiveroz / Denver Post via Getty Images)
Jordan Wood, who is gay, served as chief of staff to former Rep. Katie Porter of Orange County before co-founding the Constitution-backing organization democracyFIRST. He’s now back in his native Maine challenging centrist Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.
Collins, who declined to comment, has supported LGBTQ+ rights in the past, including in military service and marriage, and has at times broken with her party to stand in Trump’s way. However, Wood said Collins has acquiesced to Trump’s autocratic policies, including in recent budget battles.
“This is a moment with our country in crisis where we need our political leaders to pick sides and to stand up to this administration and its lawlessness,” Wood said.
Candidates said they’ve had hateful and threatening comments directed toward them because of their identities, and tough conversations with their families about what it will mean to be a queer elected official in the current political moment. The Victory Institute training included information on how best to handle harassment on the campaign trail.
However, candidates said they also have had young people and others thank them for having the nerve to defend the LGBTQ+ community.
Kevin Morrison, a gay county commissioner in the Chicago suburbs who is running for the House seat of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who is running for Senate, recently had that experience after defending a transgender high school athlete at a local school board meeting.
Morrison said the response he got from the community, including many of the school’s alumni, was “incredibly positive” — and showed how ready people are for new LGBTQ+ advocates in positions of power who “lead from a place of empathy and compassion.”
Maebe Pudlo, 39, is an operations manager for the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition and an elected member of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council. She is also transgender, and running for the Central and East L.A. state Senate seat of María Elena Durazo, who is running for county supervisor.
Pudlo, who also works as a drag queen, said that simply existing each day is a “political and social statement” for her. But she decided to run for office after seeing policy decisions affecting transgender people made without any transgender voices at the table.
“Unfortunately, our lives have been politicized and trans people have become political pawns, and it’s really disgusting to me,” Pudlo said.
Like every other queer candidate who spoke to The Times, Pudlo, who has previously run for Congress, said her platform is about more than LGBTQ+ issues. It’s also about housing and healthcare and defending democracy more broadly, she said, noting her campaign slogan is “Keep Fascism Out of California.”
Still, Pudlo said she is keenly aware of the current political threats to transgender people, and feels a deep responsibility to defend their rights — for everyone’s sake.
“This whole idea of rolling back civil rights for trans people specifically — that should be concerning for anybody who cares about democracy,” Pudlo said. “Because if they’ll do it to my community, your community is next.”
Former Palm Springs Mayor Lisa Middleton speaks at a training event for LGBTQ+ candidates and prospective candidates in L.A. in September. Also in the photo are, from left, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund President Evan Low, West Hollywood City Councilmember Danny Hang, Culver City Councilmember Bubba Fish and Virginia state Sen. Danica Roem.
(David Butow / For The Times)
Juan Camacho, a 44-year-old Echo Park resident also running for Durazo’s seat, said he feels a similar responsibility as a gay Mexican immigrant — particularly as Trump rolls out the “Project 2025 playbook” of attacking immigrants, Latinos and LGBTQ+ people, he said.
Brought to the U.S. by his parents as a toddler before becoming documented under President Reagan’s amnesty program, Camacho said he understands the fear that undocumented and mixed-status families feel, and he wants to use his privilege as a citizen now to push back.
Veteran California legislative leader Toni Atkins, who has long been out and is now running for governor, said the recent attacks on LGBTQ+ and especially transgender people have been “pretty disheartening,” but have also strengthened her resolve — after 50 years of LGBTQ+ people gaining rights in this country — to keep fighting.
“It’s what it’s always been: We want housing and healthcare and we want equal opportunity and we want to be seen as contributing members of society,” she said. “We have a responsibility to be visible and, as Harvey Milk said, to ‘give them hope.’”
America’s already roiling debate around transgender rights sharply escalated in recent days after Charlie Kirk — one of the nation’s most prominent anti-transgender voices — was fatally shot by a suspect whose life and social circles have been meticulously scrutinized for any connection to the transgender community.
Taking over Kirk’s podcast Monday, top Trump administration officials suggested they are gearing up to avenge Kirk by waging war on left-leaning organizations broadly, despite law enforcement statements that the shooter is believed to have acted alone. Queer organizations took that as a direct threat.
Kirk railed against transgender rights in life, and just prior to being shot on a Utah college campus last week was answering a question about the alleged prevalence of transgender people among the nation’s mass shooters — an idea he had personally stoked, despite pushback from statistical researchers.
Those circumstances seemed to prime the resulting outrage among his conservative base to be hyper-focused on any transgender connection.
The connection was further stoked when the Wall Street Journal reported on a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives report that suggested — seemingly erroneously — that etchings on bullet casings found with the rifle suspected as being used in the shooting included transgender “ideology.”
It was further inflamed when Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said that suspect Tyler Robinson’s roommate and romantic partner — who he said was “shocked” by the shooting and cooperating with authorities — is currently transitioning.
Leading conservative influencers, some with the ear of President Trump, have openly called for a retribution campaign against transgender people and the LGBTQ+ community more broadly. Laura Loomer called transgender people a “national security threat,” said their “movement needs to be classified as a terrorist organization IMMEDIATELY,” and said that Trump should make transitioning illegal.
LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, meanwhile, have condemned such generalizations and attacks on the community and warned that such rhetoric only increases the likelihood of more political violence — particularly against transgender people and others who have been demonized for years, including by Kirk.
“The obsession with tying trans people to shootings is vile & dangerous,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), one of California’s leading LGBTQ+ voices, wrote on social media. “First they try to say the shooter might be trans & WSJ amplifies that lie. Once that fell apart, they pivot to ‘he lived with a trans person.’ Even if true, who cares? It’s McCarthyism & truly disgusting.”
Many political leaders have called for calm, and for people to wait for the investigation into the suspect’s motivations before jumping to conclusions or casting blame. Cox has said that Robinson’s political ideology, different from that of his conservative family, appeared to be “part of” what drove him to shoot Kirk, but that the exact motivations for the crime remained unclear.
“We’re all drawing lots of conclusions on how someone like this could be radicalized,” Cox said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “Those are important questions for us to ask and important questions for us to answer.”
Searching for a connection
Officials were expected to release charging documents against Robinson on Tuesday that could contain more information about a motive. However, the debate has hardly waited.
Both the political right and left have searched for evidence connecting Robinson to their opposing political camp.
One of the first pieces of information to catch fire was the ATF reporting on the bullet etchings including transgender “ideology” — which turned out to be untrue, according to Cox’s later description of those etchings. That reporting immediately inspired condemnations of the entire transgender community.
“Seems like per capita the radical transgender movement has to be the most violent movement anywhere in the world,” the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. said in a Rumble livestream Thursday.
On Friday morning, President Trump said “vicious and horrible” people on the left were the only ones to blame for the political violence. “They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone,” he said on “Fox & Friends.”
Trump was asked Monday afternoon if he thought the suspect acted alone.
“I can tell you he didn’t work alone on the internet because it seems that he became radicalized on the internet,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “And he was radicalized on the left, he is a left. A lot of problems with the left and they get protected and they shouldn’t be protected.”
The ATF declined to comment on the leaked report. The Wall Street Journal published an editor’s note walking back its reporting, noting that Cox’s description of the etchings included no references to the transgender community.
The Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ+ advocacy group, responded to the uproar by criticizing the Wall Street Journal for publishing unsubstantiated claims that fueled hateful rhetoric toward the transgender community.
“This reporting was reckless and irresponsible, and it led to a wave of threats against the trans community from right-wing influencers — and a resulting wave of terror for a community that is already living in fear,” the group said.
Spreading the narrative
The debate has heightened existing tensions around transgender rights, which Trump campaigned against and targeted with one of his first official acts — an executive order that said his administration would recognize only “two genders, male and female.”
He and his administration have since banned transgender people from military service, blocked the issuance of U.S. passports with the gender-neutral X marker, threatened medical providers of gender-affirming care for minors, and sued California for allowing transgender athletes to compete in youth sports.
In September, the Department of Justice also reportedly began weighing a rule that would restrict transgender individuals from owning firearms — a move that came after a shooter who identified as transgender killed two children and injured 18 others at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.
That shooting led prominent conservatives, including senior Trump administration officials, to link gender identity to violence. National security advisor Sebastian Gorka claimed that an “inordinately high” number of attacks have been linked to “individuals who are confused about their gender” — a trend he claimed stretched back to at least 2023, when a transgender suspect shot and killed three children and three adults at a Nashville Christian school.
After that shooting, Trump Jr. had said that “rather than talking about guns, we should be talking about lunatics pushing their gender-affirming bull— on our kids,” and Vice President JD Vance, then a senator, had said that “giving in” to ideas on transgender identities was “dangerous.”
After it was reported that Robinson’s partner is transitioning, Matt Walsh, a right-wing political commentator, wrote on X that “trans militants” pose a “very serious” threat to the country. Billionaire Elon Musk agreed, saying it was a “massive problem.”
Many in the LGBTQ+ community have strenuously pushed back against such claims, noting research showing most shootings are committed by cisgender men.
The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University has found that the majority of shootings where four or more people were wounded in public were by men, and less than 1% of such shootings in the last decade were by transgender people.
An analysis by PolitiFact found that data do not show claims that transgender people are more prone to violence, and that “trans people are more likely to be victims of violence than their cisgender peers.”
A legacy amplified
Kirk espoused a Christian nationalist worldview and opposed LGBTQ+ rights broadly, including same-sex marriage. He called transgender people “perverted,” the acknowledgment of transgender identities “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history,” and gender-affirming care for young people an “unimaginable evil.”
Just before he was shot at Utah Valley University, Kirk had said that “too many” transgender people were involved in shootings.
It was not the first time Kirk had addressed the issue.
Days after the 2023 shooting in Nashville, Kirk went after then-White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for unrelated comments denouncing a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in state houses and saying the transgender community was “under attack.”
“It is the first shooting ever that I’ve seen where the shooter and the murderers get more sympathy than the actual victims,” he said, appearing to blame all transgender people for the attack.
The idea that liberals generally or members of the LGBTQ+ community specifically should be held accountable for Kirk’s killing has gained momentum in the days since. Vance and Trump advisor Stephen Miller seemed to allude to reprisals against left-leaning groups on Kirk’s podcast Monday, with Miller saying federal agencies will be rooting out a “domestic terror movement” on the left in Kirk’s name.
LGBTQ+ advocates called such rhetoric alarming — and said they worry it will be used as a pretext for the administration to ramp up its assault on LGBTQ+ rights.
DES MOINES — Iowa became the first state to remove gender identity from its civil rights code under a law that took effect Tuesday, meaning transgender and nonbinary residents are no longer protected from discrimination in their job, housing and other aspects of life.
The law also explicitly defines female and male based on reproductive organs at birth and removes the ability for people to change the sex designation on their birth certificate.
An unprecedented take-back of legal rights after nearly two decades in Iowa code leaves transgender, nonbinary and potentially even intersex Iowans more vulnerable now than they were before. It’s a governing doctrine now widely adopted by President Trump and Republican-led states despite the mainstream medical view that sex and gender are better understood as a spectrum than as an either-or definition.
When Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed Iowa’s new law, she said the state’s previous civil rights code “blurred the biological line between the sexes.”
“It’s common sense to acknowledge the obvious biological differences between men and women. In fact, it’s necessary to secure genuine equal protection for women and girls,” she said in a video statement.
Also taking effect Tuesday are provisions in the state’s health and human services budget that say Medicaid recipients are no longer covered for gender-affirming surgery or hormone therapy.
A national movement
Iowa’s state Capitol filled with protesters as the law went through the Republican-controlled Legislature and to Reynolds’ desk in just one week in February. Iowa Republicans said laws passed in recent years to restrict transgender students’ use of bathrooms and locker rooms, and their participation on sports teams, could not coexist with a civil rights code that includes gender identity protections.
About two dozen other states and the Trump administration have advanced restrictions on transgender people. Republicans say such laws and executive actions protect spaces for women, rejecting the idea that people can transition to another gender. Many face court challenges.
About two-thirds of U.S. adults believe that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by biological characteristics at birth, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in May found. But there’s less consensus on policies that target transgender and nonbinary people.
Transgender people say those kinds of policies deny their existence and capitalize on prejudice for political gain.
In a major setback for transgender rights nationwide, the U.S. Supreme Court last month upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors. The court’s conservative majority said it doesn’t violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same.
Not every state includes gender identity in their civil rights code, but Iowa was the first to remove nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ+ rights think tank.
Incidents of discrimination in Iowa, before and after July 1
Iowans will still have time to file a complaint with the state Office of Civil Rights about discrimination based on gender identity that occurred before the law took effect.
State law requires a complaint to be submitted within 300 days after the most recent incident of alleged discrimination. That means people have until April 27 to file a complaint about discrimination based on gender identity, according to Kristen Stiffler, the office’s executive director.
Sixty-five such complaints were filed and accepted for investigation from July 2023 through the end of June 2024, according to Stiffler. Forty-three were filed and accepted from July 1, 2024, through June 19 of this year.
Iowa state Rep. Aime Wichtendahl, a Democrat and the state’s first openly transgender lawmaker, fears the law will lead to an increase in discrimination for transgender Iowans.
“Anytime someone has to check your ID and they see that the gender marker doesn’t match the appearance, then that opens up hostility, discrimination as possibilities,” Wichtendahl said, naming examples such as applying for a job, going through the airport, buying beer or getting pulled over in a traffic stop. “That instantly outs you. That instantly puts you on the spot.”
About half of U.S. states include gender identity in their civil rights code to protect against discrimination in housing and public places, such as stores or restaurants, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Some additional states do not explicitly protect against such discrimination, but it is included in legal interpretations of statutes.
Five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled LGBTQ+ people are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace. But Iowa’s Supreme Court has expressly rejected the argument that discrimination based on sex includes discrimination based on gender identity.
Changing Iowa birth certificates before the law took effect
The months between when the bill was signed into law and when it took effect gave transgender Iowans time to pursue amended birth certificates before that option was eliminated.
Keenan Crow, with LGBTQ+ advocacy group One Iowa, said the group has long co-sponsored legal clinics to assist with that process.
“The last one that we had was by far the biggest,” Crow said.
Iowa’s Department of Transportation still has a process by which people can change the gender designation on their license or identification card, but has proposed administrative rules to eliminate that option.
Wichtendahl also said she has talked to some families who are looking to move out of state as a result of the new law.
“It’s heartbreaking because this is people’s lives we’re talking about,” Wichtendahl added. “These are families that have trans loved ones and it’s keeping their loved ones away, it’s putting their loved ones into uncertain future, putting their health and safety at risk.”
Leaders in the LGBTQ+ rights movement are taking stock and looking for lessons after a difficult few years.
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.”
WASHINGTON — About half of U.S. adults approve of how President Trump is handling transgender issues, according to a new poll — a relative high point for a president who has the approval overall of about 4 in 10 Americans.
But support for his individual policies on transgender people is not uniformly strong, with a clearer consensus against policies that affect youths.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey conducted this month found there’s more support than opposition on allowing transgender troops in the military, while most respondents don’t want to allow transgender students to use the public school bathrooms that align with their gender identity and oppose using government programs to pay for gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youths.
Schuyler Fricchione, a 40-year-old stay-at-home mother from northern Virginia, is one of those who opposes the government paying for gender-affirming care, especially for young people.
She said she doesn’t want people to make major changes that they might later regret. But she said that because of her Catholic faith, she doesn’t want to exclude transgender people from public life. “It’s very important to me that everyone understands their dignity and importance as a person,” she said.
“It is something I am kind of working through myself,” she said. “I am still learning.”
Opinion at odds with science
About two-thirds of those surveyed agree with Trump that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by their biological characteristics at birth.
The poll found that Republicans overwhelmingly believe gender identity is defined by sex at birth. Democrats are divided, with about half saying gender identity can differ from biological characteristics at birth. The view that gender identity can’t be separated from sex at birth contradicts what the American Medical Assn. and other mainstream medical groups say: that extensive scientific research suggests sex and gender are better understood as a spectrum than as an either-or definition.
A push against the recognition and rights of transgender people, who make up about 1% of the nation’s population, has been a major part of Trump’s return to the White House — and was a big part of his campaign.
He has signed executive orders declaring that people are defined by unchangeable sex rather than gender identity, banning transgender people from the military, and kicking transgender women and girls out of sports competitions for females. Those actions and others are being challenged in court, and judges have put many of his efforts on hold.
Public divide
Although transgender rights and restrictions are a hot-button issue overall, a big portion of the population is neutral or undecided on several key policies.
About 4 in 10 people supported requiring public school teachers to report to parents if their children are identifying at school as transgender or nonbinary. About 3 in 10 opposed it and a similar number was neutral.
About the same proportion of people — just under 4 in 10 — favored allowing transgender troops in the military as were neutral about it. About one-quarter opposed it.
Tim Phares, 59, a registered Democrat in Kansas who says he most often votes for Republicans, is among those in the middle on that issue.
One on hand, he said, “either you can do the job or you can’t do the job.” But on the other, he added, “I’m not a military person, so I’m not qualified to judge how it affects military readiness.”
This month, a divided U.S. Supreme Court allowed Trump’s administration to enforce a ban on transgender people in the military while legal challenges proceed, a reversal of what lower courts have said.
Gender-affirming care for youths
About half oppose allowing government insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to cover gender-affirming healthcare, such as hormone therapy and surgery, for transgender people 19 or older. About two-thirds oppose it for those under 19.
And on each of those questions, a roughly equal portion of the population supports the coverage or is neutral about it.
One of Trump’s executive orders keeps federal insurance plans from paying for gender-affirming care for those under 19. A court has ruled that funding can’t be dropped from institutions that provide the care, at least for now.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration this month released a report calling for therapy alone and not broader gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youths. Twenty-seven states have bans on the care for minors, and the Supreme Court is expected to rule in coming months on whether the bans can hold.
The view from the left
While Democrats are divided on many policies related to transgender issues, they’re more supportive than the population overall. There is no anguish over the issue or other transgender policy questions for Isabel Skinner, a 32-year-old politics professor in Illinois.
She has liberal views on transgender people, shaped partly by her being bisexual and pansexual, she said, and also by knowing transgender people.
She was in the minority who supported allowing transgender students to use the public school bathrooms that match their gender identity — something that at least 14 states have passed laws to ban in the last five years.
“I don’t understand where the fear comes from,” Skinner said, “because there really doesn’t seem to be any basis of reality for the fear of transgender people.”
The AP-NORC poll of 1,175 adults was conducted May 1-5, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Mulvihill and Sanders write for the Associated Press and reported from New Jersey and Washington, D.C., respectively.
