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On the inaugural day of Donald Trump’s second term in office, the president’s long-promised assault on trans rights—a centerpiece of his 2024 reelection bid—began without delay. But curiously, it did not start with anything much related to “saving the children,” an issue that had been a major theme of his campaign.
For example, recall that last August, Trump’s team promised that, if reelected, he would pursue felony charges for doctors who treat trans youth patients, echoing a congressional bill authored by his own running mate, then–Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Vance, for his part, has also been unapologetic about using anti-LGBTQ+ language pushed by conservatives to falsely brand queer people—and especially trans people and drag queens—as pedophiles and predators. “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children,” Vance tweeted in August 2022.
To be sure, Trump would eventually get around to meddling with trans kids, issuing a series of directives threatening to revoke federal money from medical providers who provide gender-affirming care to minors, in addition to defunding schools and sports teams that affirm trans people. But those actions were not the first priority: Instead, as an opening volley, his administration went after government-issued IDs—something that affects virtually every single trans adult in the United States. The day-one memorandum ordered that all federal documentation “accurately reflect the holder’s sex,” while also declaring gender to be binary and determined at the momentum of conception. (If read literally, the latter edict would make all Americans legally female.)
The fallout from Trump’s executive order has been swift. Within hours, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the State Department to no longer process any gender marker corrections for trans, nonbinary, and intersex passport holders, including for any individuals applying for an “X” marker. Civil rights organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have warned trans people with standing appointments for passport applications to cancel them, as it’s unclear whether their old documents will be returned to them in the case of a rejection. Although Social Security cards do not formally state the cardholder’s gender, the Social Security Administration issued an “emergency message” soon after, declaring that it would no longer correct trans people’s gender markers in NUMIDENT, the official SSA database.
The distinction between the Trump administration’s stated goals and the reality of its actual policies is telling. Although Trump claimed in a January 2023 campaign video that his mission was to protect children from “left-wing gender insanity,” which he termed “child abuse,” the truth is that Trump and his team are after a much loftier and more devastating goal. While the president may have exploited the public debate over sports participation and trans youth medical care—the latter of which is supported by every mainstream medical group—to win votes and rally his base, it’s now clear that the endgame is to make trans Americans’ lives impossible, to the point that they retreat from public life and disappear entirely. Trump may have sold many Americans on the seemingly “common sense” idea of “protecting kids,” but now, a month into his term, Trump’s policies amount to an all-out assault on the very existence of trans people. Whether or not his supporters are happy with the cynical bait-and-switch, it’s the whole trans community that’s now left fighting for survival.
Paul Castillo, deputy legal director at the national LGBTQ+ advocacy group Lambda Legal, says that taken in aggregate, Trump’s EOs serve to “delegitimize the identities of trans and nonbinary folks” as a means of sowing “division and distrust” among the electorate. Getting corrected passports and Social Security cards has long been a gateway for trans people to obtain other forms of affirming documentation, especially in states with burdensome policies making it otherwise difficult to secure accurate driver’s licenses or state IDs. Lacking accurate identification is not only extremely dehumanizing, but also makes it nearly impossible to move about the world safely and securely—whether that means obtaining medical care, enrolling in college, finding stable housing, or even putting in a job application.
“Trans and nonbinary folks are part of the fabric of America,” Castillo adds. “These fear-based tactics have an impact on people who are just trying to navigate everyday life, to participate just like their neighbors in schools and in the workplace, and this gaslighting knows no bounds. It is unfortunately part of the history of our country to use othering as an attempt to secure political power.”
Civil rights advocates are quick to point out that this has long been a tactic of the far-right conservative movement: to exploit “concern for children” as a smokescreen for the rollback of LGBTQ+ equality. When the Christian singer Anita Bryant, who recently died at age 84, mounted the “Save Our Children” campaign in 1977, her target was a recently passed ordinance in Dade County, Florida, barring anti-gay discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. At the time, two dozen municipalities already had their own bylaws on the books offering local protections on the basis of sexual orientation, beginning with East Lansing, Michigan, in 1972. While those prior measures had elicited little backlash, indicating a live-and-let-live attitude in some areas, voters ultimately repealed the county’s pro-LGBTQ+ ordinance by a more than 2-to-1 margin after Bryant’s warnings that gay activists were “trying to recruit our children into homosexuality.” It was a darkly brilliant strategy: The protections would not be restored for another 21 years.
Devon Ojeda, a national senior organizer for Advocates for Trans Equality, grew up in Florida in the shadow of Bryant’s campaign. As a child, Ojeda remembers seeing televised protests against “Gay Days” at Disney World, an annual LGBTQ+ event held informally at the Orlando theme park, and asking his father: “Dad, what does it mean to be gay?” “These are just people that have a sickness in their minds,” his father responded. Ojeda didn’t come out as trans until his mid-20s, he says, because he heard so often that gay people were “harming children, that they’re groomers, that they are deviant, and that they’re not natural.” As a survivor of sexual violence, he says that rhetoric “really messed with my head” because of how little anyone cared when he tried to speak up about the abuse he experienced.
The campaign to restrict queer people in existing public space wasn’t unique to Florida. In 1978, Republican California state Sen. John Briggs introduced Proposition 6, legislation that would make it illegal for gays and lesbians to teach in public schools, in fear that their very presence would turn students queer. (Popularly dubbed the “Briggs Initiative,” voters rejected the proposal by a nearly 17-point margin after what’s considered the first mass queer activism mobilization in U.S. history.) Throughout the 1980s, public restrooms were shuttered or raided over overwrought fears that innocent youth might accidentally witness gay men cruising for sex. Now, decades later, Ojeda sees parallels in the push to take away his rights as a trans person “all in the name of the children that they pretend that they are protecting.”
“It really just shows how very little the opposition really cares about our safety, because that isn’t what they want to do,” he said. “They just want to control people. They’re throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, and they’re taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people haven’t met a trans person. A lot of people don’t know who trans people are.”
It’s striking that the contemporary equivalent to the anti-gay moral panics of the 1970s and ’80s has once again focused on many of the same spaces: using schools and public restrooms as a pretext to normalize broad discrimination. Although a projected billion-dollar boycott led to the repeal of North Carolina’s infamous HB2 in 2017, a new wave of bathroom bills has targeted trans student facility access; at least 15 states now have laws on the books banning trans students from using campus locker rooms and bathrooms that correspond with their identities. Supporters have frequently claimed that such measures are intended to safeguard vulnerable youth; TV ads seeking to repeal an LGBTQ+ civil rights law in Houston claimed that it would grant bathroom predators legal cover to prey on helpless little girls. Just as in Bryant’s day, the misdirection proved effective: In November 2015, Houston’s ordinance was voted down by a 21-point margin.
Cathryn Oakley, senior director of legal policy for the Human Rights Campaign, says that conservatives repurposed their old playbook to scapegoat trans people in the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in 2015. That landmark legal victory was won the same year as Houston’s debate over trans rights, a moment when Oakley says that conservatives realized that they had lost the fight to convince the public that gays and lesbians were a public menace. At the time of the verdict in Obergefell v. Hodges, 60 percent of Americans supported the right of same-sex couples to marry—a marked contrast from the Briggs era, during which the public was evenly divided over whether homosexuality should even be legal at all.
“The folks who are putting this forward are the same people who have been fighting against LGBTQ+ equality for decades,” Oakley said. “They are very familiar faces, and the rhetoric is the same. Trying to make LGB folks look dangerous has gotten harder and harder as social acceptance of people being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer has become more common. As LGB people stopped being quite so scary, that argument didn’t stick, and they pivoted toward making trans folks the bogeypeople.”
In recent years, Republicans have leaned hard into the myth that trans activists are “grooming” children, retrofitting the same old hoary tropes for a new generation of scaremongering. While campaigning for president, Trump continually repeated false claims that schools were performing gender-affirming surgeries on students against their will. “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” he alleged, without evidence, at a forum hosted by the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty in September 2024. “The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” When the president signed an executive order restricting trans athletic participation earlier this month, it’s instructive that he staged a photo op of himself at the Oval Office desk surrounded by young girls, thereby casting himself as their noble savior.
But despite claims that the GOP is merely “protecting” children from best-practice medicine and competing in sports alongside their trans classmates, it’s clear that the scope of Trump’s anti-trans crusade is limitless. Within less than a month’s time, his administration has already banned trans people from serving in the U.S. armed forces (for a second time), prohibited trans federal employees from using gender-congruent restrooms in the office, ordered government workers to excise pronouns from their email signatures, threatened health care access for trans adults, deleted trans people from State Department travel guidance, and even removed mentions of trans activists from the Stonewall National Monument’s webpage. For all the hysterical concern-trolling that accompanied these decisions, few of Trump’s anti-trans moves have even been about kids at all.
“What is truly astonishing about the last few weeks is how clearly the animus is being stated,” Oakley says. “There is no effort to say: Well, people are different, and some people are going to make choices that aren’t the choices that I would make if I were in their shoes. Hey, this is America. The overt adoption of Christian nationalist rhetoric as the policy of the United States government has been truly unreal. None of these things make anybody better off. They only drive them to the margins.”
If anything, Trump’s directives have harmed the very population that his party is allegedly so obsessed with saving: young people themselves. As his transition team works to comply with the president’s executive orders, nearly two dozen mentions of LGBTQ+ youth have been scrubbed from StopBullying.gov, an anti-bullying website operated by the Department of Health and Human Services. Among them, a pair of webpages entitled “Coming OUT for Safe Schools” and “Ensuring a ‘Time to Thrive’ for LGBTQ Youth” now return 404 error messages, as of Feb. 2. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, meanwhile, is reportedly scrubbing all mentions of trans kids from its resources. This is despite the fact that trans youth remain uniquely vulnerable to harm: A 2023 report from the Human Rights Campaign found that 57 percent of LGBTQ+ young people have faced rejection at home, and 46 percent feel unsafe at school.
The Trump administration is currently facing a flurry of lawsuits over its anti-trans policies, some of which have already been met with resistance in the courts. At least two federal judges, for instance, have barred the White House from transferring incarcerated trans women to men’s prisons—winning deferrals in the cases of four inmates. LGBTQ+ groups are also suing the administration over its trans military and trans youth health care bans, the latter of which has led hospitals in a handful of states to put temporary pauses on gender-affirming care while they examine the impact of Trump’s orders. The order on trans youth health care has been temporarily paused by a pair of federal courts while they weigh a further injunction against the policy, and a preliminary ruling on Trump’s second military ban could be imminent in the coming weeks.
So what now? Paul Castillo, whose organization Lambda Legal is challenging both the denial of health care and military service to trans Americans, believes that our contemporary moral panics targeting LGBTQ+ people will end as those did in previous eras: in the triumph over hatred and bigotry. However, that will not stop the far right, as Castillo notes, from repeating the pattern until they have exhausted marginalized groups to victimize.
“There is a place for everybody in our country, and yet we see this type of playbook being utilized over and over again,” he said. “It should be called out for what it is. Trans and nonbinary youth, just like every other American, deserve to have the same opportunity to live a full and fulfilled life, regardless of who they are, who they love, and who is in political power.”
