The Trump administration is threatening the existence of transgender people. It is demonizing them, seeking to erase them from society, and preventing them from living healthy lives.
Transgender Identity Has Long Been Misunderstood
Transgender people experience a significant and persistent disconnect between the gender they experience and their assigned sex. Known as gender dysphoria, this puts one’s body at odds with one’s self. Most transgender people experience gender dysphoria when they are young, often leading to a desire to transition to the gender not assigned to them at birth.
Transgender people are not new; they have been documented across cultures for millennia and have long existed in the United States. Nor is hatred toward trans people new. In 1933, the German Institute of Sexology, a private group that researched gender identity and facilitated gender transition treatments, was destroyed by the Nazis, and its books and documents were burned in the street by youth brigades.
Importance of Gender-Affirming Health Care
Gender-affirming health care is recognized by major international and American medical associations—including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association—as an effective treatment for gender dysphoria. Gender-affirming health care is individualized, comprehensive, monitored, and adaptive, typically involving a psychologist, an endocrinologist, and a general practitioner.
Studies have shown that gender-affirming health care decreases suicide attempts by transgender teens and improves transgender patients’ quality of life and well-being.
Trump Targets Transgender People
President Trump has attacked the transgender community from the first day of his second term, issuing four executive orders trampling transgender people’s rights.
Exclusion from Civil Rights Protection
Executive Order 14168, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, denies the existence of transgender people by erroneously defining the term “sex” as a person’s “immutable biological classification as male or female.” This language expressly rejects the concept of gender identity.
In enforcing sex-based distinctions, the executive order requires federal agencies to use the term “sex,” not “gender,” in all their policies and official documents. Government-issued identification—such as passports, visas, and federal employment records—must reflect the holder’s sex at birth.
Despite the lack of evidence of harm taking place in single-sex spaces by transgender women, the order mandates that these spaces, including women’s prisons and rape shelters, be designated by biological sex, not gender identity.
The order also narrows the protection of transgender people under Supreme Court case law. Even as the Supreme Court ruled that trans people cannot be discriminated against at work, the executive order asserts that they are not protected from discrimination in schools.
Baseless Dishonorable Discharge from the Military
Executive Order 14183, Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness, requires that transgender people be dishonorably discharged from the military. The order states that trans people can never meet the standards for military service strictly based on their transgender status, regardless of their service record, and categorically asserts they are dishonorable, untruthful, and undisciplined.
Deprivation of Essential Health Care
Executive Order 14187, Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, characterizes gender-affirming health care for youth as “maiming and sterilizing” children. Contrary to research, the order maintains that “countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated.” The order requires federal agencies providing research or education grants to medical schools and hospitals to ensure that they cease providing gender-affirming health care to youth.
Exclusion from Sports in Schools
Executive Order 14201, Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports, seeks to prevent transgender women and girls from participating in sports in public schools and universities that receive federal funding. This overly broad ban applies to transgender girls who have never undergone male puberty and even includes sports like darts, pool, fishing, and chess, where muscle mass and strength play no role. Parents and school administrators have expressed a legitimate concern shared by many about competitive fairness in certain sports—particularly when transgender women who have experienced male puberty may retain physical advantages in strength and size that could impact safety and equity in high-contact or strength-based events. However, demonizing transgender young people as the administration has done, instead of having important fact-based discussions, is not acceptable.
Trump’s Orders Tie Directly to Project 2025
Laying the groundwork for Trump's executive orders, the administration's 900-page authoritarian playbook—Project 2025—calls for excluding gender identity and gender equity from civil rights protection and enforcement, as well as prohibiting transgender people from serving in the military on the grounds that they are incapable of meeting the demands of military service.
The president's executive orders on transgender people mirror Project 2025, which cruelly characterizes the “omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children” as “pornography,” and states that those who support transgender people are “child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women” who “should be imprisoned.” Project 2025 also says that educators and public librarians who allow books about transgender people in their libraries “should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
Project 2025’s Foreword states that “the noxious tenets of gender ideology…poison our children, who are being taught…to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in [sic] accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.”
Echoes of McCarthyism
Trans activists played a critical role in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising that catalyzed the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. In February, the administration erased references to transgender people from the federal website for the Stonewall National Monument in New York City.
Like gay people and communists in the 1950s, trans people have been dishonorably expelled from the military with a code labeling them a national security risk, despite years of exemplary service. The designation appears on job applications and government forms and jeopardizes their ability to get jobs requiring a security clearance.
The administration has threatened to fine and withhold medical and research funding from hospitals and universities that provide necessary gender-affirming health care.
Some Institutions Cave; Others Fight Back
Reaction to Trump's assault on transgender rights has been mixed. Some hospitals, including Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, have capitulated to Trump’s demand to halt gender-affirming health care for patients under 19 years of age. Columbia University signed an agreement that included a sports ban and a dormitory ban for transgender students. The University of Pennsylvania agreed to vacate wins by transgender athletes in sporting competitions. Brown University agreed to all the above, as well as a ban on transgender students in bathrooms—a policy that could violate state civil rights law.
In New York, which has strong trans legal protections, Attorney General Letitia James has encouraged gender clinics to stay open. Denver Public Schools and Chicago Public Schools have defied Trump’s U.S. Department of Education and will continue to allow trans youth to use the bathroom of their gender. Five Virginia public school districts have done the same and have sued the administration to maintain access to federal funding.
Why This Matters
Civil rights, a cornerstone of our democracy, are critical to protection against discrimination. They are at the core of the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence and of equal protection of the law in the U.S. Constitution.
The assault on one minority in America threatens the civil rights of others. When our progression toward a freer and fairer society is reversed, our democracy is fundamentally eroded.
Trump's dehumanizing attacks on transgender people jeopardize the health care they depend on and erase them from history and society.
What's worse, erasing and dehumanizing people pave the way to committing atrocities against them. If it can happen to one vulnerable group, it can happen to any of us.
Ellen R. Hornstein is an attorney who recently retired after 35 years of service from the United States Department of Agriculture, Office of the General Counsel. For most of her career she represented the United States Forest Service. Ellen Hornstein is also a volunteer with Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.