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.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.