Since taking office for a second time, Trump has made targeting trans Americans’ documents a top priority. At his inauguration, he signed Executive Order 14168, which, among other things, mandated that all passports ‘accurately reflect’ a person’s ‘biological sex.’ Almost immediately, trans people nationwide—including trans actress Hunter Schafer—reported having their gender markers abruptly reverted even in cases when the rest of their documents properly aligned with their identities.

By June 2025, the ACLU had mounted a challenge against the policy and won an injunction, which allowed trans people to once again update their passports without much scrutiny. Soon after, in November, the case reached the Supreme Court, and unsurprisingly, the Trump administration’s policy was upheld. In the 6-3 unsigned shadow docket ruling, the court held that in displaying a person’s ‘biological sex’ on passports, “the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.” But shortly after the decision, Transitics reported that the State Department’s website had been updated to hint at the possibility of revoking trans people’s passports, going from saying a passport containing anything other than a person’s ‘sex at birth’ “will remain valid until its expiration date” to claiming it’d only be “valid for travel until its date of expiration, until you replace it, or until we invalidate it under federal regulations.”

Following backlash, the sentence was entirely scrubbed the following Monday, but a slightly different version returned the next day. Seeing as the Trump administration had previously claimed in court that it could theoretically revoke trans people’s passports once it won the case, the site changes understandably sparked fears this would eventually come to pass. And of course, Kansas revoking trans people’s driver’s licenses in February in retaliation over a state supreme court loss 5 months prior did nothing to ease these worries. That said, it must be said the State Department itself has not hinted at this idea further since the website controversy.

However, on Monday, trans-focused news site The Needle published a story concerning a trans woman whose passport was abruptly invalidated while she was abroad. The woman, identified pseudonymously as ‘Kathleen,’ is alleged to have ties to Antifa—which the Trump designated as a terrorist organization by executive order in September—and because of that fact, the outlet claims both in the tagline and the text itself that “the State Department is likely asserting the power to deem U.S. citizens who they determine to be ideologically ‘far-left’, and who seem to be especially active in transgender advocacy, as ‘national security’ risks, and consequently revoking their passports.”

But is that true? Is the Trump administration revoking trans people’s passports for being ‘active in transgender advocacy’ by declaring them ‘national security risks'?

The answer is no. There is currently no evidence to suggest that the State Department is seeking to revoke trans people’s passports by branding them ‘national security risks.’

To understand why, it’s worth examining the article as well as the evidence it presents in support of its claim. Here, after sharing Kathleen’s story, the authors devote a significant chunk of the article to discussing passport revocations more broadly, and in two sections titled ‘Passport Policy’ and ‘Making Sense of Her Case,’ they make the case for the claim found in the tagline—that the Trump administration is revoking trans people’s passports over their advocacy.

In the first section, they start off by pointing to two examples of trans people who had their passport renewals denied during the first Trump administration: Danni Askini and Janus Rose, two prominent trans Americans who were abruptly asked to share ‘adequate’ evidence of their medical transition in order to renew their passports. After alluding to the aforementioned State Department website change, they correctly state that House Republicans have introduced a bill that would allow the federal government to revoke the passports of citizens who ‘provide material support’ to a foreign terrorist organization. However, to say the House GOP is ‘pushing’ the bill, as the article does, is a bit of an overstatement: H.R. 5244 has been stuck in committee for nearly a year and has garnered zero cosponsors.

The article then veers into discussing the current GOP rhetoric surrounding antifa and the ‘radical left.’ Drawing parallels to the Red Scare, the section concludes with the declaration that “if the administration gets its way, the State Department would have aggressive, expanded, and in force powers to revoke passports, regressing to policies not seen since McCarthyism.” Under this structure, it claims that “what happened to Kathleen and Danni would be the norm, not the exception.”

However, it must be noted that these kinds of denials have historically occurred in batches. Around the same time Askini and Rose had their renewals denied, thousands of Americans born in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas also disclosed having their renewals abruptly denied by the State Department. According to reporting from the time, the State Department no longer believed their citizenship evidence was adequate as there was “significant incidence of citizenship fraud,” and some of the affected Americans were even “jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings.”

Unlike Askini and Rose’s cases, Kathleen’s appears to indeed be an isolated incident. Since she first discovered her passport was invalid at some point in May, there have been no other known reports of trans people—or anyone else for that matter—whose passports have been suddenly invalidated. If it were part of a larger revocation spree, other affected Americans would’ve likely spoken up by now as they did then, especially if those affected had ties to advocacy organizations that are finding themselves in Trump’s line of fire.

But despite these facts, the Needle claims that their conclusion, that the revocation is due to her political affiliation, is “the conclusion supported by the most evidence.” Except, aside from the examples listed above, the only other evidence provided is essentially a process of elimination:

“We have ruled out every common reason for passport revocation, as none of them apply to her. She has no unpaid tax debt, no unpaid child support, and no pending felony charges or subpoenas issued by the U.S. government. We have also ruled out the idea that her passport was invalidated due to damage to its RFID biometric chip.”

And yet, there’s still at least one other entirely plausible explanation that hasn’t been ruled out. Earlier this year, TikTok influencer Alexis Rose reported in a series of videos that her passport had suddenly stopped working in December and that her identity had seemingly been ‘wiped’ from the passport system entirely. At the time, she speculated that the cancellation may have been due to her unapologetic pro-trans advocacy, but, after getting help from her representative, she was able to get it replaced soon after and was told it was accidentally marked lost or stolen, likely due to a clerical error. According to her, her representative also said that it’s not unheard of for a person’s information to be accidentally removed from the database after their passport is marked lost or stolen.

Around the same time, two other influencers reported experiencing a similar issue: their passports suddenly stopped working after they were marked lost or stolen without explanation. It must be noted that these other influencers did not have a record of pro-trans advocacy and did not suggest that it may have been due to their political affiliation; like Rose, both were told it was a clerical error, although the timing indicates that there may have been a systemic issue behind these reports.

Regardless of the true cause, these cases show that unexplained passport invalidations can indeed occur. And in Kathleen’s case, it’s an explanation that hasn’t been ruled out. After all, as per the article, the last time she used her passport before May was in August 2025—when she first entered the unnamed Scandinavian country to seek asylum. Because of that, there’s no way to know for sure when her passport first became invalid or whether it was among those caught in the same issue that the aforementioned influencers faced in December.

Given these facts, there simply isn’t enough evidence to suggest that the Trump administration could be beginning to “assert the power to deem U.S. citizens who they determine to be ideologically ‘far-left’, and who seem to be especially active in transgender advocacy, as ‘national security’ risks,” let alone to say that it is the ‘likely’ explanation for Kathleen’s issue. Especially considering she hasn’t reached out to the State Department about her passport because of her ongoing asylum application.

None of this is to say that something like this won’t ever happen, but to put it mildly, claiming that it is indeed happening now is extremely dangerous. Not only does it cause unnecessary panic in an already vulnerable community, but it also distracts from the issues that trans Americans are actually experiencing—including illegally implemented restrictions on trans people’s IDs, decreased access to gender-affirming care for adults, and government lists of trans people.

And in the face of that relentless onslaught, we must not allow ourselves to devote our energy to fighting against unsubstantiated threats as well. We’ve got enough to worry about.

Disclaimer: This story is intended to address the Needle’s conclusions in the second half of the article and in no way wishes to cast any doubt onto the veracity of the outlet’s extensive reporting on Kathleen’s story or on her story itself. It goes without saying that it brings me nothing but relief to know that she’s finally safe from the hardship she’s faced.

Over the past few years, Republicans have increasingly turned public schools into an important testing ground for many of their anti-trans policies. Whether it be laws restricting trans people’s sports participation and bathroom access or policies allowing trans people to be misgendered and limiting kids’ exposure to ‘gender ideology,’ they all have one thing in common: they all started with schools.

However, these attacks certainly haven’t stopped with schools. Six years after Idaho House Bill 500 targeted school sports, trans adults now find themselves banned from most competitive activities, including some where their gender is irrelevant, like chess, fencing, and billiards. Five years after Tennessee House Bill 1233 imposed a bathroom ban on public schools, trans people in Idaho now face 5-year prison sentences if they use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity in any business open to the public. Four years after Florida passed its so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, the Trump administration is floating putting warning labels on any media that features trans characters. Three years after Arkansas House Bill 1468 granted teachers a right to misgender trans people, Louisiana passed a law allowing trans people’s employers and co-workers to harass them about their identities in any context. And the list goes on.

But these restrictions haven’t satisfied anti-trans conservatives, who are now turning their attention towards trans teachers. Earlier this year, Transitics published a critical report on an attempt by Kentucky Republicans to quietly push through a bill that would’ve banned all trans people from teaching by declaring them mentally ill. And although the proposal quickly garnered opposition and ended up failing, Republicans haven’t backed down, and the Texas GOP even recently adopted a platform that calls for a total ban on trans teachers. Nevertheless, doing so would be easier said than done and would likely run afoul of the current Supreme Court’s interpretation of federal employment anti-discrimination law.

However, North Carolina Republican State Rep. Erin Paré believes she has found a different approach.

Yesterday, Paré, who wields a significant amount of power as the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, made a post on Facebook calling out an unnamed elementary school in her district—which is part of the Raleigh-area Wake County Public School System—for hiring a “transgender biological male” music teacher (whom Paré later described as “a trans person who interviewed as non binary”) and allowing them to “dress as a woman.” Despite saying she had “brought [her constituents’] concerns to the attention of the Wake County Public School System,” she also claimed that WCPSS “does not have a policy addressing this issue.” Because of that, she said, it “may be time to introduce a bill requiring gender-appropriate professional attire for public school employees” to “protect children from being exposed to more complex and mature gender-identity questions and concepts at too young of an age.”

Although Paré claimed in the same post that she “[doesn’t] care how adults choose to live outside of the professional work day,” it’s worth noting that she has supported laws that restrict the rights of trans adults in the past. This includes last year’s House Bill 805, which makes it more difficult for doctors to provide gender-affirming care by expanding their susceptibility to malpractice lawsuits from detransitioners and additionally targets trans people’s birth certificates.

Then, a few hours later, she made a separate post claiming the school had forced every teacher to wear a t-shirt at its ‘Parent’s Back-to-School Night’ that day due to “needing to obscure the [trans teacher] wearing a dress at school issue.” She sarcastically remarked that, to the school, it was “ok to administer a dress code to hide a potential controversial issue from parents, but not ok for a typical school day in the presence of children.” It must be mentioned that according to a community note under the post, WCPSS schools usually ask their employees to wear school t-shirts during these events.

However, unfortunately for Paré, she’s going to have to wait to act on her proposal. The deadline for filing bills in the NC House passed well over two months ago, and as such, assuming she isn’t defeated this November, the earliest she’ll be able to introduce it is next April. That said, a bill isn’t her only move: Paré also pledged to make trans teachers an ‘election issue’ and has already begun attacking her opponent for being a ‘transgender activist.’

Legal experts have pointed out that Paré’s dress code idea would likely violate the Supreme Court’s 1989 ruling in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, which established that employers cannot discriminate against their employees for not adhering to gender stereotypes. In 2020, this interpretation was expanded to explicitly protect transgender Americans. That said, in more recent years, the court has signaled a willingness to make exceptions for these protections when children are involved, and as such, the possibility that the court will create a carveout cannot be discarded.

Regardless of its fate, like the anti-trans proposals that came before it, one thing is clear: the push to restrict trans people’s gender presentation will not stop with schools. Already, some states have tried passing ‘drag bans’ that are vague enough to impact anyone who isn’t dressed according to their ‘biological sex.’ Meanwhile, in other states, multiple trans teachers have even been fired or forced to resign just because of who they are. These attacks have shown no sign of stopping; if anything, they’ve only gotten more widespread. And unless something changes, it seems that it’ll only be a matter of time before Paré’s proposal—or one like it—is signed into law.

Just a little over three years ago, trans people seeking to update their gender markers were facing a very different America. At the time, all 50 states allowed gender changes to driver’s licenses and other state-issued IDs, while only one, Tennessee, banned those changes on birth certificates. And although some states were more restrictive than others, the fact remained: pathways existed for every trans American to obtain documents that accurately reflected their identity—pathways that, in most cases, went back decades.

Of course, not all right-leaning states were content with this status quo, but even then, the states that sought to challenge it were few and far between. And most notably, up until this point, they had all limited their attacks to birth certificates. However, in the summer of 2023, the dam started to show signs of crumbling: Tennessee became the first state to ban legal gender changes altogether through Senate Bill 1440, and soon after, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach sued his state’s governor in hopes of following suit—kicking off a 2-year legal battle that saw a court block the state from updating gender markers until Kobach’s October 2025 loss at the state Supreme Court.

But after Florida and Texas implemented bans of their own the next year, the attacks on trans people’s driver’s licenses seemingly came to a standstill. Even as Trump imposed a trans passport ban on his first day in office, the number of states with these bans largely remained steady at 4, with Iowa replacing Kansas a month after Kobach’s defeat. Conversely, in that same 2.5-year period, the number of states with active bans on birth certificate changes had climbed from 1 to 8.

Then, the dam suddenly burst. Idaho banned gender marker changes in January. Indiana and Kansas—which additionally took the extreme step of revoking trans people’s licenses—in February. Oklahoma and Wyoming in March. Mississippi in April. In just 4 months, the number of states with these bans had quickly risen to 10, and because only two more states banned birth certificate changes, it meant that the two figures were equal for the first time in at least 50 years.

But now, Transitics has confirmed that South Dakota is enacting an ID ban of its own.

This story starts in January. Towards the end of the month, South Dakota House Speaker Jon Hansen introduced House Bill 1184, which had the stated purpose of defining ‘sex’ as ‘biological’ throughout state law by setting anatomy-based definitions for words like ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ ‘male,’ and ‘female.’ The bill, like similar laws passed in over a dozen other states, mandates that all state agencies “strictly adhere” to its definitions, and it overwhelmingly passed both of the state’s legislative chambers before being signed into law by Republican Governor Larry Rhoden on March 20th.

At the same time, a different battle was raging at the South Dakota Supreme Court, which was reviewing an appeal from a trans woman, Sigrid Kristiane Nielsen, who was denied a court order for a new birth certificate that accurately recognized her gender identity. However, on March 3rd, the court unanimously denied her petition and issued a ruling declaring that the state not only didn’t have to amend her certificate but also that it actually couldn’t in the first place. The ruling, which relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Skrmetti, was quickly applied to all trans people born in the state.

But following HB 1184’s passage, questions remained about whether or not the state would interpret it to ban gender changes on driver’s licenses as well. After all, although similarly-worded laws have been used to implement bans in Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, and Wyoming, other states—including neighboring Nebraska and North Dakota, as well as Alabama, Louisiana, Ohio, Utah, and West Virginia—did not ban gender marker changes despite having passed near-identical laws. Furthermore, South Dakota had already passed a law in 2025 that replaced ‘gender’ with ‘sex’ on requirements for state-issued IDs, but the state’s policy was not impacted.

Meanwhile, in April, as part of an effort to catalog gender marker policies in all 50 states for the first time, Transitics obtained a copy of the gender change policy found within the South Dakota Department of Public Safety’s employee training manual, which establishes that gender changes on driver’s licenses were allowed with a “letter from a physician stating that the applicant is undergoing gender reassignment care.” After HB 1184 became effective on July 1st, I filed a public records request seeking to resolve the uncertainty surrounding the law’s impact on the DPS. Yesterday afternoon and after significant stalling, that request was denied on the grounds that “correspondence, memoranda, and working papers are not subject to disclosure,” an exemption typically reserved for policies that are purely internal or are yet to be implemented. As these are categories the previously obtained policy wouldn’t fall into, it indicated that further investigation was needed.

Speaking to various DPS employees this morning, I was told that on July 1st, the state changed its policy to now require an amended birth certificate—which, as previously mentioned, South Dakota will no longer issue. Like with Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, and Wyoming, this creates a de facto ban on these changes for most trans people; according to the US Census Bureau, around 73% of US-born South Dakota residents were born in states that do not allow them to update their birth certificates if they are trans, and another 8% were born in states that require surgery for those amendments.

However, unlike the other four states mentioned, there is an important caveat: the policy hasn’t actually been implemented yet. DPS employees indicated that the ban, while not in place at the moment, will be enforced “as soon as [they] get word” from their superiors to do so. They also stressed that the previous requirement, which was relatively relaxed, will remain in place for the time being. As such, it appears that trans South Dakotans still have a little time to update their licenses before the state’s ban goes into effect.

It needs to be said that Florida, Idaho, Texas, and Wyoming all implemented their bans without any sort of warning. Other states, like Missouri and Oklahoma, have also recently tightened their policies without explanation. South Dakota was looking to follow their lead in enacting its ban without saying a word, a move that would’ve suddenly and permanently locked many trans residents out of having accurate identification.

So, if you are from South Dakota, you must update your license as soon as possible. To do so, you only need a note from your doctor stating that you are receiving gender-affirming care. This requirement is broad enough to include hormone replacement therapy, and the exact wording of the note, as I understand it, is left entirely up to your doctor. If you need help with or have any questions about this process, please do not hesitate to leave a comment, send me a message, or email me.

And finally, here’s a map of current gender marker policies:

For sources, tables, and more maps, head to Transitics’ CATPALM page.

On August 20th, 2024, the Texas Department of Public Safety shocked the nation when it abruptly announced that, effective immediately, trans Texans would no longer be able to update their gender markers on their driver’s licenses and other state-issued IDs. At the time, the announcement made the state just the third—after Tennessee and Florida—to implement such a ban, and its execution was certainly unusual: aside from rejecting lawfully issued court orders, DPS instructed all employees to report those who ask about changing their gender to an internal email address. As it was revealed later, the state has been using that information to keep a list of its trans residents—a list that has 110 names as of July 2025.

A week later, internal coordination became evident after the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for issuing birth certificates, quietly made a similar policy change. According to the Austin-based outlets KXAN and KUT, these changes were made at the urging of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and were approved by Texas’ governor, Greg Abbott. Both Paxton and Abbott have a history of harshly and abruptly weaponizing the state’s laws against the trans community, a record that includes launching child abuse investigations into several Texas families over gender-affirming care—which was legal in the state at the time—in 2022.

And the state only continued to double down: in March 2025, Paxton released a non-binding opinion declaring all gender change court orders invalid and instructing the DPS and HHS to revert gender changes whenever possible. Although the opinion provided some legal backing to the state’s restrictions, it changed little in practice, as the DPS had additionally instructed employees to revert people’s licenses upon renewal when it first changed its policy. But despite these unprecedented actions, the policies, as well as their implementation, were never challenged despite the numerous objections made.

Rather, Texas’ secrecy became an example for other red states to follow. Just this year alone, Transitics was the first to report that Idaho and Wyoming had quietly implemented similar bans as well. But in both cases, investigations from Transitics have concluded that these policies—which only involved changes to internal guidance and were prompted by the passage of laws defining ‘sex’ as ‘biological’ and ‘immutable’—were likely adopted legally.

However, as Transitics has now learned, the same cannot be said for Texas.

Rather, Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and the Department of Public Safety all violated numerous laws to implement their state’s ban, and they likely did so knowingly.

This story starts back in March 2008. At the time, Texas, like many others, was updating its driver’s license regulations to comply with the requirements of the then-recently passed REAL ID Act, and due to the rapidly changing landscape, the DPS was looking to make its third change in as many years to 37 TAC §15.24, which concerns documentation requirements for driver’s license applicants. As the state puts it, people were trying to argue that because the rule allowed them to submit any court order showing their name and date of birth, they could “use traffic citations completed with unverified identifying information.” Thus, “to prevent circumvention of the Texas identification requirements,” the state was proposing amending §15.24 to “restrict the acceptable court orders” to two types: “official name and gender changes.”

After receiving no public comments, the proposal was adopted without controversy a mere two months later. Although changes were made to the rule in 2011, the “change of name and/or gender” provision was unaffected and has remained in effect since. Furthermore, that same year, the same language was copied onto a new regulation concerning election identification certificates.

And the state has indeed been acutely aware of its inclusion from the beginning. Archived versions of the DPS’ website show that the ‘name and/or gender change’ language from §15.24 was added to the identification requirements page as soon as it was finalized in May 2008. When the DPS got a new website in 2012, §15.24’s full language remained present and was even added to the DPS’ new document requirements brochure in 2015. And when the DPS again redesigned its website in 2021, the section remained untouched. That is, until June 7th, 2024, when the bullet point that mentioned the court orders, which was present in the previous week’s capture, abruptly disappeared from the webpage.

As if this change, which came 2.5 months before the DPS implemented its ban and stopped accepting these orders, wasn’t suspicious enough, it gets worse. The section returned to the page between August 28th and August 30th, 2024—a mere 8–10 days after the ban went into effect—but it now only included court orders “indicating an official change of name.” The “and/or gender changes” language, which legally remains in effect, was and still is nowhere to be found (it does, however, remain present on the brochure).

However, as mentioned above, this change does indeed mirror the DPS’ current practice. According to the guidance email it sent its employees, it will no longer accept court orders that change a person’s gender or those that change both their name and gender in any capacity, even if the person is only requesting a name change.

The only problem is, that’s illegal. Under the Texas Administrative Procedure Act and subsequent precedent established by the state’s Supreme Court, the Department of Public Safety cannot change policies that are officially codified in its regulations without going through the rulemaking process, which involves giving the public at least 30 days’ notice and the opportunity to comment on the proposal. If an agency doesn’t do this, it cannot change the way it enforces a rule, operate as if it has been changed, or tell the public that it has changed. This is especially true if the policy change in question would impose new requirements onto the public.

For the past two years—and with Abbott and Paxton’s approval—the Texas Department of Public Safety has done all of these things. Without notice and without taking public comments, it has stopped honoring the gender change court orders that it legally must honor under its own rule. It has informed all of its employees that these orders, which are explicitly listed as acceptable under its current rules, are no longer acceptable. It has made changes to its public-facing materials that pretend as though the rule has been changed when it hasn’t. And it is imposing new evidentiary requirements onto Texans looking to obtain a driver’s license and keeping an internal list of those who do not comply with the new standards. Each of these actions likely constitutes a separate violation of various sections of the Texas APA, as does every instance of the state’s harsh enforcement of its ban.

And the DPS almost got away with all of this entirely unnoticed. Last month, it finally proposed an updated version of §15.24, and under this, the “and/or gender” language will be formally removed. However, the department is attempting to disguise it through another controversial change, which will require a person who submits a foreign passport during their application to present a valid visa along with it. This changes a decades-old policy that has accepted visas regardless of their validity as long as the applicant can prove being in the US lawfully, and unfortuntately, media organizations have taken the bait. All the current reporting on this rule has centered exclusively on the visa policy and has failed to mention the removal of gender change, and that’s exactly as intended.

The DPS justifies the entire proposal by saying it’s necessary to “align with the REAL ID Act of 2005.” And it is right about that: the REAL ID Act’s requirements, as codified in 6 CFR § 37.11, do explicitly state that a visa presented alongside a foreign passport must be ‘valid’ and ‘unexpired.’ That said, § 37.11 does not prohibit states from accepting gender change court orders; even now, a few red states still require them when changing a person’s gender marker. As such, the DPS is failing to provide a reason or adequate notice for the pending removal of the gender change provision—a requirement that could potentially be satisfied with a statement that merely reads the change is needed “to align with requirements set forth by the Office of the Attorney General.”

Instead, it’s trying to sweep this under the rug entirely, likely a deliberate move meant to divert attention away from the fact that it has illegally enforced its gender change policy for the past two years. At least to Abbott and Paxton, doing so was a necessary risk: issuing a notice would’ve allowed trans people to rush to change their gender markers before the cutoff date. But, by abruptly implementing the ban, they ensured that it would inflict the maximum amount of pain onto the state’s trans people. All they needed was for no one to look too carefully.

And for almost two years, no one did. It makes sense: only 4 other red states address gender changes in their driver’s license regulations—Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, and West Virginia—and all have a history of being much more progressive than Texas when it comes to trans people. The rest often operate under internal policies, and based on the email that was sent to DPS employees, Texas seemed no different.

However, as it stands today, the Lone Star State’s ban on gender changes—and the list of trans people the Department of Public Safety has been making because of it—now finds itself among the most vulnerable anti-trans policies in the country. It’s up to trans Texans to take it down.

Last week, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, published a report titled “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity.” As its title suggests, the report—which came only days after the Supreme Court upheld laws banning trans women from women’s sports—takes aim at Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funds and was directly responsible for the creation of women’s sports programs in K-12 schools.

Its author, Heritage Foundation senior research fellow and Boise State University political science professor Scott Yenor, chooses to introduce the topic in a familiar way: transphobia. Here, he opens with a nod to the right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding Imane Khelif, writing that “in 2024, a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman for the Olympic women’s boxing gold medal.” Already, he gets the facts wrong: Imane Khelif is Algerian, and she isn’t transgender, but regardless, he presses on and uses Khelif to call for laws that “define and uphold the physical differences between men and women.”

However, Yenor is merely using the topic of trans athletes—one that right-wing groups have manufactured as a way to get many Americans comfortable with discriminatory policies—as a springboard for his true target: women’s sports, and more specifically, “the deeper feminist settlement that has governed athletics for decades.” This feminism, he writes, aimed to make women “more independent and even dominant and less deferential and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional female graces,” and as a result, “Title IX evolved from a seemingly modest anti-discrimination statute into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering, complete with proportionality mandates.”

His central argument is simple: Title IX has created “a prejudice in favor of a male-normed competitive model for women’s sports and a prejudice against men’s non-revenue programs,” and these prejudices “rest on [the] false premise that differences in competitiveness and interest between the sexes are stereotypes to be engineered away.” As he clarifies later, he believes that women, when compared to men, are naturally less ‘aggressive, assertive, and dominant’ and less interested in sports, and therefore, giving men more sporting opportunities isn’t discriminatory. Rather, according to Yenor, the discrimination lies in giving women equality, as Title IX’s mandates of equal spending and parity in competitive opportunity meant “colleges learned that the safest (and often cheapest) path to compliance was cutting men’s non-revenue programs rather than adding women’s teams or controlling costs in football and men’s basketball.”

Interestingly, his entire argument essentially reverses the rhetoric that Republicans have employed when banning trans athletes. There, they argue that trans athletes should get fewer opportunities because they are more competitive and aggressive and that every trans woman who wants to compete is unfairly taking an opportunity away from a cis woman. But here, it’s now cis women who should get fewer opportunities for being less competitive and aggressive and that every cis woman who wants to compete is unfairly taking an opportunity away from a man.

And the irony continues Yenor takes issue with the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Virginia, a 1996 landmark case that struck down policies barring women from US military schools, for ‘furthering the war on stereotypes.’ Meanwhile, that ruling—and its finding that there are “inherent differences between men and women”—has been used to support anti-trans laws going back to the very first line of the very first anti-trans sports law in the US, Idaho House Bill 500 (2020).

Nevertheless, to account for these purported differences between genders, Yenor proposes that Title IX should instead ‘accommodate nature’ by doing away with many competitive women’s sporting programs and instead “supporting a wide range of non-competitive and lower-intensity activities.” And in this final section, he writes the following:

“History and the nature-denying extremism of today’s Title IX enforcement compel us to consider basic questions: What goods do women themselves get from sports and physical activity? What goods do men get? What goods does society derive from women’s participation? From male participation? Podiums, scholarships, or the cultivation of a conquering spirit are hardly the main concerns for most female athletes. Much less of a concern is having a career in professional sports.”

As for the ‘goods’ in question, Yenor is unequivocal: children. In fact, he spends two-thirds of his answer to these questions on fertility alone:

“Of course, many women enjoy the thrill of competition, as the joy on faces of victorious female athletes shows. Women also benefit from activities that build health, good habits, vigor, bodily toughness, grace, confidence, social connection of teamwork, and beauty. Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports, which, as science shows, produces Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and elevated rates of menstrual disruption in many top-notch female athletes. Between 26 percent and nearly 50 percent of women who exercise intensely stopped having regular menstrual cycles according to several studies. As one recent review of the literature holds, “evidence demonstrates higher rates of menstrual disturbance in elite athletes.” High-intensity exercise increases infertility; moderate exercise assists fertility more than any other approach to exercise assists it.”

Through this paragraph, Yenor reveals his hand—as well as the fact that the rest of the reasoning he presents may very well be entirely ad hoc. After all, according to his bio on the Heritage Foundation’s page, Yenor “writes primarily on the family.” Quotes from other conservative figures about him that are listed on the page characterize him as “a student of the hostile forces of feminism and liberals that rip the family apart or prevent families from forming” and as “one of the leading pro-family intellectuals in the country.”

Title IX and college sports policy should therefore sit comfortably outside of his area of expertise—unless, of course, he believes this issue concerns family policy. Viewing the report through this lens, his emphasis on replacing the ‘high-intensity, elite model of sports’ with opportunities that promote ‘moderate exercise’ (which he defines as including “group fitness classes, dance, yoga, recreational intramurals, hiking clubs, and the like”) starts to make more sense, as do his repeated references to the idea that competitive sports make women “less oriented towards motherhood” that are present throughout the report.

As Yenor’s report shows, right-wing attacks on women’s participation in sports will not remain limited to trans women for much longer. That discourse, ostensibly about ‘fairness’ and ‘safety,’ has served to normalize the idea that laws can and should be passed that regulate who qualifies as a woman and what opportunities she has access to. Now, armed with a recent victory at the Supreme Court that upheld those laws, men like Scott Yenor are looking to cash in.

Will America’s women let them?

I remember when, almost a year ago, Graham Platner first announced that he was running for Senate. I saw it everywhere: a populist oyster farmer & veteran was taking on Maine Governor Janet Mills and the rest of the ‘Democratic establishment’ in a must-win 2026 Senate race. Like everyone else, I was interested; after all, Susan Collins has been a remarkably stubborn incumbent, and in other states, bringing in a political outsider has worked before. His politics quickly won him the endorsement of the Democratic Party’s progressive kingmakers: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ro Khanna, David Hogg, and others all threw their weight behind Platner.

Then the problems began. In October, reports surfaced that he had made loads of bigoted Reddit comments in the past, including one that victim-blamed women who have faced sexual violence.

But he’s changed, right?

Then came scrutiny over the Totenkopf—a Nazi symbol—he had tattooed on his chest. He claimed he did not know of its significance when he got it and had it covered up.

But he’s changed, right?

Then came the report a few days later that he had previously called his tattoo ‘my Totenkopf,’ clearly undercutting the excuse he’d given.

But he’s changed, right?

By this point, I was no longer buying into the Platner hype. Although I agreed with his politics and hoped that he had indeed changed, I knew that, especially in this race against Collins, he’d be a liability. But he pressed on. His supporters pressed on. His lead in the polls only grew.

I could see why: outside of controversies, he was saying all the right things. He was highly vocal in his support for the LGBTQ+ community and especially vulnerable trans kids. He opposed Trump’s weaponization of ICE. He supported Ukraine. He opposed AIPAC and labeled Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. He called US billionaires ‘oligarchs.’ And he championed labor unions.

Then in February, he went on a conspiracy theorist’s podcast and said he was a ‘longtime fan.’

But he’s changed, right?

In May, it was reported that he’d cheated on his wife and sexted with multiple women.

But he’s changed, right?

Then, last month, he was accused of domestic violence and was alleged to have repeatedly told a former girlfriend that he fantasized about having a person break into his home so he could rape them “to show them that [he’s] dominant.”

At the time, I called him a bad person and said he was unfit to serve. Many others did as well. But he pressed on. His supporters pressed on. A few days later, he overwhelmingly won the Democratic primary despite his string of controversies. The Democratic establishment united behind him, and the matchup was set.

Because he’s changed, right?

Then, just yesterday, he was accused of raping a woman in 2021. Like clockwork, his progressive backers like Bernie, Warren, Khanna, and Hogg rescinded their endorsements and called on him to drop out of the race. As did Zohran Mamdani, Chuck Schumer, Ruben Gallego, Tim Walz, and nearly every PAC that initially endorsed him. According to reports, he’s now considering suspending his campaign. And I agree: Graham Platner must go, especially while there is still time to replace him.

But it needs to be asked: why now? How is it that the line has only been drawn here? It implies that everything else he’s done—a history of bigoted comments, a Nazi tattoo, adultery, domestic violence, and fantasies of rape—somehow isn’t disqualifying. Because except for maybe the first one, all of these things are. And these are all things that I, along with most left-leaning Americans, will readily criticize Republicans over. Don’t believe me?

We say that former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s insane porn forum comments are disqualifying. We say that former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin’s 2012 ‘legitimate rape’ comments are an example of unacceptable victim-blaming and disqualifying. We say that Elon Musk’s Nazi salute—and subsequent denial—during Trump’s second inauguration is unforgivable and disqualifying.

We also say that Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels—and subsequent cover-up—is disqualifying. We say that Ken Paxton’s divorce on “biblical grounds” is hypocritical and disqualifying. And we say that Herschel Walker’s accusations of domestic violence are horrific and disqualifying.

These things aren’t just disqualifying when a Republican does them; whether or not they are disqualifying transcends politics. National stakes be damned. ‘Relatable persona’ be damned. Progressivism be damned. And if Republicans don’t choose to hold their own to those standards, then that’s on them. It makes their appeals to character less effective and allows Democrats to attack GOP candidates on their disqualifying characteristics. That is not a position that the American left should be willing to lose. Especially not over someone like Platner.

Within the LGBTQ+ community, Delaware Representative Sarah McBride has received sporadic criticism for saying that advocates need to “create space for some imperfect allies.” In her words, this means recognizing that “if we are gonna have 50 percent plus one in support of basic nondiscrimination protections, if we’re going to have 50 percent plus one in support of protecting access to medically necessary care, that, by definition, will have to include some people in the 70 percent who oppose trans people participating in sports” and meeting them where they’re at.

Although McBride’s comments were said in the context of trans rights, they can be applied to all issues. After all, those within a given coalition almost certainly won’t agree on everything because politics is complicated by nature, but where they agree is more important than where they don’t. Through my work, I’ve gotten to speak with imperfect allies like Nebraska State Sen. Merv Riepe, a Republican who supported banning trans people from sports but has since single-handedly blocked every attack on trans people in his state. I got the sense that he’s a good person who’s trying to do the right thing, and I have a great deal of respect for him.

Graham Platner is a different kind of imperfect ally. He’s the kind of ally who says exactly what I want to hear: he vehemently opposes any attacks on the trans community even when it’s not the most popular position. But, based on everything I’ve seen, it’s clear to me that he isn’t fit for public office. There are simply no standards that he holds himself to. How can we be so sure his ‘perfect’ positions won’t change once he’s elected?

Because of that, I’d rather vote for someone like Merv than someone like Graham. I may not particularly enjoy being governed by people I disagree with, but I’m sick and tired of being governed by bad people with no morals who use their positions to hurt others.

And I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one.

On May 13th, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed anti-trans Senate Bill 904 into law, which went into effect that day due to receiving a two-thirds majority in the legislature. As its sponsor, State Sen. Todd Gollihare, explained it, the law merely “determines the fiscal policy of Oklahoma to say whether the taxpayers will pay for [gender-affirming care].” Accordingly, Gollihare has primarily pushed it as a “bill prohibiting Medicaid funding for gender transition procedures.” And that part is true: SB 904 explicitly prohibits Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care for all ages.

However, unlike the 12 other states that have implemented similar restrictions on Medicaid, Senate Bill 904 goes much further, stipulating that “no state property, facility, or building may be used to provide gender transition procedures, regardless of whether the procedures are provided to a minor or an adult.” As if that wasn’t enough, it also vaguely states that “public funds shall not be used, granted, paid, or distributed to any entity, organization, or individual for the provision or subsidy of any gender transition procedures.” Finally, it makes it a misdemeanor for state employees to allow public funds to be used for gender-affirming care, which carries up to one year of jail time and/or a $500 fine.

Taken together, these restrictions constitute an unprecedented assault on trans adults’ access to gender-affirming care. To understand why, it’s worth examining each of the three provisions individually, starting with the ban on Medicaid coverage. As mentioned above, SB 904 bans Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care for all ages, and in Oklahoma, that’s a big deal: according to federal data, 468,547 Oklahoman adults—nearly 15%—are enrolled in Medicaid, the 3rd-highest adult enrollment rate among states that ban gender-affirming care coverage, after Kentucky and Louisiana.

For trans Oklahomans, this rate may be even higher. In 2022, UCLA’s Williams Institute estimated that 21.2% of transgender adults are enrolled in Medicaid, a rate 1.5x higher than that of the general population. Assuming uniformity, this means that as many as 23% of Oklahoman trans adults may be reliant on Medicaid and, as a result of SB 904, are no longer able to access the gender-affirming care they need.

Furthermore, 20% of working Oklahomans are employed by state or local governments, and now, their insurance plans can no longer provide coverage for gender-affirming care either. On top of that, an additional 5% of the state’s workforce is employed by the federal government, which cut gender-affirming care from its insurance plans earlier this year. And another 8% of Oklahomans get their healthcare through ACA individual plans—state-subsidized plans that are also subject to SB 904’s new restrictions on gender-affirming care.

Through this data, the picture becomes much clearer: gender-affirming care just got a lot more difficult to access in Oklahoma. As a result of SB 904, many trans Oklahomans will now find themselves having to pay out-of-pocket for the care they need—and until recently, were insured for—posing a potentially insurmountable financial barrier to medical transition, especially among those who rely on Medicaid.

Even for those who aren’t affected by these cuts, the story doesn’t end here. SB 904 bars state property from being used to provide gender-affirming care, and as StateImpact Oklahoma reported last month, this provision almost immediately forced the University of Oklahoma’s health system, OU Health, to stop offering this care. The impact of this is undoubtedly significant: OU Health is the largest health system in the state, and it employs over 1,300 physicians—nearly 27% of the state’s total of 4,868. OSU Health, which has been similarly affected, employs another 2.5% of the state’s physicians.

As such, this provision means that almost 30% of the state’s doctors are no longer legally allowed to provide gender-affirming care—something that alone would undoubtedly strain the already dwindling number of providers of that care in the state. But it somehow gets even worse: SB 904 also includes a ban on public funds from going towards “the provision or subsidy of any gender transition procedures,” and this part is much more vague.

Questions primarily center around the word ‘subsidy,’ and because Gollihare never clarified its meaning, providers have been left to form their own interpretations. Does it include only direct funding, or is a provider that receives state funds technically using those funds to subsidize gender-affirming care if it requires those funds to stay financially afloat? We don’t know the answer to that question, and like all vague anti-trans laws with criminal penalties, it leads to overcompliance. As the ACLU of Oklahoma’s legal director, Megan Lambert, put it in an interview with StateImpact Oklahoma, “folks are really hesitant to try to separate funding streams when any kind of commingling of those funds can result in a criminal misdemeanor.”

And what has followed is an unprecedented shortage of appointments for gender-affirming care. As of the writing of this story, Planned Parenthood’s location in Oklahoma City has only 4 appointments for gender-affirming care in the next 3 months. Tulsa has none. Last Friday, those figures were 6 and 2, respectively. Telehealth appointments, which are shared between all 5 states in Planned Parenthood’s ‘Greater Plains’ region, are also scarce, with only 8 available between now and September.

Meanwhile, locations in neighboring Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas all have an abundance of appointments available later this week. It must also be stressed that these are the availability figures for a provider that isn’t directly affected by SB 904, as an executive order issued by the state’s governor last year has already banned Planned Parenthood from receiving state funds. According to reports, other clinics have been similarly swamped.

In other words, SB 904 has delivered a near-death blow to trans adults’ access to care in the state, regardless of insurance coverage status and ability to pay. In a bit of irony, this means that trans Oklahomans will have better luck finding care if they travel to states that have historically been much more hostile to trans people, like Kansas, Missouri, and Texas. But not everyone has that choice, with work schedules, costs, and vehicle access posing significant barriers.

As does incarceration: the state’s Department of Corrections has interpreted the new law to prohibit it from allowing those in its custody to access gender-affirming care, going as far as saying that “inmates arriving at an assessment and reception center, who are received with hormone therapy prescriptions, shall have that therapy discontinued.” The same is almost certainly true for county jails. Although Oklahoma doesn’t have a criminal bathroom law, it did just introduce a new crime targeted at trans people and their allies: spending state funds on gender-affirming care.

But above all, Senate Bill 904 provides a roadmap; a roadmap for other states to follow in curtailing gender-affirming care access for all ages, but also a roadmap for us to know what to expect and how to push back. As the Trump administration gears up to bar care centers that provide gender-affirming care to minors from accepting Medicare and Medicaid, SB 904 offers an important window into how that ban—and a hypothetical nationwide ban on care for at least some adults—will likely be enforced. And it also gives us the knowledge that this ban will not be absolute. Providers—however few—will push back.

However, for trans Oklahomans, the day that their state threatens care for trans adults has arrived. We can only hope that providers are able to meet the moment.

Like in many other states, incarcerated trans people in Missouri have long struggled to access gender-affirming care. For many years, the state enforced a so-called ‘freeze frame’ policy, a common approach at the time that saw hormone therapy barred from anyone who hadn’t already begun receiving it prior to their arrest. Although this also meant trans people wouldn’t be detransitioned, it didn’t allow trans people to transition, either—making them wait until their release to get necessary care that the prison system is, at least in theory, legally required to provide.

That changed eight years ago. Unable to access the care she needed, a transgender woman in Missouri Department of Corrections custody fought back, and, in the ensuing case, secured a ruling that struck down the DOC’s policy as it applied to hormone therapy on Eighth Amendment grounds. However, that case, known as Hicklin v. Precythe, notably didn’t challenge the DOC’s categorical denial of gender-affirming surgery, and in 2023, the state legislature codified the surgery ban through Senate Bill 49.

Even as the state became more hostile to transgender Missourians, the Hicklin ruling was never appealed, and thus, for eight years, it has remained settled law. However, in March, one state representative took it upon himself to alter that status quo: Dirk Deaton. Being the sponsor of this year’s corrections appropriations bill, House Bill 2009, Deaton tacked on a provision barring the DOC from spending its appropriated funds on “any cross-sex hormones, or gender transition surgery undertaken for the purpose of any gender transition.”

Explaining his reasoning for tacking the provision onto the bill while speaking on the House floor in March, Deaton had this to say:

“A number of years ago, there was a court decision that indicated that certain gender transition sorts of measures, including specifically hormone therapies, [were] required under the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution. This was a federal decision, and the Department of Corrections has been operating under that.

Now, since that time, the Eighth Circuit, you know, there’s been a lot of appointments there. There’s been a lot of change, I think, in the national conversation around this issue, and I think conditions have changed significantly, and so we’re trying to insert this language.”

Here, Deaton admits to knowing that his proposal has already been ruled unconstitutional, and yet, he is deciding to push it anyway, thinking that a more conservative judiciary will give him a favorable ruling. And if this feels familiar, that’s because it is: this is the same strategy that conservatives used to get Roe v. Wade overturned, except here, the move is much more aggressive.

While the law that led to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization banned abortions after 15 weeks—5 weeks shy of a legally permissible 20-week ban—Deaton’s provision goes even further than the ‘freeze frame’ policy that led to Hicklin, entirely barring gender-affirming care from those who have already begun medically transitioning as well. As such, under this provision, trans people in Missouri’s prisons will be forcibly detransitioned, and Deaton clearly knows this:

“We do provide healthcare for offenders and there are certain offenders currently receiving hormone therapy for the purposes, as I understand it, of a gender transition. And so this would speak to that, and in a manner of public policy, allow the general assembly to speak into this as to what we believe and deem is an appropriate use in expenditure of taxpayer dollars or not.

And as if that wasn’t enough, he concluded his tirade by dehumanizing those in prison and implying that the trans people in question deserve to have their healthcare stripped away:

“Because recall…these are people that have been adjudicated of a crime. They’ve been convicted of a crime. They have been sentenced to prison. They are incarcerated on the taxpayer’s dime, for their room and board and also for their healthcare—paid 100% by the taxpayer. And what is appropriate healthcare under those circumstances, that’s what this speaks to.”

In the end, HB 2009 ended up overwhelmingly passing both chambers, and on June 30th, it was signed into law by Governor Mike Kehoe. Effective as of yesterday, it now governs the Missouri Department of Corrections’ operations—as well as the lives of the trans people in its custody. It also makes Missouri only the 7th state (and the second this year, after Oklahoma) to pass a law entirely banning gender-affirming care within its prisons. Here’s what that map currently looks like:

Note that Georgia and Idaho have had their bans blocked in court. For sources, tables, and more maps, head to Transitics’ CATPALM page.

HB 2009’s passage comes amid a backdrop of an aggressive campaign by the Trump administration to deny trans prisoners access to healthcare—a campaign Deaton himself acknowledged when he first proposed the ban in committee earlier in March. As Transitics has extensively reported, that campaign essentially amounts to medical experimentation: trans inmates in federal custody are being forcibly ‘tapered’ off of hormone therapy, misgendered, deadnamed, and made to live as their assigned sex at birth. The Trump administration has admitted to implementing this despite being aware of the adverse mental health effects that it will have.

Thanks to HB 2009, Missouri is no different. While drafting the law, state legislators were explicitly told by the director of the DOC that similarly to the court in Hicklin, the Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth Circuit Courts ‘have been pretty consistent’ in ruling that gender-affirming hormone therapy is medically necessary and that denying it violates the Eighth Amendment. They were explicitly told that the litigation surrounding Trump’s policy was still ongoing. They were explicitly told by Deaton himself that there are people whose lives the law was going to affect, and that—unlike the Trump administration’s policy—the denial of care would be immediate. And they passed it anyway.

Now, starting today, trans people in Missouri DOC custody will start having the rug pulled out from under them. They will be forcibly detransitioned without even being given time to adjust. And if a court intervenes? Well, Missouri has clearly shown it’s more than willing to ignore a court ruling that still legally binds it to provide this care.

Who’s to say the state won’t do that again?

This morning, the Supreme Court released its decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox and, in a widely expected 6-3 ruling, upheld trans sports laws nationwide. This decision, the latest legal blow to transgender rights, comes only a few months after the court’s 8-1 ruling striking down conversion therapy bans and a year after the court’s 6-3 ruling upholding youth gender-affirming care bans. In doing so, the court has signaled to right-wing groups that the manufactured culture war against trans Americans—which started with sports participation—has largely succeeded in achieving many of the legal changes they’ve pushed for.

But notably, the 29-page majority opinion, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, stipulates that its holding is not absolute, writing that “these cases do not present the distinct question of whether, under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may allow biological males who identify as female to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams.” Instead, the decision, like the one in Skrmetti v. United States (2025), only decides whether or not schools may “determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex.” And because the ACLU challenged the laws on both Title IX—which governs discrimination in federally funded education programs—and 14th Amendment Equal Protection grounds, the court addressed each claim separately, starting with the Title IX challenge.

In page 10, Kavanaugh unequivocally refutes the first claim, stating that “the term ‘sex’ in the 1972 Title IX statute, the 1974 Javits Amendment [the specific provision governing sports], and the 1975 Title IX regulations cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.” Continuing, Kavanaugh writes that “the ordinary meaning of the term “sex” at the time of enactment in the early 1970s was biological sex and not gender identity, particularly in the sports context.” Although this interpretation may seem new, it is nearly identical to the one advanced by fellow Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020)—which extended employment discrimination protections to transgender Americans. There, Gorsuch, setting up the argument that gender identity discrimination necessitates sex discrimination, wrote:

“The only statutorily protected characteristic at issue in today’s cases is ‘sex’—and that is also the primary term in Title VII whose meaning the parties dispute. Appealing to roughly contemporaneous dictionaries, the employers say that, as used here, the term ‘sex’ in 1964 referred to ‘status as either male or female [as] determined by reproductive biology’… Because the employees concede the point for argument’s sake, we proceed on the assumption that ‘sex’ signified what the employers suggest, referring only to biological distinctions between male and female.”

And in his concurrence today, Gorsuch echoed this reasoning while justifying his rejection of the plaintiffs’ Title IX claim, stating that “the Court understands the term ‘sex’ in Title IX to mean biological sex, just as we understood that term in Title VII in Bostock.” To that end, he writes that “Title IX anticipates and approves single-sex living accommodations and sports teams in school settings; it does not treat them as unlawful discrimination.” As such, because some sex discrimination is allowed under Title IX, and because ‘sex’ is construed to mean ‘biological sex,’ restricting school and collegiate sports on the basis of biological sex does not violate Title IX.

It’s worth noting that B.P.J. did not contest the majority’s interpretation of ‘sex’ in Title IX as ‘biological.’ Similarly, the 3 liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Elena Kagan—joined the majority in rejecting the Title IX claim using Gorsuch’s reasoning, though they stressed that “there are plenty of contexts outside of athletics in which Title IX applies and does not allow sex distinctions like this one to be drawn.”

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Meanwhile, rejecting the Equal Protection argument, Kavanaugh endorses the arguments put forward by West Virginia and Idaho, who defended their laws by stating that their laws “help prevent serious physical injuries to female athletes and preserve opportunities for female athletes to fairly compete and succeed.” On the first point, Kavanaugh writes:

“The safety risks are at their apex in contact sports, such as soccer, basketball, field hockey, lacrosse, and ice hockey, among others. And safety concerns also exist in ostensibly non-contact sports, such as volleyball, where spiked balls can cause serious injuries, and softball, where line drives can similarly cause significant harm.”

Although this argument is nothing new, his mention of volleyball is of some interest, as it appears to be a direct nod to Payton McNabb, who became prominent for her anti-trans advocacy after being injured by a spiked ball. But Kavanaugh’s rhetoric escalates in the next paragraph:

“Sports are generally zero sum. Every biological male who makes the team takes a roster spot from a female athlete. Every biological male who earns playing time reduces the playing time of a female athlete. Every biological male who starts takes a starting position from a female athlete. Every biological male who wins a race takes the gold medal away from a female athlete. And so on. Even if only one or a few males were to play on a women’s or girls’ team, that would still place specific individual female athletes at a significant competitive disadvantage.”

This, of course, largely echoes conservatives’ main attack against trans athletes, which contends that trans women who are allowed to participate in women’s categories are ‘stealing’ medals and opportunities from cis women. Agreeing with both arguments, Kavanaugh writes that a sex-based classification “is substantially related to those interests” and, as such, allows the laws to overcome intermediate scrutiny.

Moreover, addressing B.P.J.’s narrower claim, he writes that “States are not required to conduct an individual-by-individual comparison of the physical and athletic capabilities of all biological males in order to satisfy intermediate scrutiny.” Rather, “intermediate scrutiny permits a sex-based classification that, as here, is “not invidious, but rather realistically reflects the fact that the sexes are not similarly situated in certain circumstances.”

But while there are many things this ruling impacts, there are also many things it doesn’t. Firstly, as stated earlier, it does not require that states or schools adopt policies banning trans athletes. Nor does it establish that allowing trans athletes to compete in women’s categories explicitly violates Title IX. Instead, like Skrmetti, it defers that matter entirely, writing that “the legislatures and the schools are better equipped—and under the Constitution, are the more appropriate entities—to assess the competing medical and scientific considerations and draw appropriate lines.”

As such, today’s decision, coupled with the fact that Title IX does not expressly mandate strict sex separation in sports, potentially undermines the Trump administration’s threats against schools and universities over trans sports participation. If true, that would be a massive victory: over the past year and half, Trump has weaponized federal funding through the lens of Title IX enforcement—in fact, his executive order on trans women in sports itself entirely relies on his administration’s restrictive interpretation of Title IX. Furthermore, the Department of Justice has similarly attempted to argue that “failing to maintain sex-separated intimate spaces [defined as ‘bathrooms, showers, locker rooms, or dormitories’] can also violate federal law” as it “can violate Title IX by denying women access to the full scope of sex-based protections in education.”

By emphasizing that the authority to regulate this issue lies with the states and schools, the Supreme Court complicates the federal government’s assertion that Title IX itself imposes a uniform and restrictive rule; whether or not that argument is advanced in court will be up to the few institutions willing to challenge the funding restrictions. It’s also worth mentioning that Title IX does not explicitly require that educational institutions maintain sex-segregated sports teams or bathrooms. That said, his administration likely won’t interpret the ruling in that fashion. If anything, the federal government will only use this ruling to double down on its aggressive enforcement of Title IX as it did following Skrmetti.

Some institutions may comply in advance. Lawsuits may attempt to incorporate the ruling into arguments that hinge on the court’s restrictive interpretation of Title IX. And it won’t undo the damage that has already been done: the NCAA will continue to entirely bar the handful of trans athletes from collegiate sports; California will continue to essentially nullify the accomplishments of trans athletes like AB Hernandez; and despite Kavanaugh’s urging that “no student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” trans kids who want to play sports with their friends will continue to face harassment from anti-trans voices in their communities and online. Thanks to today’s ruling, that harassment will only get worse.

Last Tuesday, as the nation’s eyes were fixed on the ongoing feud between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic establishment, a different battle was raging in upstate New York: the race that likely decided the next representative of New York’s 21st congressional district. That race, which was sparked by current congresswoman and prominent Trump ally Elise Stefanik’s unexpected retirement following her failed gubernatorial run, pitted Sticker Mule CEO Anthony Constantino against state assemblyman and Marine Corps veteran Robert Smullen.

As the only fiercely contested GOP House primary in the state, it was bound to get ugly—and almost immediately, it did. Constantino called Smullen a “f*cking coward” and an “evil person.” Smullen called Constantino “unhinged” and “dangerously unfit to serve in public office.” Both candidates even threatened to sue each other.

But in the end, it wasn’t close. In April, Trump endorsed Constantino, and come election day, Constantino ended up winning the nomination by almost 20 points. Given that the district went for Trump by ~21 points, Constantino also appears poised to claim victory—and a seat in Congress—in this November’s midterms.

And for trans Americans, that’s a problem.

Because somehow, Constantino’s anti-trans rhetoric manages to go far beyond that of virtually every other prominent anti-trans Republican politician—including outgoing South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace.

In a video he posted to Facebook in January, Constantino dubbed trans people the “transgender scam” and said that he “strongly advises everyone against ‘transgenderism’” because he “just [doesn’t] think it’s good for humanity.” In the accompanying caption, he wrote that he “advised all humans to stay far away from the transgender bullshit.”

But that isn’t even the worst of it. In late December, Constantino appeared on right-wing media outlet One America News Network, where, in an interview with disgraced former Rep. Matt Gaetz, he said this:

“I think another big bipartisan issue I’d like to see addressed is the detransitioning of America. I’d like to see some legislation passed; we’ve already done a little bit on it, but we need to be aggressive [in] detransitioning America. Maybe it should just be LGB without the T. We need to detransition America because it’s an irreversible procedure.

They’re targeting kids with it. I don’t think Democrats or Republicans like it when we go after kids with transgender ideology and all this craziness. It’s a big winner that I think appeals to everybody.”

Then, in May, he expanded this rhetoric, publishing a lengthy article in right-wing online magazine American Thinker that he simply titled “We Need to Detransition America.” Concerningly, at various points in the article, he ambiguously swaps between targeting his statements towards trans kids and more general attacks, and despite framing his central argument as addressing a ‘fiscal issue,’ that mask often slips.

Towards the beginning, he asks: “How did we ever arrive at a point where the government not only tolerates but also financially supports puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries?”—a statement that implies that the government should do neither. In the next paragraph, he compares gender-affirming care to smoking and alcoholism. And although he does state that “adults are free to make their own decisions” and that “this should not be about hate, cruelty, or denying anyone dignity,” he immediately contradicts these claims too.

He asserts that “the government’s role is to protect its citizens, especially children, not to accelerate confusion or fund irreversible harm.” He then appears to endorse conversion therapy, writing that “children deserve time, guidance, and real psychological support.” Towards the end, he even states that his “dismay over this national madness is precisely why [he has] chosen to step into the political arena” and that “watching this destructive ideology threaten children, families, and taxpayers alike has convinced [him] that silence is no longer acceptable.”

“This is not about personal ambition,” he concludes, “it is about civic duty.”

Aside from repeating these calls on his campaign website and saying he “hopes to propose legislation that fully stops efforts to promote transgenderism to kids,” he additionally writes that “we must also appropriately inform adults who want to transition about the potential harm of doing so.” He does not elaborate on what ‘appropriately informing’ trans adults would look like, but it can be assumed that this would involve significant legal and/or medical gatekeeping of gender-affirming care.

Furthermore, the success of his extreme remarks within the party base prompted attempts from Smullen to cast him as a supporter of trans people, who wrote on an anti-Constantino campaign website called therealanthonyconstantino.com that because Constantino’s company “actively sells pro-transgender merchandise, including items explicitly targeted toward children,” Constantino “provides a valuable platform to the radical transgender community that is trying to indoctrinate our children.” It goes without saying that these attacks did little in the way of the final result.

Although Constantino is seemingly using the phrase ‘Detransition America’ as a euphemism for purging what conservatives call ‘gender ideology,’ in reality, his rhetoric does not end with trans kids—nor does he even claim it does. Because, at its core, to detransition America means to detransition Americans. It means cutting off trans people’s access to gender-affirming care, especially for those who rely on Medicaid or Medicare or are incarcerated. It means forcing trans people to present according to their sex assigned at birth through drag bans. And it means erasing all traces of trans people from governance and public life.

These are not off-handed remarks. This is what Anthony Constantino is running on. And because of his victory on Tuesday, his extreme anti-trans agenda has gotten one step closer to the halls of Congress. We can only hope that House Democrats—who appear poised to retake the majority this November—will block him from implementing it.

Update 11:25 a.m.: Good news: the charge against Ripper has been dismissed by the county prosecutor! The original story, which details the case itself, has been preserved below. Regardless of the outcome, it’s worth a read.

On March 25th, 2026, Kris Ripper walked into a Kansas DMV and replaced her driver’s license. Like other transgender Kansans, Ripper was forced to change the gender marker on her license back to ‘M’ because of Senate Bill 244, which invalidated all licenses that don’t display a person’s ‘biological sex.’

On May 5th, Ripper was driving home from work in the rain. Because it was sunny, her car’s headlights had automatically turned off. That caught the attention of a cop, and she was pulled over.

“After seeing my license, he spent like 10 minutes questioning me on if my license was real before I explained to him that I am a transgender woman,” Ripper said. “It has to say ‘M’ legally.”

“He just awkwardly gave it back to me and sent me on my way with a verbal warning,” she added. Ripper maintains that she wasn’t issued a citation of any kind.

But yesterday, she received a notice in the mail that she had failed to appear before her county’s court for an arraignment.

Her charge? Operating a motor vehicle without a valid license, a class B misdemeanor that carries 6 months of jail time and/or a $1,000 fine, as well as a permanent criminal record.

If she doesn’t appear within 30 days, the notice, which Transitics has reviewed, said, her license will be revoked. Although it isn’t the first time this year that the state is threatening her license, it’s safe to say that the consequences are much more severe this time around. And worse, she says she wasn’t informed that she was being charged at all.

“I literally got this notice in the mail after getting back from work so I can’t even call anyone to double-check,” she said. “Everything I know about the case itself is from searching the case number on the notice,” she added.

“I’m just a little scared and freaking out.”

Although the charge might eventually be dismissed, the damage is done: Ripper is now forced to take on the stress of being threatened with jail time over a crime she knows she didn’t commit. Incredibly, the notice itself even lists the number that corresponds to her new driver’s license. But to her, the most infuriating part is that she’s only in this mess because she complied with the law—a law that has forced her and thousands of other trans Kansans to carry around IDs that don’t reflect who they are. Ironically, the crime she’s being charged with is the exact crime that the Kansas Department of Revenue used to strongarm trans Kansans into turning over their licenses this past February.

But while Kansas’ law might be the most extreme example—initially aiming to revoke trans people’s licenses just a week after its passage before a court challenge delayed its implementation to late March—what it accomplishes isn’t unique. Just this year, a record 6 states have passed laws or adopted policies restricting gender markers on driver’s licenses, bringing the total number of states with these policies from 4 to 10. Here’s a map of those policies:

Dark red denotes states that ban gender marker changes, while stripes denote the states that adopted their policies in 2026. For sources, tables, and more maps, head to Transitics’ CATPALM page.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach recently defended SB 244 in court, saying that Kansas driver’s licenses must “contain objective, accurate [sex] information” because they are used to “identify the individual in a variety of situations, including interactions with law enforcement.” The irony isn’t lost on Ripper, who, after hearing the quote, said that “they just don’t believe trans people can actually pass as their preferred gender.”

And that may very well be true. After all, Ripper received scrutiny for not appearing male—a situation the state is effectively arguing is impossible. She isn’t alone, either: across the country, trans people have reported having similar interactions with law enforcement when presenting IDs that don’t fully reflect their identities. At the same time, the number of states taking on positions similar to the one taken by Kobach has only grown.

However, for the trans people who do receive scrutiny, their law enforcement interactions usually start and end with harassment. Kris Ripper may very well be the first to end in criminal charges.

But, given the growing number of states with these restrictions, she likely won’t be the last.

Today, House Republican Nancy Mace, who has represented South Carolina’s 1st District since 2021, was resoundingly defeated in her bid to become the next governor of South Carolina. With 54% of votes counted, Mace has only garnered 11.4% of the vote in the Republican primary, a figure that places her in 5th place out of 7 candidates and dead last among those still in the race. Tonight’s result means that Mace will exit public office when her term expires next January and likely spells the end of her political career.

If her name seems familiar, that’s for good reason. Over the past two years, Mace—who once described herself as “pro-transgender rights”—has repeatedly made headlines for her extreme anti-trans positions. Shortly after Trump’s election in November 2024, Mace successfully convinced House Speaker Mike Johnson to implement a trans bathroom ban in the Capitol. Her push was meant to target openly trans Rep. Sarah McBride, who had just been elected two weeks prior and indicated she’d follow the rules. 

Unwilling to let the issue rest there, in January 2025, Mace and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert entered the women’s restroom and confronted a cis woman they mistook for McBride. It’s worth noting that while Boebert ended up apologizing for the incident, Mace never did.

Then, in May, Mace went on to say this during a House hearing:

“I believe the trans movement is radicalized. Its [sic] a cult. Trans people and their supporters fuel violence, particularly toward women who speak the truth and toward elected officials who refuse to be bullied. Men who crossdress as women are mentally ill. They are violent toward women.”

The preceding month, Mace had gone viral for using the ‘tranny’ slur to refer to trans people while speaking at the University of South Carolina. When she was confronted by a trans student over her language, she mocked the student for finding it ‘derogatory.’ Mace repeated the word three times while recounting the incident a few days later.

And that’s not all. September 2025, shortly after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Mace—without evidence—repeated the right-wing myth that the shooter had been a trans person during a press interview, again using the slur ‘tranny’ in the process. Immediately following that statement, Mace went on to declare that trans people “are violently ill and should be in a straight jacket with a hard steel lock on it.”

A month before that outburst, Mace announced her run for the next year’s gubernatorial election in South Carolina and, because of her national profile, she was considered a frontrunner by media and polls alike. This perception held until April, when Mace’s polling numbers started to slip. A big reason? Donald Trump, who turned against her after she successfully pushed to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act—just like he did with Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. Trump endorsed her rival, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, last week, all but sealing her fate.

Following this resounding defeat, Mace will exit office—and the public spotlight—next January, likely bringing her political career to a close. In doing so, she’ll be removing a prominent and extreme anti-trans voice from the halls of Congress. Hopefully, she doesn’t let the door hit her on her way out.

Late last night, Senior Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee who serves on the DC District Court, issued an injunction blocking the Trump administration from moving trans women held in federal prisons to men’s facilities. The injunction, the seventh such injunction issued by Judge Lamberth in the case Doe v. McHenry, comes after the previous injunctions were lifted in mid-April by an appeals court panel—a panel composed primarily of Obama appointees—which found that the injunction needed to be decided on an individual basis.

At least for now, the ruling means the 14 plaintiffs in the case—a group that forms the majority of the trans women in federal women’s prisons—will remain in their current housing after Lamberth found every one of them would “suffer imminent and irreparable harm” if placed in a men’s facility. The Trump administration has once again appealed his ruling. But as Lamberth pointed out in his decision, this case has been complicated by a separate lawsuit in Northern Texas, where a group of cis women housed in the federal women’s prison FMC Carswell sued the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) over the Biden administration’s policies that allowed trans women to be housed in women’s prisons.

Last week, the court there blocked the Trump administration from housing trans women in cells with cis women and ordered FMC Carswell to use “separate movement, routing, scheduling, or other measures as necessary to prevent overlap between male inmates [which the ruling defines as ‘any inmate who is biologically male, regardless of gender identity’] and female inmates in housing and shared spaces.” As such, Lamberth states that his ruling does not require that the BOP violate the injunction, only that the four trans women in FMC Carswell not be transferred out of the facility.

Over the past 18 months, the federal government’s policies surrounding trans people in prisons have become a serious cause for concern. On his first day back in office, Trump signed Executive Order 14168, which, along with erasing trans people at the federal level, implemented a slew of restrictions on the trans people held in federal prisons. Immediately, those who were receiving gender-affirming care were stripped of their medications, and the BOP began preparing to move the handful of trans women in its custody to men’s prisons, sparking legal challenges. Coincidentally, both cases were randomly assigned to Lamberth, who has consistently ruled against the Trump administration when it comes to this issue.

Although these policies only directly impact federal prisons, they’ve reverberated across many states as well. In December, the Trump administration stopped enforcing the federal sexual violence protections for trans people in prisons that, up until that point, every state (except Alaska) has abided by since they were finalized in 2012. These repealed protections included provisions prohibiting states from categorically refusing to house a trans prisoner in a facility that aligns with their gender identity. At the same time, the Trump administration has launched investigations into California, Maine, and Washington over their more progressive policies.

However, in the past, courts across the county have found that placing trans women in men’s prisons is extremely harmful and that the resulting violence likely constitutes ‘deliberate indifference,’ which is considered cruel and unusual punishment and is prohibited under the Eighth Amendment. And now that Lamberth’s injunction has addressed the DC Circuit Court’s opinion, it remains to be seen if this standard will continue to be applied during the appeal. Even so, the Trump administration’s increased desire to win on this issue—which no other state has shown thus far—coupled with this fight’s nationalized scope almost certainly means that this case will eventually reach the Supreme Court. Because the court has never directly ruled on policies impacting trans prisoners, any ruling on the issue has the potential to transform the legal landscape that trans people face—for better or worse.

Note: this post is making the rounds in anti-trans circles and has been temporarily paywalled to prevent its misuse.

Every so often, a Democrat will face backlash over thei…

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Today, the Trump administration released a new proposed rule titled “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.” The rule, spearheaded by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and published jointly by every federal agency, aims to “ensure that Federal awards and subawards are not used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” “’diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) policies, principles, or practices,” “gender ideology,” and “the so-called ‘transition’ of a child under 19 years of age from one sex to another.”

In doing so, it will formally codify and broaden the funding prohibitions that were originally established by Executive Orders 14151, 14168, and 14187 in the first few days of Trump’s second term. However, it also directs government agencies not to discriminate against organizations on the basis of their “religious character, affiliation, exercise, or lack thereof,” which legalizes anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in some contexts. And even worse, it repeals the Biden-era rule mandating that recipients of federal funding not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity if they are subject to federal discrimination law. These changes are planned to take effect by October 1st.

Make no mistake: this proposal is extremely destructive. The regulation in question, 2 CFR 200.300, governs virtually all federal funding awards, which, as per 31 U.S.C. § 6401, include “the transfer of anything of value for a public purpose of support or stimulation authorized by a law of the United States, including financial assistance and Government facilities, services, and property” as well as “a grant, a subgrant, a cooperative agreement, or any other transaction” outside of government loans, insurance, and subsidies. In practical terms, this encompasses state & local governments, universities, K-12 schools, healthcare providers, research institutions, non-profit organizations, museums, public libraries, many private businesses, and more.

Seemingly the most straightforward of the three prohibitions is the one on DEI. According to the rule, it’s meant to ban funding from going towards supporting “racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination used by the recipient or subrecipient that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws, including activities where race or intentional proxies for race will be used as a selection criterion for employment or program participation.” Read plainly, this is primarily meant to target DEI hiring practices and some cultural programs as well as to eliminate federal grants that are intended for minorities.

However, the second provision—the ban on ‘gender ideology’—is much more vague. It directly relies on EO 14168, which defines the ‘gender ideology’ as “[replacing] the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.” In the rule, this is expanded to also include “theories or ideologies that deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans, or endorse or advocate for the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic.”

And in its policies, the Trump administration has already interpreted gender ideology extremely broadly, construing it to mean any acknowledgement of trans people in virtually any capacity. Because of this, his government has stopped enforcing federal gender identity discrimination protections, removed all mention of ‘gender identity,’ ‘transgender,’ and even just ‘gender’ from all federal regulations and rules, implemented a bathroom ban in federal buildings, cut gender-affirming care from federal employee insurance plans, banned gender changes on passports, updated federal forms, and tortured trans prisoners, among other things.

As a funding ban, this gets more complicated. The language used—”fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate”—significantly expands EO 14168’s ban on funds directly being used to ‘promote’ gender ideology, and it provides the Trump administration with extensive authority to condition funding. This is especially true given the inclusion of the word ‘facilitate,’ which has been used to justify broad enforcement action against trans people by figures like Texas AG Ken Paxton.

So, for example, if a federally funded high school mentions trans people in lessons, and if the school cannot operate without that funding, is that funding ‘facilitating’ ‘gender ideology’? How about if a federally-funded museum organizes a pride display? Or if a city flies a pride flag at a building that receives federal funds? Or if a university funds research into gender-affirming care? These remain open questions, and that’s a problem. As has already happened with many colleges and youth gender-affirming care providers, entities afraid of losing their funding will likely overcomply in advance.

As a result, trans people will be erased from many areas. American research into trans healthcare may stop almost entirely. Many museums and libraries could drop any mention of trans people. City governments might stop celebrating pride and repeal nondiscrimination ordinances. Larger advocacy organizations may stop addressing the needs of the trans community. And across the board, many entities will likely implement the DOJ’s bathroom guidance, which states that failing to segregate bathrooms by ‘biological sex’ violates federal discrimination laws. Worse, because the rule would also give the existing funding bans more teeth, compliance with those narrower provisions—which some entities have avoided thus far—will become the new bare minimum.

Another big question mark is Medicaid, which is a joint state-federal program that provides health insurance for lower-income Americans. Unlike some other federal funding that is sent to states, funding for Medicaid is considered a federal award, and as a result, it’s possible that the federal government may use this rule to condition that this funding is not spent on gender-affirming care. If this occurs, it’s entirely possible that the handful of GOP-led states that do cover this care—Georgia, Indiana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Utah—will use this to justify ending their coverage. In fact, in the past few years, many states, including Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Ohio, and Wyoming, have already done so as a result of similar political pressure.

Unfortunately, this idea isn’t entirely out of the question. The third provision, the ban on funds being used for gender-affirming care for minors, is the most similar to existing prohibitions. Over the past 16 months, the Trump administration has threatened providers’ entire funding streams over providing this care and has justified doing so through similar language—”fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support.” At the very least, this rule will likely bar the states that do cover gender-affirming care for minors through Medicaid and another similar program, CHIP, from using federal funds for that purpose.

To justify these broad anti-trans funding conditions, the Trump administration wrote that “divisive gender ideologies…harm women, have a corrosive effect on public trust in Federal grantmaking agencies, infringe on religious liberties, and fall outside of specifically enumerated purposes of authorizing legislation.” Furthermore, it states that “ending government-sponsored promotion of divisive gender ideology is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, and trust in government.”

Ironically, it is these very actions that have corroded trans people’s trust in the government, stifled scientific research into trans people’s needs, and made trans people feel much less safe. But therein lies the point: when the Trump administration says ‘public,’ that doesn’t include trans people. Through this rule, it will attempt to leverage the collective might of the federal government in order to impose that worldview onto this nation as a whole. And in many places, it might work—at least for a time. But they should know: trans people can never really be erased.

If you want to read the full rule for yourself and submit a public comment on the proposal, you can do so here. Comments will be accepted until July 13th.

Today, Louisiana Republicans unanimously voted to defer action on anti-trans House Resolution 290. Because the Louisiana legislature must adjourn by June 1st, that deferral likely means that HR 290 will not be considered again this year. And this is a massive victory: in its words, HR 290 “urges and requests the Louisiana Department of Health to study the potential correlation between medications prescribed for any gender-affirming hormone therapy and the incidence of psychosis and related psychiatric conditions in individuals twenty-six years of age and younger.”

Although bills targeting care for trans adults are primarily sponsored by far-right Republicans and have all failed without a hearing, HR 290 is different. Its sponsor, Jessica Domangue, has not written or sponsored any anti-trans legislation in the past and is considered to be a relatively moderate Republican who has not leaned as much into anti-trans messaging. And yet, HR 290 presents a grave threat to gender-affirming care for trans adults both in Louisiana and in other red states.

It opens with two generic statements that are commonly found in bans on gender-affirming care for minors: that the state is responsible for “the health, safety, and well-being of children, adolescents, and young adults” and a description of gender-affirming hormone therapy. However, following this, it makes a problematic assertion:

“Certain medications affecting endocrine and neurological function have been associated in medical literature with possible psychological and psychiatric side effects in some individuals and…psychosis and related psychiatric symptoms, including hallucinations, severe mood disturbances, and dissociative symptoms may significantly impair an individual’s functioning and quality of life.”

This, of course, echoes the right-wing talking point that HRT makes trans adults mentally ill that often accompanies rhetoric about ‘trans shooters’ and associated calls to ban gender-affirming care for adults. But it gets worse. After stating that a review of “psychiatric outcomes in minors and adults would be beneficial to healthcare professionals, patients, and families,” HR 290 describes what the study will look like:

“(1) A review of available peer-reviewed medical and scientific literature concerning psychiatric outcomes associated with estrogen and testosterone therapy, androgen blockers, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and related medications.

“(2) An examination of adverse event data, where available, relating to psychosis, schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, severe mood disorders, dissociative conditions, suicidal ideation, and other significant psychiatric symptoms.

“(3) Consultation with behavioral health specialists, endocrinologists, obstetrician-gynecologists, psychiatrists and therapists, pediatric specialists, pharmacologists, and other qualified healthcare professionals representing a diversity of medical perspectives.

“(4) Recommendations, if warranted, regarding informed consent standards, patient screening practices, mental health evaluations, monitoring protocols, and areas requiring additional research.”

The idea of the first point isn’t new: in November, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS also released a ‘review’ of evidence for gender-affirming care for minors that entirely disavowed accepted medical standards in favor of a talk therapy approach. The outcome of this review was essentially predetermined; aside from the fact that the review’s authors were all known opponents of gender-affirming care, the review itself was specifically sought by Trump to justify Executive Order 14187’s ban on care for trans people under 19.

HR 290’s study would likely be no different. Since 2023, Louisiana has banned gender-affirming care for minors, and no amount of evidence—or opposition from the medical community—has changed that. Worse, like the HHS, the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) has a record of opposing gender-affirming care: after Republican Governor Jeff Landry took office in 2024, it quietly cut trans Louisianans’ Medicaid coverage despite not having repealed a 2022 policy that affirmed coverage and labeled that care as ‘medically necessary.’

The second point lists a variety of medical conditions that Domangue implies could result from gender-affirming care, including psychosis, schizophrenia, and suicidal ideation. It’s worth noting that, as Transitics reported in March, the Trump administration reviewed—and ignored—similar evidence when making its anti-trans prison policy.

Finally, in the last point, HR 290 explicitly spells out its threat and asks the LDH to recommend changes to informed consent standards and patient screening practices, both of which could result in laws gatekeeping or even banning gender-affirming care outright.

In today’s committee hearing, Domangue justified her bill by saying she simply “would like to see the data,” and as part of that, she kept the discussion to care for adolescents while doing her best to cover up the fact that HR 290 also targets trans adults under 26. However, in doing so, she encountered opposition from an unexpected source: fellow Republican Representative Rhonda Butler.

Funnily enough, Butler took issue with the fact that the study has the potential to reopen discussion into Louisiana’s ban, saying that she “just [doesn’t] want to shift policy and discussions toward a broader acceptance of minors making gender-related medical decisions.” And Butler’s fear isn’t without precedent: after banning care for trans minors, Utah Republicans ordered the Utah DHHS to study patient outcomes. After that study ended up supporting gender-affirming care, it became a significant counterargument against the ban.

Telling Domangue that she “[didn’t] know how LDH would get this data if it’s illegal in Louisiana” and that the proposal “may hit some big roadblocks,” Butler moved to defer the resolution for later consideration. Rather than leave it up for a committee vote, a somewhat visibly defeated Domangue opted to voluntarily defer it before appearing to ask Butler to “come see her after.” Given the outcome of the hearing, Domangue may very well end up proposing a rewritten version next year that accounts for Butler’s issues.

Still, at least for now, this is a big victory. But if the study is eventually conducted and if it concludes similarly to the HHS review, its findings could be used by other states to justify restrictions on care for trans adults. Because, although there certainly seems to be a broad lack of political will to implement those restrictions at the moment, that sentiment may not last forever. If that dam breaks, it’ll likely start with a pretext that closely resembles House Resolution 290. Thankfully, that hasn’t come to pass today.

Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has moved to significantly restrict the rights of trans people in prisons. On day one, he signed an executive order that stripped their access to gender-affirming care and required that trans women be housed in men’s prisons. These mandates, which apply to the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), have been the subject of numerous lawsuits and are currently blocked.

Then, in December, the DOJ released a memo announcing that the Prison Rape Elimination Act’s (PREA) protections of transgender prisoners—which date back to 2012—would be removed. As per Transitics’ research, these protections form the basis for 31 states’ transgender inmate housing policies and have been responsible for many advances in trans prisoners’ rights over the last decade. A similar change was made to protections for trans people in ICE detention centers in January.

As part of the case against the BOP’s ban on gender-affirming care, the Bureau released a policy that will forcibly impose conversion therapy—which is recognized as torture—onto the ~2,200 trans people in its custody with no exceptions. And after being ordered to explain the medical basis for its policy, the BOP revealed that it relied on standards for unrelated conditions and that it expects that it will need to collect more data relating to transgender suicides.

Amid this unprecedented assault, Vermont is moving in the opposite direction. Today, its state legislature passed H.550, which is simply titled “an act relating to gender equity within Vermont’s correctional facilities.” The bill opens with a section on legislative intent, where it declares that “gender transition is a deeply personal experience that may involve some combination of social transition, legal transition, medical transition, or none of these.”

The bill then shifts towards prisons and acknowledges that “due to safety concerns, inconsistent medical and mental health care, and insufficient education and resources, among other factors, incarceration often serves as a barrier to gender transition or recognition.” Concluding the section, it states that “gender diverse, intersex, and transgender incarcerated individuals are at a higher risk for abuse, harassment, and sexual violence.”

Already, H.550 is doing what no bill has done before: explicitly acknowledging the unique barriers that trans people face in prisons. And it’s aiming to do something about it. Under its provisions, the Department of Corrections (DOC) will have to ensure “that all individuals are addressed in a manner consistent with their gender identity” and that “staff and contractors receive gender-responsive training.”

Aside from that, it will allow trans people in DOC custody to request to be moved to a facility that aligns with their gender identity. Like the handful of other states with similar policies, these requests will require a “review by the Department’s multidisciplinary review panels” which will “consult with medical personnel, mental health professionals with experience in gender dysphoria or gender-affirming care, and personnel who have received training aligned with nationally recognized standards for gender-affirming care.” However, these requests may be denied “if the Department finds that accommodating the inmate’s request would pose an unreasonable risk to institutional safety or security, the inmate’s health or safety, or the safety or security of other inmates or staff.”

But unlike the 9 states with similar policies, it provides an alternative by allowing the DOC to move trans prisoners to another state’s facility. This opens the door for them to be housed in Colorado, which recently created two units entirely for trans women. It also explicitly instructs the DOC to separately codify and comply with the pre-Trump PREA standards.

Finally, it commissions a report on “current practices related to gender-affirming care in correctional settings” that “shall include recommended statutory language”—signaling that the state will move to codify access to gender-affirming care for trans prisoners in the near future. Once it does, Vermont will become the first state to legally protect gender-affirming care in prisons. That said, this won’t come with any substantial policy changes, as Vermont is already one of the 24 states that provide surgeries and hormone therapy to trans prisoners. Here’s a map of those policies:

Simply put, H.550 is wholly antithetical to everything the Trump administration’s anti-trans prison policies stand for. Because of that fact, Vermont will likely find itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, which has launched investigations into California, Maine, and Washington over their pro-trans prison policies. However, as of now, nothing has come of those investigations, and all three states are yet to give in to Trump’s demands.

And even despite that threat, H.550 was far from controversial. It passed the House by a voice vote before heading to the Senate, where 11 of the chamber’s 13 Republicans voted for its passage. Furthermore, at least 6 of those Republicans voted to suspend the rules—which requires a 3/4th majority—and expedite its passage, meaning the bill now heads to Governor Phil Scott’s desk for his signature. Scott, a socially liberal Republican with a stronger record on trans rights than California Governor Gavin Newsom, is expected to sign it into law.

Today, in a landmark 5–2 decision, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Children’s Hospital Colorado must resume providing care to trans youth. The news comes as part of Bella Boe v. Children’s Hospital Colorado, a class-action lawsuit filed by patients in response to CHC’s January announcement that it was pausing care for trans minors and overturns a lower court decision siding with the hospital. The first state supreme court ruling of its kind, it marks a significant victory for trans youth both in Colorado and nationwide.

In the majority decision’s 30 pages, the author, Justice William Hood, doesn’t hold back. Firstly, he emphasizes the broadness of Colorado’s gender identity discrimination protections, writing that the Colorado General Assembly “has repeatedly declared that gender identity is a protected class,” and because of that, the lower court was correct when finding that “granting the requested injunctive relief would serve the public interest by protecting petitioners and other vulnerable transgender and gender-diverse youth.”

Despite that holding, the lower court still ruled that this interest was outweighed by the fact that “the requested injunction could create a greater risk to a greater number of individuals, which would adversely affect the public interest,” as funding threats “could force CHC to shut down.” However, Hood emphatically rejects this notion:

“We conclude that…strict numerical comparison of affected individuals isn’t appropriate when the individuals seeking injunctive relief are part of a protected class and seeking an injunction because of discrimination based on that protected class. Were it otherwise, minority groups would always lose. But that is not the law. On the contrary, that’s precisely why we have protected classes.”

Here, Hood is declaring that CHC’s choice to sacrifice the rights of trans kids in exchange for funding isn’t a valid option, and this matters. Over the past year, providers across the country have made a similar calculation and, as a result, have left trans kids scrambling for options. Now, at least in Colorado, hospitals can no longer rely on that excuse. Following this, he goes even further and takes aim at the Trump administration itself, writing:

“The trial court’s concern about opposing the public interest by ordering CHC to ‘violat[e]...federal law’ is also misplaced. Why? Because the Kennedy Declaration isn’t federal law. A declaration from the HHS secretary can be a basis for exclusion from federal health care payment programs, but the Declaration itself isn’t a federal law banning gender-affirming care.

“Furthermore, since the trial court issued its order here, the federal district court in Oregon has issued its opinion, concluding that the Kennedy Declaration is unlawful and enjoining HHS from initiating enforcement actions based, in whole or in part, on the Kennedy Declaration.”

This is doing something important: it rejects the idea that the Trump administration’s actions against gender-affirming care—which have been repeatedly framed by both providers and the federal government as being in accordance with ‘federal law’—are law at all. This is an important assertion, as it removes the federal supremacy justification that many providers have cited when cutting care for trans youth.

Next, Hood writes that “without access to medical gender-affirming care, [the plaintiffs] are likely to experience irreversible physical changes to their bodies that are inconsistent with their gender identity.” Conversely, he notes that CHC “has also demonstrated significant potential

harm if the court issues the preliminary injunction and HHS follows through on its threat to exclude CHC from federal health care payment programs,” but that, crucially, that threat “remains speculative” and that “CHC has other avenues to address it.” More specifically, he urges CHC to sue the Trump administration in response to these threats—something care providers have so far refused to do out of a belief that abandoning trans kids is the path of least resistance.

Finally, the decision reaffirms the idea that pausing gender-affirming care is discriminatory on the basis of gender identity, and aside from finding that the hospital is still providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to cis kids, it does something interesting: it cites CHC itself. Hood notes that in response to Trump’s Executive Order 14187—which has formed the basis for these threats—CHC sent a letter to trans kids’ families where it wrote that the ban “denies the families of gender diverse children the same rights as other families.”

Closing out his reasoning, Hood agrees with the plaintiffs’ argument that “CHC can’t avoid responsibility by claiming it’s merely implementing a third-party’s discriminatory agenda.” Here, he holds that “although CHC acted reluctantly and expressed no animus toward transgender patients, the action it chose to take in response to the Kennedy Declaration specifically targeted transgender youth,” and as a result, “it doesn’t absolve CHC of responsibility.”

It goes without saying that this is a major ruling. Starting today, should the Trump administration choose to follow through on its threats, Children’s Hospital Colorado will have no choice but to challenge the restrictions. It can no longer decide to acquiesce. Furthermore, because of the precedent it sets, the same will almost certainly hold true for all other providers in the state.

And the effects won’t just be limited to Colorado, either. As providers are sued in other states with similar protections, Hood’s reasoning will likely form the backbone of these cases moving forward. Hopefully, it’ll only be a matter of time before trans kids’ access to care is mostly restored.

You can read the full decision here:

2026 05 18 Opinion

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Last summer, the Department of Justice announced that it had sent at least 20 subpoenas to providers of care for trans youth. And these subpoenas, which were sent out as part of the Trump administration’s investigations into ‘healthcare fraud’ and ‘false statements’ surrounding gender-affirming care for minors required under EO 14187, were detailed. According to court filings, the DOJ’s request included demands that care centers turn over:

• “Documents sufficient to identify each patient (by name, date of birth, social security number, address, and parent/guardian information) who was prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy.”

• “Documents relating to the clinical indications, diagnoses, or assessment that formed the basis for prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy…for each such patient identified [as having received gender-affirming care].”

• And “all documents relating to informed consent, patient intake, and parent or guardian authorization for minor patients identified [as having received gender-affirming care].”

It must be noted that the information being sought is considered individually identifiable health information under HIPAA privacy standards and can only be disclosed if required by law. It must also be mentioned that in this particular instance, the inclusion of a patient’s name, date of birth, social security number, and address indicates that, unlike other government requests, the risk of patients being reidentified is virtually guaranteed.

Of course, given this risk, at least 7 providers—including the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Boston Children’s Hospital—challenged these subpoenas in court and won favorable rulings. Meanwhile, others—including Rhode Island Hospital (RIH)—instead opted to negotiate with the Trump administration in a bid to get the identifying requests removed.

At least for RIH, these negotiations stretched through April, and on the 28th, the federal government asked RIH for a “conference this week regarding status”; as part of this, RIH proposed times the following day but received no response. Instead, on the 30th, the DOJ filed an enforcement motion almost 2,000 miles away in the Northern District of Texas, a preferred conservative venue.

And it paid off: in a highly unusual move, the district’s only judge—Bush appointee Reed O’Connor—granted the motion on the same day without allowing RIH to respond. The judge has since denied RIH’s request for a stay. 4 days later, the state’s government stepped in and filed a separate case seeking to quash the subpoena, this time in Rhode Island. The judge overseeing that case, Trump appointee Mary S. McElroy, is expected to rule on that motion prior to RIH’s May 14th compliance deadline.

Even just a week ago, most believed that these proceedings would serve as a test case for broader enforcement of the DOJ subpoenas; after all, RIH was the only target of these aggressive proceedings. But that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Last night, it was revealed that NYU Langone (NYULH) had received a grand jury subpoena—again from the Northern District of Texas. Unlike the administrative subpoenas sent to RIH or CHOP, a grand jury subpoena is issued as part of a criminal investigation and likely indicates that the federal government intends to bring charges against providers of gender-affirming care.

According to the information shared by NYULH, the federal government is demanding “information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care at NYULH between 2020–2026, as well as the names of NYULH providers and others who were involved in offering such care at NYULH in that timeframe.” Worse, NYULH shared that it was only “one of several institutions that received a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas.” However, the other recipients of these subpoenas are yet to be identified.

Make no mistake: the information being requested can rather easily be used to make a list of trans kids, their families, and their medical histories. Even if the DOJ were investigating healthcare fraud for the sake of investigating healthcare fraud here—and it can be safe to assume that this is not the case given EO 14187’s political nature—it still faces a significant burden in enumerating why it needs the names, dates of birth, social security numbers, and addresses of trans kids who bear no criminal responsibility in these proceedings under any standard.

Of course, in an April 30th declaration by Lisa K. Hsiao, the acting director of the DOJ’s Enforcement and Affirmative Litigation Branch, the government attempts to claim otherwise:

“The final group of requests [the identifying information requests mentioned above] will permit the United States to evaluate the scope of prescribing the drugs described herein (including the number and age range of patients treated), and consistency of diagnoses… Linking each patient’s clinical record to corresponding billing and insurance claims can demonstrate whether diagnoses were miscoded, which can prove fraudulent intent. Documentation of clinical justification, informed consent, and disclosure of off-label use is key to assessing whether the clinic (and/or potential co-conspirators) concealed or downplayed risks associated with using these drugs in a manner not approved by the FDA. Absence or minimization of such warnings could establish the intent to mislead. Patient charts also typically capture adverse outcomes, side effects, and complications of drug use. By reviewing multiple patient records, the investigative team may reveal systemic use of the same masking codes, fraudulent informed consent documents, etc.

“Finally, providing patient records can provide essential investigative leads. Parents may be witnesses about what disclosures were made. Patients (depending on age and circumstances) may provide information about the informed consent process, side effects, or other false or misleading information about the drugs conveyed during treatment. Health benefit programs tied to identified patients could provide additional information, including claim records, creating a triangulated evidentiary record.”

At least for the first section of this justification, it quickly becomes clear that this amount of identifying information isn’t needed. In fact, all of the goals—minus those requiring ‘documentation of informed consent’—in this section can be achieved using the information that Tennessee will gather under its new gender-affirming care data collection and publishing law. That law collects age, sex, mental health diagnoses, drug information, and provider information but will not collect names, dates of birth, social security numbers, and addresses. Meanwhile, information on informed consent can also be acquired without identifying patients.

The second section isn’t as straightforward. It’s true that parents and patients could serve as witnesses, but the government also clearly indicates that, even if it gets all this data, it will only seek information from some of them. And notably, a similar outcome would be achieved if the DOJ only collected a patient’s parental information and address, as, in virtually every instance, the investigators would be able to get in contact with kids through their parents or legal guardians. In other words, the DOJ wants this information—most of which it admits that it will not need—just in case it might need it later. Worse, it never states that unused data will be deleted.

And there is a much less invasive way: the federal government and hospital could assign unique identifiers to each patient’s records, and, if the investigators want to contact them, the hospital could pass patient information along on an individual basis. Better yet, the hospital could first ask patients if they want to serve as witnesses and pass on their information if they agree.

So why not do this instead? And why not store parents’ information instead of collecting such specific information on kids? We might not ever know.

But here’s what we do know: we know that four states—Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee, and Texas—have made or are actively making lists of trans people using three different methods. Indiana and Kansas internally flagged gender changes to identity documents; Tennessee is collecting patient data; and Texas has been tracking those who ask about changing their gender on their driver’s license.

We also know that no state has been this aggressive in pursuing the identifying information of trans people and especially not of trans kids. And we know that no state wields as much power over a person’s identity as does the federal government.

If the Trump administration is allowed to acquire trans kids’ data, it will keep it even if providers defeat the federal efforts to intimidate them out of providing gender-affirming care to trans youth. That data includes their names, their addresses, their dates of birth, their social security numbers, and their parents’ information; in effect, this is a comprehensive entry of every trans person in the country that sought gender-affirming care as a minor over the past 6 years.

If that isn’t a government list, what is?

On February 25th, the Republican-aligned governor of Puerto Rico, Jenniffer González-Colón, signed anti-trans House Bill 165 into law. The law, known as the “Public Government Restroom Facilities Regulation Act,” implements a bathroom ban on all government properties in the territory. Additionally, the law prohibits government entities from designating bathrooms as ‘inclusive, mixed, or neutral,’ sending a clear message to trans Puerto Ricans that their government does not wish to accommodate them at all.

In a press release, the governor’s office stated that HB 165 “aims to strengthen public safety standards while ensuring that no individual is subjected to unlawful discrimination” and that it “is consistent with Executive Order 14168 issued by President Donald J. Trump.” As part of this, it explicitly borrows the Trump administration’s position that allowing trans women to access women’s spaces is discriminatory against ‘biological’ women, a line that the Department of Justice has used against colleges as well.

However, despite being among the broadest bathroom laws in the nation and the first bathroom ban to pass in a US territory, HB 165 received minimal media attention: aside from the governor’s press release, the only other article written about it had fewer than a hundred views at the time of writing. Unlike with the territory’s extreme ban on gender-affirming care for anyone under 21—Senate Bill 350, which passed last year—opposition to HB 165 never really materialized, and it overwhelmingly passed the Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly by votes of 37–11 in the House and 21–5 in the Senate. That said, the timing of the law’s passage may provide an explanation for this, as it was signed on the same day that Kansas began sending driver’s license revocation letters to trans residents.

But even when compared to the harshest bathroom bans, the rhetoric behind HB 165 is nothing short of extreme. It opens with four pages of legislative findings (by contrast, Idaho’s first bathroom ban, SB 1100 (2023), used half a page), and in the first of its fourteen paragraphs, it begins with this statement:

“We firmly believe that human dignity is unalienable and that every person has a right to use a public restroom in a clean, safe, and accessible manner. In the past few years, the controversy surrounding inclusive, mixed, or neutral restrooms has surged. Specifically, the people who identify as something other than their biological sex have argued that sex distinctions in public bathrooms amount to discrimination against them and violate their human dignity. For this reason, we are not opposed to the idea that persons who identify as something other than their biological sex should receive a reasonable accommodation to attend to their physiological needs without affecting the rights of others.”

Despite expressing this sentiment, after dedicating an entire page to the history of women’s bathrooms, the law immediately goes on the offensive against the trans community:

“Those who advocate for the existence of multi-occupancy gender-neutral bathrooms argue that they need to protect the safety and well-being of those who identify as something other than their biological sex. This constitutes a depreciation and even an erasure, conscious or not, of a problem that is worthy of consideration, which is that there have been many instances, regrettably, where men who self-identify as women have entered women’s bathrooms to assault and rape them. For example, a group of women on the University of Pennsylvania’s swim team spoke up about the case of [Lia’s deadname] Thomas, or how [she’s] made [herself] known, ‘Lia Thomas’, who identifies differently from her biological sex, and how [she] showed them [her] [genitals] and walked around naked in women’s swim team bathrooms. A group of women approached the university’s administration but did not receive a favorable response. Additionally, they brought a coalition of over 35 women who felt uncomfortable, especially after [Lia] expressed that [she] was sexually attracted to women.

“Similarly, there have been instances of sexual violence in schools where adolescents who identify as something other than their biological sex have entered girls’ restrooms. This has also occurred in department stores, supermarkets, to girls in kindergarten, and in other scenarios. Many survivors of sexual assault have opposed these new policies of multi-occupancy gender-neutral bathrooms.”

To substantiate these claims, the law primarily relies on largely anecdotal reports and cites articles by conservative outlets like the Daily Signal and the New York Post. Additionally, it also makes a point to repeatedly deadname and misgender Lia Thomas, who is mentioned despite having never really been relevant to the issue of trans bathroom use.

Then, after claiming that a court ruling upholding a Florida school district’s bathroom ban “represents a great victory for the rights of women,” HB 165 contains a rather humorous double entendre: “los baños no tienen sexo, pero las personas sí.” This sentence can be translated in two ways: one reading is the idea “bathrooms don’t have a sex/gender, but people do,” while the other is that “bathrooms don’t have sex, but people do.”

Finally, the legislature asserts that “it is a clear manifestation of discrimination against women around the world that their still-unsatisfied sanitary needs are given less publicity and importance than problems arising from new ideological identities and that these problems lead to encroachment upon women’s spaces rather than on the privileges of men who self-identify as women.”

This rhetoric doesn’t stop there, either. Although it stipulates that government entities found to be in noncompliance will be fined—similarly to most other bathroom laws—it uses these fines as an opportunity to send a message, stating that any fines will be sent to the Puerto Rican government’s Center for Assistance to Victims of Rape (CAVV). This may be a nice sentiment on its face, but based on the language used earlier in the law, it can be inferred that this is a reference to the idea that allowing trans women into women’s restrooms is comparable to sexual assault.

Unfortunately, House Bill 165 isn’t alone. This year, there are 4 other anti-trans bills making their way through the Legislative Assembly, including a ban on trans sports participation—which has already passed the House—and another mandating that trans women be housed in men’s prisons. But given that this law and last year’s youth gender-affirming care ban were both passed by supermajorities, it doesn’t seem that there’s much political opposition to either of these measures. Hopefully that’ll change as these bills receive more attention.

Author’s note: the author is a fluent Spanish speaker and has manually translated the quoted contents of House Bill 165 to English from its original Spanish text. References to Lia Thomas’ deadname and instances of the law misgendering her have been removed out of respect for her identity.