On February 22nd, 2022, Texas made national headlines when it announced investigations into several trans kids’ families over potential child abuse. Gender-affirming care—which was still legal for minors at the time—“constituted child abuse,” the state argued, and “to protect Texas children” from that abuse, it was willing to pull families apart. To most trans Americans and their allies, the news is often remembered as an outrage, a dramatic escalation in the push to target the healthcare access of trans youth.

I can only remember February 22nd as the day my world fell apart.

I was 15 when I first became afraid that I’d be taken away from my parents. I’d been questioning my gender for a while, and by that point, I was pretty certain that I was transgender. And reading the news from my Austin, Texas bedroom through teary eyes, I only knew that I had to hide. “No matter how bad my mental health gets,” I’d tell myself, “my parents can never know.”

After that, I’d have the same nightmare every night: my parents would find out somehow, and right when they did, I’d lose them. Sometimes, they’d die in a plane crash or freak accident. Others, they’d suffer a heart attack and die before the ambulance arrived. But most often, CPS agents would break in through the windows and take me away from them. Eventually, I became afraid of going to sleep altogether, knowing that when I did, I’d live through my worst fear.

Over time, my mental health continued to decline, and as my depression worsened, suicidal thoughts crept in. Still, my family—my only support system—could never know. I was left to suffer alone and in silence, fearful that if I spoke up, I’d lose everything I still had.

In June 2023, the investigations were replaced by a law, Texas Senate Bill 14, which banned all forms of gender-affirming care for minors. The threat mostly gone, my fears soon began to subside, and the next month, I finally came out to my parents. Although it did take them a while to fully come to terms with me, they did immediately agree to find me a therapist.

Except that search ended up taking two months, as the dozens upon dozens of therapists they contacted would always reply in the same way: ‘We can’t.’ According to them, the state also banned them from ‘facilitating’ gender-affirming care, and because of that, they believed they’d be criminally liable if a trans kid they worked with were to get gender-affirming care in another state.

Feeling hopeless and unable to get care of any kind, one night in early August 2023, I walked up to a ledge in my home and prepared myself to make the jump. Thankfully, at the last second, I decided to dial into a hotline and was eventually talked down. That was the closest I came to taking my life. Although things improved slightly after my parents found a therapist willing to risk seeing me, I’d remain depressed and suicidal until I turned 18 and began hormone therapy shortly after on October 22nd, 2024—exactly 32 months since my nightmare began.

I’m not alone in my experiences, but Texan trans kids are. Even now, Texas is the only state that has ever threatened to take trans kids away from their families over gender-affirming care. Furthermore, Texas is also the only state that doesn’t allow trans kids to seek talk therapy and other mental health/psychological services. Had I lived in another red state, my story would probably be very different.

At the center of my story and these restrictions lies one man: Ken Paxton. On February 18th, 2022, he formally asserted that under Texas law, gender-affirming care for minors constituted child abuse, and that opinion formed the sole legal foundation for the state’s child abuse investigations that were announced a few days later. To date, no other state AG has issued a similar interpretation.

And buried deep within that same opinion was a separate claim: “the failure to stop a doctor or another parent from conducting these treatments and procedures on a minor child can…constitute child abuse.” As such, he wrote, “any person that conducts or facilitates these procedures or treatments could be engaged in child abuse, whether that be parents, doctors, counselors, etc.” In March of this year, he released a separate opinion clarifying these statements, writing that any therapists who don’t “assist with ‘stabilizing,’ ‘alleviating,’ or ‘overcoming’ a child’s [gender dysphoria]” would be subjected to criminal penalties. Because most licensed professionals refuse to practice this kind of conversion therapy, these restrictions effectively prevent them from treating altogether. Once again, it must be noted that no other state has implemented anything similar.

No kid should fear losing their parents because the state disagrees with who they are, and no kid should be denied access to talk therapy when they truly need it. Either of these things alone would be considered unfathomably cruel. Together, these destructive policies are killing Texan trans kids just as they almost killed me 3 years ago.

And now, Paxton is seeking higher office. In his Senate campaign, he’s leveraging his record on trans people, and still living in Texas, I often come across his ads. More than once, I’ve found myself tearing up—not about what he’s talking about, but about what he won’t. About the suffering and pain that I and so many other trans kids have endured as a result of his actions; about the fact that so few people know the true extent of his actions that he hasn’t ever had to defend them; and about the fact that Texan trans kids haven’t ever been given the opportunity to speak out against him.

Meanwhile, his opponent, James Talarico, recently made a pair of statements regarding trans rights, saying he “opposes trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it endangers safety or fairness” and that he’d “absolutely” vote for a ban on gender-affirming surgery for minors. Despite Talarico’s broader record of supporting trans rights, some trans Texans and their allies have threatened not to vote for him over these comments. A few have even threatened to vote for Paxton out of spite. This discourse ultimately helps Paxton, who is facing the most competitive Senate race this state has seen since 1978. Simply put, as a senator, he’ll be given the power to influence policy at a national level, and there’s no telling how he’ll try to use it.

This race is personal to me in a way that it isn’t for others, and I think I speak for every Texan trans kid who has suffered at Paxton’s hands when I say that this is not the way to honor our struggle and it is not the way to honor the lives of those we’ve lost because of him.

Regardless of his comments, the trans community and our allies must coalesce behind Talarico. Not for who he is, but because of what he stands for: a rebuke of Paxton and the pain he’s inflicted. Through this election, we have an opportunity to give Texan trans kids hope—the hope of knowing that the politicians who hurt them aren’t invincible, that their suffering may not last forever, and that a man like Paxton will not be rewarded for what he’s done.

When I was 15, I would’ve given anything for that hope. But my story has been written. Come November 3rd, it’ll be up to Texans to decide whether or not another generation of this state’s trans kids will grow up fearing Ken Paxton’s name.

You may not hear from them now, but I promise you they’re watching. Please make the right choice.

The Trevor Project’s toll-free LGBTQ+ support hotline saved my life. If you are experiencing thoughts of self harm, go to their website or call +1 (866) 488-7386.

On Friday, the Department of Justice announced it had reached a settlement with the New York City-area hospital network Mount Sinai—one of the largest providers in New York State—over allegations of ‘fraudulent billing practices’ surrounding gender-affirming care for minors. Under the terms of the binding agreement, Mount Sinai has agreed to permanently “cease providing these interventions to minors, including by administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and performing surgical procedures,” even after Trump’s term ends, as well as pay a ‘monetary penalty’ and “dedicate $2 million to providing free medical care to individuals suffering harmful consequences of ‘gender affirming care’ they received as children.” According to LawDork’s Chris Geidner, the organization settled so it wouldn’t have to hand over trans kids’ medical records, which the Trump administration is seeking from providers nationwide.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, either. In May, the Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH), the largest children’s hospital in the state, struck an even harsher agreement, permanently cutting gender-affirming care, paying a $10 million fine, and creating a detransition clinic that will offer free care for the next 5 years. Perhaps more concerningly, under the settlement, TCH must also maintain two lists of patients: one for those who have a gender dysphoria-related diagnosis code appearing anywhere in their medical records and a “Potential GAC Patient List” for patients with past or present diagnoses—from any provider, not just TCH—of precocious puberty (E30.0, E30.1, E30.8), intersex conditions (E25.9, E34.51, Q56.4), hormonal imbalances and disorders (E22.8, E22.9, E23.6, E23.7, E27.49, E29.1, Z86.39), and constitutional tall stature (E34.4), as well as those who have experienced painful menstrual cramps (N94.6, N94.89) or who have been prescribed birth control pills at any point in their lives (Z30.011).

The next month, the Cleveland Clinic—yes, the Cleveland Clinic—announced it agreed not to provide gender-affirming care for minors for the next 20 years at any of its locations across Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Canada, and the UK. The settlement also required that Cleveland Clinic put $2 million towards providing free detransition care, which the clinic has already begun offering at its locations in Ohio and Florida. And in August, Connecticut Children’s Hospital (CCH) settled its case as well, agreeing to never again offer care for trans youth, pay an undisclosed monetary penalty, and “dedicate an additional $500,000” to providing free detransition care. The full details of the CCH and Mount Sinai agreements have not been made public, although it should be noted that Connecticut Democrats have recently announced that they are working on forcing CCH to provide any documents surrounding its deal.

Especially in blue states, these agreements threaten to put permanent barriers on trans kids’ care access. As was mentioned above, the commitments CCH and Mount Sinai have made are permanent, and once Trump leaves office, these hospitals will remain legally bound to follow through. Because of that fact, the care network for trans youth in those states will continue to be strained even after the federal threats finally cease. After all, when a hospital like Mount Sinai is suddenly removed from that network, the trans kids who rely on it don’t just disappear; they still have to seek care somewhere else, and with one less major provider available, that will become more difficult. That said, this issue is more pronounced in Connecticut, as prior to 2025, CCH was only one of two known care providers for trans youth in the state. The other provider, Yale, has paused that care as well but hasn’t signed an agreement that would make that cessation permanent.

And we’ve already seen what can happen when major providers are suddenly forced to cut gender-affirming care. As Transitics reported in July, Oklahoma abruptly banned 30% of its doctors from providing gender-affirming care to all ages, and the result has been catastrophic. Even now, clinics like Planned Parenthood are still unable to keep up with the demand, with trans Oklahomans in Oklahoma City and Tulsa being forced to wait upwards of 1 month for appointments that are often available same-day in most other states. Worse, because Planned Parenthood groups 5 states into its “Greater Plains” network—Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma—and shares telehealth appointments between them, those appointments continue to be entirely unavailable throughout these states.

Nonetheless, the most sinister parts of these settlements lie elsewhere. First, there’s the motivation behind them: as Transitics reported in May, Trump’s DOJ has been increasingly aggressive in its attempts to force care providers to turn over trans kids’ medical information, including their names, addresses, and social security numbers. In theory, most of that information—especially if Medicaid or CHIP are involved—could be found through billing codes and insurance claim information. However, as the Trump administration has repeatedly complained about, this isn’t a catch-all solution in practice due to the fact that many providers have avoided using trans-specific diagnosis codes in order to protect their patients.

Indeed, this is exactly what the DOJ is investigating these hospitals over: ‘billing fraud.’ Why? Because that extra layer of privacy has prevented them from being able to compile the list of trans kids that they’ve been wanting to make. The resulting fraud investigations appear to function as a punishment for the existence of these roadblocks and will undoubtedly serve to dissuade providers from taking similar actions in the future. Put differently, it can be said that the Trump administration is angry over the fact that it cannot make a list of trans kids easily and, through these investigations, it’s seeking to go after the organizations it deems responsible.

The second and greater concern surrounds the ideas that these settlements and detransition clinics convey to trans kids. For decades, conservatives have vehemently argued against ‘taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries,’ and in recent years, many red states have enacted laws and policies doing just that: banning the use of public funds for trans people’s medically necessary healthcare. In their view, trans people shouldn’t get treatment for free because being trans is inherently a ‘choice’—and they shouldn’t ‘encourage’ that choice. But now, the Trump administration is mobilizing the entire federal investigative apparatus and the massive amounts of taxpayer funding it relies on specifically to pressure clinics into offering free detransitions. These actions do nothing but endorse the idea that trans people should detransition.

Even worse, there’s another component to this implication. Through these investigations and other actions, Trump is making gender-affirming care much more difficult for trans kids to access. On the other hand, thanks to these settlements, detransition care is easier to access than it ever has been. For families of trans kids who find themselves unable to pay the travel or out-of-pocket costs that are now necessary to get this care, there are really only two choices: 1) continue to seek care in another state and potentially spend money they don’t have to do so or 2) accept a free, state-sponsored detransition—which includes ‘hormone balancing’ services per the settlements—and resume their transition when they turn 18. Unfortunately, it is essentially a statistical guarantee that a non-zero number of trans kids will be forced to go with the second option, especially if they live in Ohio or Texas.

At least in Connecticut and New York, these settlements appear to violate gender identity nondiscrimination laws. In both cases, the hospitals will continue to provide detransition care to kids and adults alike—including hormone therapy and potentially even surgeries—to those seeking to detransition while refusing to provide those exact same treatments to trans kids. Be that as it may, because both states have already allowed these providers and many others to cut care for trans youth despite their repeated assertions that doing so violates state law, it remains to be seen whether these protections will finally be enforced. However, the fact that the full terms of the CCH and Mount Sinai agreements have remained private—while the TCH and Cleveland Clinic settlements haven’t—does suggest that the terms of those agreements may make CCH and Mount Sinai much more vulnerable to lawsuits than they have so far let on.

But regardless of the outcome, one fact is clear: the Trump administration is now actively trying to push trans kids into detransitioning. Even in blue states, some providers are taking the deal, permanently shuttering their youth gender-affirming care programs and offering free detransitions in their stead. And if these settlements continue to expand to other providers, accepting a free detransition may very well become the only choice some trans kids have left.

Seth Moulton spent years claiming he was a trans ally. First elected to the House of Representatives in 2014, the relatively moderate Democrat and veteran from Massachusetts’ 6th district co-sponsored multiple iterations of the Equality Act as well as the Transgender Bill of Rights when it was first introduced in 2023. And that same year, he released a statement explaining his vote against an early iteration of a federal anti-trans sports bill, writing that the “bill [was] part of a broader Republican attack on the rights of transgender people—with detrimental consequences for children’s mental and physical health” and that “in the fight to uphold Title IX, we are wrong to single out transgender girls and contribute to discrimination and stigma against them.”

Above all, “our rhetoric as policymakers matters,” he wrote.

But Moulton is also ambitious. Just 4 years into his House career, he led a failed effort to oust Nancy Pelosi from her position as the House Minority Leader. The next year, he announced a long-shot bid for the presidency, and after he notably took aim at Bernie Sanders for being a “socialist,” he was ultimately forced to withdraw his campaign just four months later. He never polled higher than 2% in any survey.

Meanwhile, throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans attack ads in a bid to turn trans people into a political issue. Despite the wealth of polling showing that the ads had little impact on Trump’s victory, a few Democrats weren’t convinced. Indeed, Moulton was the first to break. “I have two little girls,” Moulton told the New York Times just 2 days after the election, “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Although New York House Democrat Tom Suozzi made a similar statement in the same article, Moulton’s remarks generated much more outrage after he doubled down a few days later on CNN:

“I was just speaking authentically as a parent about one of many issues where Democrats are just out of touch with the majority of Americans. And I stand by my position, even though I may not have used exactly the right words. And I’m willing to have this debate, as I’ve been having with LGBTQ advocates and others, some of whom agree with me and others who don’t, but we’re engaging in a thoughtful debate. On the other hand, some of the people like you’ve mentioned [referring to trans advocates who publicly criticized his remarks] are more interested in shaming fellow Democrats, shaming the majority of voters, when they simply don’t meet their ideological purity test.”

11 months later, those comments would come back to bite him. In October, he announced he was challenging incumbent Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, a progressive firebrand and outspoken trans ally, for his seat. Just a few days after his announcement, on October 18th, Markey and Moulton both appeared at the No Kings Rally in Boston. And the contrast couldn’t have been sharper: Markey, draped in a transgender pride flag, spoke about the importance of fighting for trans rights; when Moulton took the stage, the crowd responded by booing him.

Despite Markey’s age—79—and the need for generational change being focal points of his campaign, his standing among Massachusetts’ notably progressive electorate never recovered. Early that November, it was revealed he only rebuked AIPAC after they refused to guarantee that they’d endorse his campaign. By the end of the year, polls were consistently finding that Moulton was trailing by over 20 points. Then Markey, who was endorsed by trans-led PAC Christopher Street Project and LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Human Rights Campaign, leaned in.

“Congressman Moulton decided that he was gonna throw trans kids under the bus, the political bus, and blame them for the loss of the 2024 election,” he said at their July debate, “those kids are vulnerable. Those kids need love. Those kids don’t need to be scapegoated and blamed for what was wrong with the Democratic Party.”

Seeing the writing on the wall, Moulton eventually tried to fully walk back his 2024 remarks.

“To anyone hurt by my comments, I’m sorry because that was not my intention,” he said at the August debate. “My intention was to say that we need to take on these issues.”

Despite his apologies, to Massachusetts Democrats, his rhetoric as a policymaker mattered.

On Tuesday, Markey overwhelmingly defeated Moulton. The race was called 28 minutes after polls closed with only 2% of the votes counted. As of the writing of this article, Markey is currently leading 74%-26%.

Speaking to Transitics on Markey’s win, Christopher Street Project executive director Tyler Hack celebrated Moulton’s loss as a loss for anti-trans Democrats nationwide:

“Tonight, anti-trans politics lost,” she said. “Massachusetts rejected the idea that attacking transgender people is a shortcut to political power. Voters chose a different path: one where equality is not negotiable, cruelty is not courage, and transgender people do not have to disappear for Democrats to succeed.”

And she’s right. In Iowa and Ohio, a number of Democrats have taken anti-trans positions in recent months, including gubernatorial nominees Rob Sand and Amy Acton as well as Iowa Congressional nominee Sarah Trone Garriott. Some strategists have argued, without evidence, that Democrats need to take these positions in order to win. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, anti-trans politics just cost Seth Moulton his career, and come January, he’ll be out of the House.

More likely than not, he’ll be remembered for one thing and one thing only: when his rhetoric mattered most, he didn’t hesitate to throw trans kids under the bus.

See the full timeline at timeline.transiticsnews.com.

As recently as 2021, 48 states allowed transgender people to change their gender markers on their birth certificates. The preceding decade had been one of progress, with many blue states removing longstanding surgery requirements and recognizing non-binary identities for the first time. Fueled by those victories, advocates were looking to continue their push in Republican-controlled states, hopeful that they could extend those fundamental rights to all trans Americans.

But they’d never get the chance. As Republicans began taking aim at trans rights more broadly, restrictions on trans people’s birth certificates quickly followed. Oklahoma in 2021. Montana in 2022. Kansas in 2023. Florida and Texas in 2024. Indiana and Iowa in 2025.

This year, Idaho, South Dakota, and Wyoming have all implemented bans of their own. Along the way, lawsuits overturned bans in Montana and West Virginia. As things stand, trans people’s identities are now recognized in only 40 states.

At the center of this assault lies one idea: allowing trans people to update their documents is a fundamentally ‘woke’ idea that has only recently taken hold, and that by banning those changes, the ‘accuracy’ and ‘integrity’ of vital records can be preserved. Meanwhile, when fighting against these policies at legislative hearings and in court, advocates usually focus on how having accurate documents benefits trans people instead of refuting conservatives’ arguments.

Put differently, they articulate it as being a right that people should have and not as an established right that these efforts are taking away. As a result, the entire American system—legislatures, courts, and public opinion—hasn’t been given the opportunity to consider or examine the latter argument. But this begs an important question: could that argument even be made?

After all, for topics related to gay rights, like sodomy laws or the recognition of same-sex unions, an exact timeline is known starting with Illinois in 1962. Wikipedia itself features animated maps and a thorough timeline. Historians reference these laws with precision, and legal, medical, and advocacy organizations all regularly feature the same information. And perhaps most interestingly, these timelines have been established for decades: in 2003, the Supreme Court even went as far as using the history of these laws to justify striking them down.

Conversely, for legal gender changes, advocates, courts, and legislatures often have trouble establishing the history of that right just in their own state. Don’t believe me? Just try finding what the first state to grant that right was and when it was granted. According to the website Equaldex and this 1993 French-language report that was submitted to the Council of Europe (CoE) over 30 years ago, it was Illinois in 1962, but according to the California legislature’s analysis of a bill in 2011, it was California in 1977.

What about the second? The CoE report states that the second was Arizona in 1968, but Equaldex claims Arizona only legalized these changes in 2006—which would place it firmly after California. And the third? Again, according to the CoE report, it’s Louisiana in 1968, but the state’s own courts have claimed that the law in question was only passed in 1979. As such, basing a timeline on this conflicting information would probably result in something like this:

Given these glaring issues, it’s obvious why historical arguments are yet to be employed when it comes to this issue. Without a timeline, the arguments can’t be formulated, but at the same time, getting the timeline wrong can have catastrophic consequences for the lawsuits it hopes to bolster. And because birth certificate amendments aren’t always handled by statutes—unlike gay rights issues—histories for many states have been lost to time. As such, that history has remained forgotten.

Or at least it did.

Truth be told, this problem has been sitting in the back of my mind for quite a while. In April, hoping to establish a timeline of the assault on trans people’s documents, I added a column denoting the enactment date for those policies as part of a major update to my policy tracker. But because of the lack of consensus and timeline and having no clear way to display any potential findings, the idea ended there. However, a few weeks ago, a relatively dry spell of news presented an opportunity, and I began working on the project.

Now, nearly a month later, I’m proud to be unveiling—for the first time in history—a comprehensive timeline on the right to a legal gender change in the United States. I’ll be going over the core findings here, but to view the full data for each state as well as an interactive map, please visit timeline.transiticsnews.com or click the button below.

View the Full Timeline Here

I’ll start by addressing the questions I asked above: the sources I mentioned were right about Illinois being the first, but the state passed its law in 1955—meaning that the right to a legal gender change has been around longer than Alaska and Hawaii have been states. It wouldn’t be another ten and a half years until a second state began allowing these changes, but notably, that state hasn’t ever been mentioned in any of these discussions, court cases, or legislative proceedings.

Because the second state was actually Kansas. That’s right: the same Kansas that recently revoked trans people’s documents was also the second state to legally recognize their existence. The provision in question, K.A.R. § 28-17-20, was enacted on January 1st, 1966, and allowed sex changes when substantiated by “a medical certificate when the change is physiological or anatomical.” But it gets even weirder, as Kansas also holds the distinction of being the second state to ban these changes after having already legalized them—in 2002, after Texas—the second state to legalize them two separate times—in 2019, again after Texas—and the second state to have banned them on two separate occasions—in 2023, after Ohio.

Meanwhile, California, despite claiming to have been first, was really the seventeenth. Aside from Illinois and Kansas, Arizona, Colorado, and Louisiana (1968), Minnesota (1969), New York City (1971), Hawaii (1973), New York State (1974), Utah, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Connecticut (1975), and North Dakota, Iowa, and Nevada (1976) all enacted their laws, regulations, or policies prior to California. Interestingly, the first state to not include a strict surgery requirement was Utah, and Iowa’s law was the first—and until 2008, the only—to explicitly not require surgery. That law, 1976 House File 798, used the language “by reason of surgery or other treatment,” and an archived news article from 1983 that was reviewed as part of this project confirms that the law was interpreted as such since its passage.

By the end of 1984, trans people’s identities were recognized in 28 states—plus New York City, D.C., and Guam—a figure that’s actually higher than the number of states that permitted same-sex relations at the time, which was 26. In fact, this statement would remain true until the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws nationwide in 2003; at that point, 38 states were recognizing legal gender changes while only 4 explicitly banned them. This history matters. Here’s a full map:

Taking a peek at the legislative records of many of those early laws, which, except for Arizona’s, pretty much exclusively addressed trans people’s birth certificates, this information becomes damning. Illinois’ 1955 law passed 107-2 in the state House and unanimously in the Senate. Arizona’s 1968 law passed unanimously in the House and 28-1 in the Senate. Louisiana’s 1968 law passed 87-8 in the House and unanimously in the Senate and was introduced on the request of a trans woman who wanted her birth certificate changed.

In the 1970s, it was a similar story. Hawaii’s 1973 law passed unanimously in both chambers and was enacted alongside a repeal of the state’s crossdressing ban. The 1975 laws in Utah and North Carolina passed unanimously in both states. Iowa’s 1976 law passed 65-12 in the House and unanimously in the Senate and was introduced specifically to reverse a 1974 attorney general opinion asserting that the state had no authority to amend birth certificates for trans people. Extraordinarily, out of all these states, the idea of legal gender recognition was at its most controversial in California, where it passed 41-30 in the Assembly and 21-3 in the Senate. In fact, only one trans-specific bill in this period—1980 Ohio House Bill 750—failed to become law, passing the House 52-43 before dying in the Senate without receiving a vote.

Nowadays, this story is changing. While Illinois, Hawaii, and California have become much more protective of trans people, many of the others mentioned are taking aim at the very right they overwhelmingly granted. In 2025, Iowa entirely repealed the provision that allowed trans people to update their birth certificates as part of a targeted effort to erase trans people from its legal code. This law, Senate File 418, also notably removed the gender identity discrimination protections that had been in place since 2007. A few months later, North Carolina passed a law mandating that trans people’s birth certificates are issued as “multi-page documents” instead of being new certificates designed not to out them.

This year, Wyoming also banned gender changes through its administrative rules in March, and unlike the other states mentioned, that ban is now before the state’s Supreme Court (which had previously unanimously ruled in favor of trans people’s amendments in 2020). As part of that case, the state’s Attorney General has claimed that the rule’s sex change provision originated in 1993; in reality, documents obtained by Transitics as part of this project have now revealed it was actually added in 1984 as part of the state’s first and only major overhaul to its birth certificate amendment rules. Finally, in Utah, a ban on legal gender changes passed the state House before ultimately failing in the Senate.

Through these efforts, Republicans aren’t just hoping to erase trans people’s rights; they’re hoping to erase trans people’s history. And for far too long, we’ve not only let them—we’ve actually helped them.

As part of this project, I reviewed a slew of recent and historical bills, laws, and court cases that have impacted trans people’s birth certificates, as well as the discussions, legal analysis, and legislative testimony surrounding them. Throughout all of these documents, the one thing that has almost never been mentioned—by either side—is history. When it is mentioned, like it notably was in California in 2011, the cited figures are often comically inaccurate. Instead, advocates tend to argue that legal gender recognition has always been an inherent right and that withholding it is wrong. But to more skeptical audiences and courts, this approach clearly hasn’t been enough.

Now, its historicity and background having never been properly asserted, our deeply rooted right is slowly being lost. As a result, today, the total number of states that provide legal gender recognition is the lowest it’s been since 2003.

And to move forward, we may very well just have to look to the past.

See the full timeline at timeline.transiticsnews.com.

Yesterday afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had published a new report titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” Coming only two weeks after the HHS published another report that alleged widespread billing fraud in gender-affirming care for minors, the relatively short 20-page study concludes that “support for “gender-affirming” norms is strongly associated with broader authoritarian attitudes, not just political identity, and predicts support for political violence.” In doing so, it marks a dramatic escalation in the conservative fixation on ‘transgender violence’ that has particularly crystalized over the past 12 months, providing rhetorical legitimacy to the concept and expanding it to encompass trans people’s allies.

But despite what the Trump administration would have you believe, this study is far from scientific. Even in its first sentence, its partisan nature is made abundantly clear. “For decades,” the study reads, “psychological research on attitudes toward individuals who identify as transgender has focused almost exclusively on prejudice and has attributed that prejudice to authoritarian dispositions presumed to reside on the political right.”

And worse, the authors of the study appear to be just as partisan. The study lists five, and unsurprisingly, all have shown support for conservatism or right-wing causes in the past. Here’s what you should know about each of them:

1. Ohad Fedida is a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University in New Jersey and, according to his Twitter bio, a research fellow at an organization called the Network Contagion Research Institute. It’s also worth mentioning that Fedida got his undergraduate degree from the Talmudic University in Miami, a highly conservative Orthodox Jewish men’s college that specializes in Orthodox Jewish theological studies.”

2. Danit Finkelstein is also a Ph.D. student at Rutgers and is a co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute. Finkelstein has publicly supported Trump in the past, recently writing an article defending the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to scientific research.

3. Colin Wright is an evolutionary behavioral psychologist, a fellow at the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute, and the editor-in-chief of an anti-trans right-wing media outlet called “Reality’s Last Stand.” As Transitics reported in April, Wright was previously hired by the state of Montana to defend its ban on birth certificate gender marker changes, and the majority ruling ultimately called him out on misgendering the plaintiffs he was claiming to analyze.

4. Lee Jussim is a psychology professor at Rutgers who is particularly notable for having spent the last decade arguing that diversity and bias training lead to false claims of racism. Jussim, Wright, and Danit Finkelstein recently co-authored an article arguing against banning caste discrimination that appeared in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

5. Finally, Joel Finkelstein is the other co-founder and the ‘chief science officer’ of the Network Contagion Research Institute. His relationship to Danit is unclear. In recent months and under his direction, the NCRI has published a series of reports accusing the progressive political organization Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of being a foreign actor, with one of Finkelstein’s employees even appearing before Congress to testify on the issue in February.

The study itself reflects these beliefs. According to the report, the researchers measured ‘justification for political violence’ by asking respondents whether they thought six real and hypothetical instances of political violence were justified on a 5-point scale: “killing Charlie Kirk, killing Donald Trump, killing Brian Thompson [the United Healthcare CEO who was assassinated by Luigi Mangione], arson of ICE buildings, damaging wealthy people’s property, and violence against police.”

Notably missing from this list are distinctly right-wing instances of political violence, including the assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home last year, the Pulse nightclub shooting, the plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, last year’s assassination attempt on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (and the subsequent arson of the governor’s mansion), and the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi. It goes without saying that a truly scientific study on popular support for political violence—and note that the study does specifically use the term ‘political violence’ in its conclusion without qualifying it with ‘left-wing’—would not exclusively ask respondents about only one side of that violence; any study that does so will always conclude the side it asks about to be ‘more violent’ than the other.

Meanwhile, as part of the questions meant to gauge support for ‘gender ideology,’ respondents were also asked “to rate how likely it is that transgender people are facing genocide in the United States.” This so-called ‘Trans-Genocide Belief’ was mentioned in the conclusion as ‘deserving note’ for being “predicted to more strongly relate to ‘Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale’ [a metric invented by the authors to measure support for trans rights] and left-wing authoritarianism than to political identity and to be associated with elevated justification for political violence.” Although ‘Trans-Genocide Belief’ is essentially framed by the authors as being unreasonable, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has issued repeated red flag alerts stating that the US is in the early stages of a trans genocide.

Lastly, to measure ‘left-wing authoritarian tendencies,’ the authors asked respondents to rate their agreement with 13 statements, this time on a 7-point scale. Like before, those statements were highly biased:

Of these statements, only number 9, “classroom discussions should be safe places that protect students from disturbing ideas,” is likely to be agreed with by conservatives despite the fact that authoritarian tendencies are prevalent across both sides of the political spectrum. But, if the wording is changed slightly on many of these statements—such as number 7 to “wokeness and gender ideology need to be abolished,” number 8 to “all political liberals are fools,” and number 10 to “university authorities are right to ban woke speech from campus”—they would now only apply to conservatives while remaining just as authoritarian. And yet, the study still purports to be measuring a respondent’s ‘authoritarian disposition’ as a whole.

By designing the study this way, the authors ensured that virtually nobody who is opposed to trans people’s rights would be characterized as violent, authoritarian, or an extremist. And just to make sure, the study also featured heavy sampling bias. Of the 1,208 respondents, a whopping 55% self-identified as Democrats, while only 27.2%—less than half the previous number—declared themselves to be Republicans.

Rather glaringly, it also fails to establish a neutral baseline and instead exclusively compares left-wing support for left-wing political violence with right-wing support for left-wing political violence when drawing its conclusions. Worse, the authors themselves specifically note that the study only measures correlation—not causality—and that “a second study is being designed” to determine the causal link.

Through these facts, one thing is made certain: this study was conducted with a predetermined conclusion in mind. After all, the report was specifically commissioned by the HHS to address the topic, and that commission came almost a year after the Trump administration first started floating the idea of ‘transgender violence.’ In fact, Open Science Framework (OSF) data shows that an earlier iteration of the study was only registered on June 15th, 2026, but was withdrawn a week later and subsequently refiled due to some of the proposed survey questions being modified.

Nevertheless, the study is already being wielded as a weapon. Conservative news outlet The New York Post is already peddling it as having “found that those normalizing transgender beliefs were more likely to be supportive of political violence.” Another right-wing outlet, the Washington Examiner, is characterizing it as having “found that individuals radicalized by gender ideology are substantially more likely to believe political violence is justified.” Meanwhile, the HHS has declared that “the association between sex-rejecting clinical beliefs, authoritarian attitudes, and the justification of political violence warrants serious scientific scrutiny,” also claiming that “the study also found that people who more strongly endorsed the sex-rejecting positions measured by the CGAS were more likely to justify political violence.”

Although it remains to be seen how exactly it will be used by the Trump administration and other actors, HHS ‘studies’ like this have typically only brought escalation. The HHS’ gender-affirming care report from last year was the catalyst for renewed efforts to crackdown on gender-affirming care for minors, ultimately resulting in a number of federal rules targeting it through Medicaid and Medicare as well as attempts to obtain trans kids’ medical records. On the ‘transgender violence’ side of things, the Trump administration has already been trying to make it more difficult for trans Americans to purchase firearms, and in September 2025, the FBI even went as far as creating a separate classification for trans ‘nihilistic violent extremists.’

Simply put, whatever this study brings won’t be good. Not for trans people and certainly not for our allies, who now find themselves caught in the crosshairs of conservatives’ unrelenting obsession with the non-existent.

In August 2015, amid a shifting legal landscape for trans prisoners, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) announced that it would begin allowing all trans people in its custody to access hormone therapy, a landmark decision that made the Lone Star State one of the first southern states to implement such a policy. Prior to the change, the TDCJ had enforced a so-called ‘freeze frame’ policy—a policy restricting hormone therapy access to those who’ve already begun transitioning prior to their incarceration—since 2006, and it often meant that many would be made to wait years until their release to get the care they needed.

Although the change garnered some negative attention from local media once it was reported the next February, the issue quickly faded from public consciousness, and the policy, G-51.11, remained. Perhaps most tellingly, it wasn’t even publicly opposed by the then newly elected Gov. Greg Abbott and AG Ken Paxton, both of whom would go on to define the state’s sharp anti-trans turn in the coming decade.

But it wasn’t without controversy. Two months before the policy was introduced, an incarcerated trans woman filed a lawsuit alleging that the state’s denial of gender-affirming surgery constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. After her suit was dismissed by a district court, she appealed the verdict to the notoriously conservative 5th Circuit. In a 2-1 ruling published on March 29th, 2019, the court denied her appeal, making a point to deadname and misgender the plaintiff while writing that “a state does not inflict cruel and unusual punishment by declining to provide sex reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate.”

The Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal that December, and for the next six years, the TDCJ’s policies surrounding trans people weren’t seriously challenged. Nevertheless, in August 2025, as part of the anti-trans bathroom bill Senate Bill 8, the state became the first in the nation to pass a law mandating that trans prisoners be housed in facilities “according to their biological sex.” Despite that law, however, Policy G-51.11 and its hormone therapy provisions remained; the policy was renewed in July 2026, and it seemed that, barring legislative action, the TDCJ would continue to maintain the status quo.

Then, out of nowhere, Policy G-51.11 vanished. As did the three related documents that were previously found within the TDCJ’s Correctional Managed Health Care (CMHC) Manual: a revision explanation from 2014 and two consent forms for hormone therapy, both of which were also updated this past July. The links to all four of these documents now return a 404 error, and perhaps most interestingly, the HTML code responsible for displaying them on the manual’s site is still present but has been deliberately commented out in its entirety.

And it wasn’t just those four documents. Eleven days ago, the TDCJ released its 2026 Disease Management Guidelines, making only one major change from its 2025 version: the section titled “Gender Dysphoria Hormone Monitoring Guideline” was removed, and in the document’s table of contents, the 34 subsequent entries were all renumbered accordingly. Meanwhile, the CMHC’s formulary—a formal listing of the medical drugs the TDCJ provides that mentioned the term “gender dysphoria” several times—has also disappeared from the CMHC’s publications list.

In a phone call with Transitics today, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice confirmed that Policy G-51.11 is no longer in effect and that it hasn’t been for ‘a few weeks.’ Transitics was also told that no policy is replacing it, effectively meaning that TDCJ health services are no longer authorized to provide gender-affirming care. TDCJ declined to provide any more details when asked.

As for why the state waited until now—a few weeks after the policy was renewed—to rescind it remains a mystery. That said, the execution isn’t exactly surprising. Two years ago, the state made headlines nationwide for implementing its ban on driver’s license gender marker changes virtually overnight, and just one week later, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services implemented the same ban for birth certificates. Both changes were made at the urging of AG Ken Paxton.

Given Paxton’s stance on gender-affirming care in prisons is similarly extreme, it’s entirely possible the quiet and sudden removal of G-51.11 was the result of similar maneuvers. However, regardless of the cause, the policy makes Texas the 6th state to entirely ban this care in its prisons. Bans in another two, Georgia and Idaho, are currently blocked by courts. Texas is the first to do so without having first passed legislation, and it is also the first to do so without any warning or announcement.

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

Even worse, Texas’ state prison system is by far the largest in the country, housing an estimated 149,000 people. The next largest, California and Florida, house 96,000 and 87,000 people, respectively. It must be noted that Florida also blocks its prisoners from accessing gender-affirming care; up until a few weeks ago, it was the largest state with such a policy.

However, the disparity between these states is even larger when it comes to trans inmates. In 2019, the total number of transgender people in TDCJ custody was estimated to be around 1,100. Meanwhile, in 2020, Florida’s total was found to be 235. Although exact totals are scarce, these numbers are estimated to have risen slightly in recent years. And in 2022, the total number of trans people incarcerated in US state prison systems was estimated to be roughly 5,000; in other words, Texas’ new ban on gender-affirming care in its prisons impacts more than 1 in 5 of all trans people in state prisons.

That statistic is simply horrific. It means that, as of today, over 1,100 trans people in Texas prisons will be forcibly detransitioned until they are released or until it breaks them. And by doing it quietly, the state hoped to get away with it without anyone noticing, at least for a short time.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done. Texas state courts are far from receptive to trans people’s struggles, and a case in the Fifth Circuit is even more of an uphill battle. Really, there are only two ways the state’s ban can be overturned: a) if the largely conservative US Supreme Court rules that states cannot deny this care and b) if the state’s anti-trans government chooses to show mercy. At least in the next few years, neither comes close to seeming plausible. In the meantime, Texas’ trans prisoners will be tortured, suffering more than they have in 20 years.

And it wasn’t to score political points. It wasn’t to ‘save taxpayer money’ either. In an election season, both of those motives would be touted. Suffering, inflicted without warning, truly appears to be the policy’s only discernible purpose.

That cruelty is the point.

Last year, amid a broader assault on gender-affirming care access, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule targeting insurance coverage for many trans adults. The rule, which made changes to 45 CFR § 156.115’s requirements for ACA marketplace plans, entirely prohibited coverage of ‘sex-trait modification procedures’ unless the state separately mandated that coverage—in which case they would have to shoulder the cost—starting this year.

And for the trans community, this was a big deal: 10% of Americans get their insurance through individual or small group marketplace plans, and worse, 75% of them live in states won by Trump in 2024. As is the case with Medicaid, marketplace enrollment rates are likely higher for trans Americans, potentially leaving tens of thousands vulnerable to the upcoming cuts.

Almost immediately, a coalition of 21 blue states led by California AG Rob Bonta sued the HHS over its new rule, claiming the agency failed to conduct a mandatory review of “what benefits are typically covered by employers” and that the “prohibitions on [gender-affirming care] are a “dangerous intrusion into the practice of medicine” and violate the “sanctity of the patient-physician relationship.” But as that court fight dragged on, some insurance companies started caving to the federal pressure.

In November, Ambetter/Centene, the largest provider of ACA plans, updated its policies to cut coverage of gender-affirming care in 19 states—Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Similarly, in January, marketplace plans under Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS)/Anthem in most of those states plus Montana and Texas.

Notably, however, these changes have been somewhat inconsistent across plans. Ambetter’s plans in Texas still retain coverage for gender-affirming care, as do BCBS plans in Arkansas (a fact that notably affects its Medicaid program as well), while BCBS plans in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Dakota do not mention the exclusion either. Marketplace plans in Idaho and Utah don’t mention gender-affirming care at all, and thus, the only states where all ACA plans appear to be continuing their coverage of gender-affirming care despite the absence of a statewide mandate are the usual two: Alaska and North Dakota. Overall, these cuts have resulted in a loss of healthcare coverage for potentially tens of thousands of trans adults, and with many states moving to cut Medicaid coverage as well, it leaves trans people who are lower income without a way to get insurance for the healthcare they need.

But on Saturday, things took a turn. As part of the case against the HHS’ new restrictions, US District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, a George H.W. Bush appointee, granted the coalition’s motion for summary judgement, declaring the rule ‘unlawful’ and vacating it entirely. In his decision, Gorton agreed with the plaintiffs’ claim that the Trump administration had implemented the rule without the required review and separately took aim at the HHS for ignoring a previous decision he had made in connection to the case:

“The Court previously concluded that HHS was required to submit such a report to Congress by January 1, 2026, the effective date of the Rule. HHS still has not done so and the government has not attempted to justify that failure. Indeed, the government does not mention [the federal statute requiring the report] at all in its pleadings. When asked about the issue at oral argument, the government maintained its position that the Agency is not required to submit such a report, notwithstanding the Court’s clear ruling that it was required to do so.”

However, it must be noted that Gorton denied the summary judgement motion for the other four claims—which relate to other changes to ACA plans that were made by the Trump administration as part of the rule—essentially delivering a targeted rebuke of the HHS’ crusade against gender-affirming care. And best of all, it’ll be very difficult for an appeal to overturn, as it was a summary judgement—a decision made without trial after a court finds there to be no real factual dispute, which, in these types of cases, is pretty rare.

Because of the decision, the rule that caused so many trans adults to lose coverage is officially no longer in effect. Starting today, insurance companies like Ambetter and BCBS will no longer be able to lean on it to justify denying trans people proper healthcare coverage, exposing them to lawsuits if they don’t work quickly to reverse their denials. As they create their policies for 2027’s plan year, it’s fairly certain that most of the plans mentioned above will formally reinstate their coverage or at least remove the exclusion. And depending on how they wrote their exclusions, some policy changes may come before then.

Meanwhile, the plans that haven’t implemented it yet, like those in Alaska and North Dakota, now have no reason to, especially given that both of those states are pretty progressive when it comes to recognizing the necessity of gender-affirming care for adults. Finally, it ensures that non-marketplace insurers and state Medicaid programs can’t hide behind it to expand their gender-affirming care exclusions beyond their ACA plans, at the very least preserving Medicaid coverage in states like Arkansas, Indiana, North Carolina, and Utah.

However, the fight might not be over just yet. Although the rule was defeated, the Trump administration could theoretically attempt to implement it again. That said, doing so would take some time due to the HHS having to conduct the review it tried to skip this time around, and this means the earliest a similar rule could be adopted is in 2028.

In February, the Trump administration released its policy concerning the treatment of trans people in federal prisons. As Transitics reported at the time, the policy is horrific: under it, the ~2,200 trans people in federal custody will be medically and socially detransitioned against their will, all in the name of helping them “recover” from gender dysphoria.

And over the next few weeks, more details emerged: when making the policy, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) admitted to being aware of and simultaneously disregarding existing medical standards while forcing arbitrary guidelines—developed from research entirely unrelated to gender-affirming care—onto a captive population. It also implied that it expected suicide attempts to increase as a result of its actions. In an effort to justify these egregious actions, the BOP has since tried arguing that withholding gender-affirming care is necessary to protect trans people from harm.

Given these facts, Transitics has previously characterized these policies as medical experimentation—and courts have so far agreed. The judge overseeing the ACLU’s challenge, Reagan appointee Royce Lamberth, has granted several injunctions against the policy, leaving its future up in the air. But unfortunately, this isn’t the only way the Trump administration is trying to abuse trans prisoners.

As part of the same January 2025 executive order that stripped trans prisoners’ access to healthcare, the BOP was ordered to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons.” Within days, the handful of trans women housed in women’s prisons were informed that they would soon be transferred to men’s prisons, where they’d face alarmingly high rates of physical abuse and sexual violence. They quickly sued, and Lamberth, also in charge of their case, has so far issued seven injunctions preventing the Trump administration from housing them with men.

However, despite these losses, the BOP remains determined to make these women suffer as much as possible. And on June 2nd, it was given the excuse it needed.

That day, a North Texas judge granted a preliminary injunction in the case Fleming v. Warden T. Rule, where a group of cis women in federal women’s prison FMC Carswell are challenging the fact that four trans women are housed in their facility. This ruling—technically a ruling against the BOP—ordered the prison to use “separate movement, routing, scheduling, or other measures as necessary to prevent overlap between male inmates [defined as ‘any inmate who is biologically male, regardless of gender identity’] and female inmates in housing and shared spaces.”

Because the four trans women in question are plaintiffs in the case against Trump’s trans housing policy, Lamberth amended his injunction to stipulate that the Fleming ruling didn’t give the BOP grounds to transfer them to a men’s prison. To comply with both injunctions, the FMC Carswell created a separate unit to house its trans population.

To be clear, this alone wouldn’t be problematic: in 2024, Colorado created two prison units entirely for trans women after being sued by trans women who faced years of mistreatment and abuse. And while the solution isn’t perfect, it’s garnered significant praise from advocates for being a major step towards making prisons safer for trans women and could potentially be replicated elsewhere without much controversy.

Needless to say, a unit for trans women shouldn’t be used to make them suffer. And yet, that’s exactly what the BOP is using it for. Here’s how one of the plaintiffs, known by the pseudonym Emily Doe, described the unit’s conditions in a July court filing:

“All of us are transgender. We are housed…with two women in each cell. We are not allowed to leave the unit unless we are escorted and surrounded by corrections officers. Because of the staffing required to move us, the officers never want to bring us anywhere. Meals are delivered to the unit and we must eat in the unit, or sometimes in our cells. We shower in the unit. We must use the toilet in our cell, in front of our cellmate.”

Another plaintiff, Carla Jones, wrote similarly:

“I am in this unit at least twenty-three hours a day. It was twenty-four hours a day until recently. I started going to recreation for our only allotted hour outside the unit to try to improve my mental state. But there is no outdoor recreation, and one hour outside the unit is not enough. We don’t have access to meaningful programming or educational opportunities while on this unit… My only exposure to the sun or ability to be outdoors is about five to ten minutes a day when we are escorted and walk to and from the recreation building. Even those brief walks are stressful, as they have to shut down the facility and guards surround us to ensure that none of the other incarcerated women can see us.”

Meanwhile, plaintiff Mary Doe added that “in the first weeks we were in this unit, they were permitted to go outside for recreation once a day, but rather than going to the usual [large, well-equipped] outdoor recreation space,” the trans women in the unit “were only permitted outside on a small patio that is about 15 feet by 10 feet wide.“ But, she added, they “were not even allowed to go to the corners of the patio because other incarcerated women might see them.” And in the week preceding her court declaration, they “have not even been offered outside recreation.”

As if that wasn’t enough, the women also raise significant privacy concerns. Mary said that “male staff work in our housing unit and can see us when we are on the toilet and even in the shower,” but that “when she was in general population, only female staff could access the bathroom spaces or places where we change clothes.” According to all four, the shower room has a window that allows guards to look in; Jones wrote that “a small piece of paper covers a portion of the window that looks into the shower area, but [she has] seen guards move that paper aside and was told by one guard that they need to be able to see us at all times.”

A fourth plaintiff, Zoe Doe, said meetings with her lawyers have been interrupted and cut short, that her “legal phone calls have been abruptly cancelled,” and that “non-legal phone calls have also become more difficult, because there are times she cannot get access to a phone.” Worse, she wrote that her access to medical services has been severely restricted:

“I also recently learned that BOP staff canceled one of my medical appointments by telling the provider I was unavailable, which was not true. I believe staff said that to avoid the logistical burden of moving me. I did not find out about the cancellation until I later obtained my own medical records… Unlike other inmates, we cannot go to see the Health Services Administrator or other BOP staff that we routinely rely on; instead, we must send an electronic message and hope someone responds. Even when they do respond and come to the unit, there is very little privacy during the visit due to the tight quarters.”

Emily said “the conditions remind her of being in the SHU”—more commonly known as solitary confinement—and that she calls the unit ‘SHU-lite.’ And, like solitary confinement, it’s taking a toll on the women’s mental health. All four report feeling depressed, anxious, and isolated. Zoe says she is again experiencing thoughts of self-harm, which she had last felt when she was housed in a male facility. Despite that, their access to psychologists has been excessively limited.

Emily says, “I’m in these conditions because I’m a transgender woman.” Mary says, “we can sometimes be sent to segregated units when we do something wrong, but I have not done anything wrong. I’m only being treated this way because I am a transgender woman.”

Meanwhile, Jones is much more unequivocal: “It feels like what the BOP is really trying to tell me, by isolating me this way, is that I am not, and never will be, a ‘woman.’”

And now, the unit isn’t just being used for the four women that were originally housed in FMC Carswell. At the time these four declarations were written in mid-July, the BOP had already transferred two more trans women from other prisons into the already-packed unit. In the past month, they’ve moved another two in, again from other prisons, bringing the total to eight—more than half of the fourteen total plaintiffs in the case.

This raises an important question: if the unit has at least 4 cells, why, when it was only the four of them, were they made to share cells with each other from the start? Perhaps the BOP always planned on moving more trans women into the unit, or maybe they were housed that way to make their lives as difficult as possible. But whatever the reason, the fact remains: in the month that there were only four trans women present in the unit, they were deliberately housed in a way that increased their suffering for no clear reason.

Unfortunately for these eight women, yesterday, Lamberth denied their request to stop the BOP from imposing these conditions onto them—his first time ruling against trans prisoners since Trump’s term began—on largely procedural grounds. According to him, the BOP’s actions are outside the scope of the preliminary injunction and their initial complaint, and as such, his court lacks jurisdiction on this question. Although Lamberth does add that he’d ‘act promptly’ on any motion to amend the complaint and expand the injunction, the damage is done. His ruling signals to the BOP that, when courts rule against their anti-trans policies, there are still loopholes it’ll be able to exploit to abuse the trans people in its custody.

Because, for the past two months, these women have been watched by men—who say they need to be able to see them when they’re naked ‘at all times’—while they shower. They’ve been kept from accessing medical care and psychological services. They’ve had their privacy in their own cells taken away and are made to use the toilet in front of each other. They no longer have access to prison programming and education resources. They’ve been kept from going outside and segregated from the other women to the point where they can’t even be seen, as if they’re some kind of disease. And when they do get to leave the unit, if they get to leave at all, they’re surrounded on all sides by guards to ensure the cis prisoners are ‘protected’ from them. All because they’re trans.

Many of these conditions appear to violate standards on solitary confinement, privacy, access to healthcare, and humane treatment established by the UN’s ‘Nelson Mandela Rules’ and the Council of Europe’s CPT Standards. It goes without saying that none of these things are currently experienced by cis women or cis men in federal prisons. They’re cruel, unusual, and severely punishing, and being in these conditions for a prolonged period of time can cause tremendous suffering.

It’s taking away these women’s will to live through no fault of their own, and even if they prevail in their challenge and are moved out of the unit or given better conditions, they will almost certainly carry the psychological trauma for months or years to come. Nobody deserves to be treated this way—especially not just because they’re trans.

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.