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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full decision here:

2026 05 18 Opinion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This morning, the Trump administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) published a proposed rule titled “Selecting Biological Sex on ATF Forms.” As the rule’s title implies, it states that “individuals completing forms required by this part should select their biological sex” and applies to the federal forms Americans are required to fill out whenever they purchase firearms and explosives.

On its face, this move—which follows months of reporting surrounding internal DOJ discussions on a potential ban on trans gun ownership—doesn’t seem particularly concerning. After all, the Trump administration has already implemented similar requirements on other federal forms without much consequence, but unfortunately, the same cannot be said here. Right after the sentence requiring ‘biological sex’ on ATF forms, the rule inserts another clause: “each form shall be executed under penalties of perjury, if the form or the regulation so provide.” It must be noted that perjury is considered a felony offense and carries a 5-year prison sentence

According to the ATF, this change is being made for ‘consistency and clarity,’ as “a ‘penalties of perjury’ clause is already present in [27 CFR] § 479.21(a),” which regulates the form required when purchasing machine guns. However, that doesn’t provide the full context: all three regulations the rule will alter, 27 CFR § 478.21 (firearms), 27 CFR § 479.21 (machine guns), and 27 CFR § 555.21 (explosives), were proposed and finalized alongside each other in 1981. And even back then, the only one that included the ‘penalties of perjury’ clause was § 479.21. As such, it can be reasonably inferred that the omission of the clause was a deliberate drafting choice, and this view is further supported by the fact that these regulations have been simultaneously updated numerous times since then.

Clearly, every administration since Ronald Reagan has concluded the same thing: this perjury language is not necessary for the firearms and explosives forms. If it’s being added now, that can pretty much only be because the Trump administration is adding a requirement to the forms and wants to give itself the power to prosecute violations. And it just so happens that the only other thing the rule adds is the requirement that individuals select their ‘biological sex’ on forms.

Given the facts, the rule is likely intended to be at least a partial trans gun ban. To understand why, consider a scenario where a trans person wants to purchase a firearm. According to federal regulations, in order to do so, they must present an ID and complete the ATF form. This is straightforward for cis people, but under these new rules, it could get problematic for a trans person who has updated their ID—something that 40 states currently allow.

So, if they select their ‘biological sex’ as required by the rule, they may face scrutiny over the mismatch between the form and their updated ID. In many cases, this will almost certainly result in the person being denied the sale altogether, as firearms dealers are allowed to refuse sales if they suspect a person hasn’t completed the form accurately. Conversely, if they select their sex as it appears on their ID, they won’t face scrutiny at the counter but will have legally committed perjury. Should the federal government choose to investigate, this one action could result in a 5-year prison sentence.

And, as the Trump administration’s passport policy has shown, they can find out if they want to. The federal government, through past firearms transactions along with information stored by Social Security, the Selective Service, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies, maintains a record of a person’s gender as it was first listed on official documents and considers that a person’s ‘biological sex.’ Of course, it goes without saying that consistently enforcing this—which requires checking every single person—would almost certainly be impermissibly expensive.

However, the risk isn’t 0. Because perjury has a statute of limitations of 5 years, prosecution over the ‘offense’ could occur at any point during the Trump presidency. For example, if a trans person who owns a firearm is arrested at a protest, law enforcement could then dig into their firearms purchases and charge them with perjury if their form didn’t reflect their ‘biological sex.’

Given this, it can be inferred that the ATF is likely banking on trans people complying with the new requirements and being scrutinized at the counter as a result. Because the government wouldn’t be the one denying firearms sales, it circumvents the Constitutional questions that a total ban on trans gun ownership would’ve presented—an idea that even drew opposition from the NRA when the DOJ discussions surrounding a trans gun ban were first reported in September.

The ATF will begin accepting public comments on the proposal starting tomorrow, which you’ll be able to submit on this page.

On Monday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released a proposed rule titled “Equal Access to Housing in Department of Housing and Urban Development Programs.” The rule, which aims to implement Trump’s executive order defining ‘sex’ as ‘immutable’ throughout federal regulations, would eliminate the federal gender identity and sexual orientation housing discrimination protections that were first implemented by the Obama administration in 2012 and expanded in 2016.

As part of this change, the rule would remove these protections from HUD “Community Planning and Development (CPD)-assisted programs, benefits, services, and accommodations,” which “include temporary and emergency shelter programs, such as the Emergency Solutions Grants program and the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program” as well as various affordable housing initiatives.

Instead, the rule would force shelters that receive HUD funding to ensure that “an individual is placed, served, and accommodated in accordance with” their ‘biological sex.’ The proposal states that this will apply even in states with laws banning shelters from engaging in this behavior, as it will “preempt local laws that may conflict with these requirements for state or local entities” by conditioning federal funding—which most shelters receive—on these restrictions.

And the rule goes even further, stipulating that it will “allow a facility provider to ‘require reasonable assurances or evidence to establish a person’s sex.’” According to the rule’s text, this explicitly repeals the 2016 rule’s provision banning shelters from subjecting trans people “to intrusive questioning or asking them to provide anatomical information or documentary, physical, or medical evidence of their gender identity.” Worse, what constitutes “reasonable assurances or evidence” is left entirely up in the air, meaning the Trump administration will be removing language banning genital inspections while encouraging shelters to “establish a person’s sex.”

In other words, although the rule doesn’t force shelters to perform physical inspections of trans and gender non-conforming people, it will no longer stop them from doing so, either.

The Trump administration justifies this change in a few different ways. First, it claims “it is not beneficial to institute a national policy that forces homeless women to choose between sleeping alongside and interacting with men in other intimate settings or refusing emergency shelter or other facilities.” It then elaborates by saying that “requiring shelters to place biological males with homeless women in shared sleeping, bathroom, and other intimate settings continues to place them at risk of sexual harassment and assault and exacerbates prior traumas for many homeless women.” This idea that trans women pose a threat to homeless women is similar to the reasoning Republicans in 8 other states have employed in order to expand their bathroom bans to cover homeless and domestic violence shelters.

Next, it asserts that “requiring homeless shelters and other facilities to house individuals inconsistent with their sex reduces the amount of help available to homeless individuals because it imposes an unacceptable and potentially illegal burden on the religious exercise of many faith-based facilities.” Here, it attempts to hide behind the First Amendment, writing that “many faith traditions believe that sex is an immutable characteristic determined by a creator, that male and female are the only two sexes, and that it is wrong for a person to deny his or her sex.”

Finally, it leans on Trump’s Executive Order 14168, which “specifically directed HUD to prepare and submit for notice and comment rulemaking a policy to rescind the 2016 Rule in order to restore biological truth in the federal government.” The HUD additionally states that it “believes this rule would advance the President’s policy to ‘defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience.’” It’s worth noting that the definition of female used by the rule—”a person of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs”—is different from the definition established in EO 14168, meaning that the agency exercised its own independent judgment when making this rule. This could matter in court.

After these justifications, the HUD feigns empathy for trans people, writing that it “acknowledges that this rulemaking would result in denying individuals who claim a different gender identity than their sex being denied access to their preferred single-sex shelters or their preferred accommodations in other shelters.” Instead of having this concern meaningfully impact its policy, it instructs trans people to “find other shelter options that are not limited to a single sex or seek admission to a single-sex shelter consistent with their sex”—where they will be at a significantly higher risk of sexual violence.

Furthermore, it states that “this rulemaking would require some organizations to follow rules inconsistent with their beliefs regarding gender and sex, if they continue to use federal funds” but that it “has considered these potential impacts and believes they are outweighed by the factors discussed above.” Of course, it goes without saying that this also “imposes an unacceptable and potentially illegal burden on the religious exercise of many faith-based facilities,” as it will also apply to religious shelters that are supportive of trans people.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has removed discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, either. Already, the federal government has finalized rules removing gender identity and sexual orientation as protected classes in credit & lending, education, and sports along with proposing rules eliminating similar protections from foster care and refusing to enforce the gender identity employment protections created by the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020).

But even then, this is different. According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, trans adults are 8 times more likely to experience homelessness than non-LGBTQ+ adults and almost 3 times more likely than non-trans LGBTQ+ adults. Thus, if this rule is finalized and upheld by courts, the Trump administration will be removing the social safety nets that trans people disproportionately rely on. It will actively place trans people with nowhere else to go at heightened risk of harassment, sexual assault, and violence. It’s needlessly cruel.

However, this fight isn’t over. When the proposal opens up for public comments tomorrow, we must make our voices heard. We must urge the Department of Housing and Urban Development to back down from this dangerous proposal or at the very least least soften it. It’s also worth noting that its broad and preemptive nature makes it especially vulnerable to a lawsuit. Hopefully, it isn’t allowed to stand.

Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to find the place to leave these comments on this page.

Just over two months ago, as Transitics has previously covered, the Trump administration released its new policy outlining how it will treat transgender people in federal prisons. The policy, Program Statement 5260.01, will deny trans people access to medically necessary healthcare and ban them from receiving any “social accommodations”—which is defined to encompass proper name and pronoun usage as well as gender-affirming items like clothing, binders, and makeup. Instead, the policy will attempt to help them “recover” through psychotherapy and psychotropic medications like antidepressants.

Because trans people in prisons will have no say in being subjected to this policy and its treatment plan, this essentially amounts to state-mandated conversion therapy. A lawsuit, Kingdom v. Trump, is currently challenging this policy—along with the executive order that sparked it—on 8th Amendment grounds and has resulted in a preliminary injunction covering ~800 of the 2,200 trans people in BOP custody.

As part of that case, last month, the agency that oversees federal prisons, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), was forced to release an administrative record for PS 5260.01—essentially a list of the documents it evaluated when creating the policy. There, the BOP admitted to deliberately disregarding the medical consensus surrounding gender-affirming care and implied that it’s expecting to collect more self-harm data among trans people in prisons. Following the release of the record, in early April, the Trump administration began moving to dissolve the injunction blocking the policy.

For some context, up until this point, BOP lawyers had defended the denial of healthcare to trans prisoners by arguing that it wasn’t in violation of the 8th Amendment because 1) the plaintiffs were still receiving gender-affirming care when they challenged the policy, 2) the plaintiffs must prove individualized harm, not generalized, and 3) the plaintiffs’ reliance on “WPATH guidelines at best reflects a ‘simple difference in medical opinion’” and that WPATH standards “are not accepted as medical consensus.”

The main argument here rested on the final point and is reminiscent of the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, which held that “states have wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical and scientific uncertainty.” But notably, the Trump administration wasn’t outright rejecting the existing consensus—just that it wasn’t enough of a consensus to be required treatment under the 8th Amendment, which has a relatively high threshold.

However, one year after taking this approach, the Trump administration has opted for a much more aggressive strategy, and the argument it’s now making is highly concerning. Here, there are two main documents: a 51-page declaration by Kristopher Kaliebe and a BOP memorandum on PS 5260.01.

First, the Kaliebe declaration. For some background, Kristopher Kaliebe is a psychiatrist who works at the University of South Florida and a known opponent of gender-affirming care. Aside from having ties to SPLC-designated hate group SEGM, he was also one of the nine authors of the ‘comprehensive’ HHS review that denounced gender-affirming care for minors. It’s also worth noting that Kaliebe was the only anti-trans expert consulted during the creation of PS 5260.01. In the document itself, he provides a succinct summary of his main argument towards the beginning, writing:

“Hormone therapy is unproven and experimental treatment for Gender Dysphoria that generally should not be available to those in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”). Though it is not medically necessary to provide hormone therapy to inmates who are diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria but not currently receiving hormone therapy, inmates currently receiving hormone therapy may be a more complex situation. In most circumstances, it is appropriate, after individual assessment, to discontinue hormone therapy for inmates currently receiving hormone therapy through an appropriate withdrawal process. In a limited set of circumstances, it may be appropriate, after individual assessment, to continue hormone therapy for inmates already being treated with hormones.”

There are a lot of things happening here. First, there’s the claim that “hormone therapy is unproven and experimental,” which entirely replicates the rhetoric Republicans have employed when banning gender-affirming care for minors. This argument is a major claim, and it goes against the consensus that gender-affirming care is evidence-based and medically necessary—a consensus supported by virtually all major American medical organizations, including the AMA, APA, and Endocrine Society. And yet, Kaliebe spends a large chunk of the declaration supporting this assertion, and he begins this section by writing that the “affirmative model has many weaknesses and risks.”

He argues that “within the affirmation model, hormones or surgical interventions are provided despite that these treatments would not meet the usual clinical standards”; that gender dysphoria is “a temporary disorder like bulimia or depression”; and that “much of the justification for affirmative treatment, such as cross-sex hormones and surgical treatments, comes from surveys indicating patient satisfaction”—which he claims is unreliable.

Following this, he shifts to characterizing psychotherapy as “the preferred treatment approach for gender dysphoria,” and this is where it begins to get concerning. He writes that “the affirmation model carries significant risks because humans have immense powers to deceive themselves and because patients may be susceptible to clinicians’ suggestions of affirmative treatment…a major target of [psychotherapy] treatment is helping patients identify how they deceive themselves.”

The way this is written, it carries the implication that many trans people are pressured into being trans by their therapists and by their own minds. A few paragraphs later, Kaliebe cites a 1993 study in order to assert that “cross-sex identification can arise after trauma,” another nod to the idea that transgender identity is artificial and not inherent.

After devoting some time to denouncing the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) recommendations while mentioning the Cass Review, Kaliebe finally makes his big claim: “cross-sex hormones generally are not medically necessary.”

He begins this section by arguing that “hormone therapy for Gender Dysphoria is not based on guidelines using best practice or systematic reviews of evidence” before repeating that “cross-sex hormones remain an experimental treatment that has been pursued at the expense of more cautious, holistic, and measured approaches.” To support that, he cites the work of Evgenia Abbruzzese, one of the other authors of the HHS review and a co-founder of SEGM.

Following this, he then writes that “sex-trait modification through hormone therapy has substantial health risks and is one of the few instances, and the only psychiatric disorder, in which doctors intentionally harm healthy tissue”—again taking a right-wing talking point that was used against trans youth care and applying it to trans adults. To conclude this section, Kaliebe ties it back to the Bureau of Prisons, asserting that:

“It could be reasonable for prison officials to adopt a strong presumption in favor of ending hormone therapy for all inmates (through the appropriate method of withdrawal), given the unproven medical benefits of continued hormone therapy and the potential negative effects of hormone therapy. This strong presumption would only be rebutted by exceptional cases.”

It’s worth noting that Kaliebe’s point here is disingenuous at best. After all, he wrote this declaration in support of a policy that makes no exceptions for “exceptional cases”—a policy that he had a hand in crafting, as per the administrative record. Clearly, although he emphasizes ‘caution’ and ‘risk’ when supporting mandatory detransition, he’s not willing to extend that same courtesy to gender-affirming care. This is a telling indicator of the true intent behind Kaliebe’s ‘evidence-based’ façade.

After this section, he repeats similar rhetoric to argue that ‘cross-sex surgeries’ and ‘social accommodations’ are not medically necessary under any circumstances for anyone, entirely ignoring the fact that gender-affirming surgeries are pretty much the only thing that doctors have been able to agree on about trans healthcare for at least the past half-century.

The BOP leans heavily on Kaliebe’s declaration in its memorandum, explicitly using it as evidence to support its claims that ‘sex trait modification surgeries,’ ‘social accommodations,’ and ‘hormones’ are not medically necessary, writing that “an expert [Kaliebe] has persuasively explained” these facts to them—an expert that they themselves sought out and hired for that exact purpose.

The bureau supports its policy further by claiming it keeps prisoners safe in three separate ways. First, it writes that PS 5260.01’s “handling of hormones to address gender dysphoria reduces rewarding threats of self-harm and may reduce overall self-harm” because “providing more access to hormones, especially in response to threats of self-harm or suicide, could increase self-harm.” Secondly, the BOP expresses baseless ‘fairness’ concerns, saying that “when inmates receive special treatment within a correctional environment, other inmates may begin to resent those receiving special treatment”—ignoring the fact that adequate medical care has not ever been considered to be ‘special treatment.’

Lastly, the memorandum argues that “limiting the availability of hormonal interventions to address gender dysphoria reduces the chance of an inmate being targeted by other inmates” as “the inmate would inevitably become a target for abuse in the male facility.” Which is actually true: trans women in prisons face astronomically higher rates of sexual violence. But taking away their healthcare is not the solution to this problem; removing them from male facilities is, and that’s something Trump has also moved to block.

Simply put, weaponizing the rampant abuse of trans people in prisons to justify taking away their healthcare is a new low, even for the Trump administration.

All of that said, because of the way the case is being argued, this won’t only have repercussions for federal prisons. Unlike before, the Trump administration has shifted to claiming that gender-affirming care isn’t healthcare at all—and that it’s harmful to trans people. These are the exact same justifications Trump used when he signed Executive Order 14187, which aims to strip federal funding from any providers that offer gender-affirming care (in its words, ‘chemical and surgical mutilation’) to minors. Already, dozens of providers nationwide have capitulated to these funding threats, creating a chilling effect on care for trans youth in states where it’s both legal and protected.

Unfortunately, precedent for banning adult care already exists. Notably, EO 14187’s definition of ‘children’ extends to anyone between the ages of 18 and 19, who are considered adults under federal law and in all but 3 states. Legally speaking, there’s no tangible difference between a minimum age of 19 and a minimum age of 21, 26, or even 60. Like EO 14187, the federal government is using trans prisoners as a test case for expanding these restrictions onto all trans adults.

Trump isn’t the only one pushing for a nationwide ban, either. Already, many right-wing groups and individuals, like the Heritage Foundation (the authors of Project 2025), Elon Musk, and Matt Walsh, have spoken out in support of total bans on transgender healthcare. At the same time, Republicans in Oklahoma and Texas have even introduced bills that aim to ban gender-affirming care for all ages. Meanwhile, Tennessee recently passed a bill that attempts to intimidate trans patients away from their care by forcing providers to report trans people’s private medical information to the state.

So far, Republicans have not been able to get the ruling they want to be able to justify a nationwide ban. Even a 4th circuit ruling last month upholding West Virginia’s exclusion of gender-affirming surgery from its Medicaid policy, despite calling those surgeries ‘experimental procedures,’ was fairly limited to questions of funding and discrimination. But here, they’re trying to force courts to answer on the medical necessity of gender-affirming care not just in prisons but for all trans Americans.

And they hope that by tying a nationwide ban to a case surrounding prisons—an area that’s typically far removed from the public conscience—fewer people will take notice. As such, now more than ever, the LGBTQ+ community as a whole must stand up and fight for the trans people in federal prisons and their access to healthcare. Our right to access care depends on it.

In early February, I had the opportunity to speak with Nebraska State Senator Merv Riepe about anti-trans legislation in his state. Riepe, a moderate Republican from the Omaha area, often finds himself as the deciding vote in breaking the Democratic-led filibuster—something that requires the support of all 34 Republicans in the chamber. In previous years, he’s only voted for two anti-trans bills, LB 574 in 2023 and LB 89 in 2025, but it wasn’t without forcing concessions from the bills’ sponsor, Kathleen Kauth.

LB 574, which originally entirely banned gender-affirming care for minors (in Nebraska, that’s anyone under 19) and imposed a 6-week abortion ban, was significantly watered down into a surgery ban with tighter restrictions—namely, a 40-hour talk therapy prerequisite—on hormone therapy and puberty blockers for trans youth and a 12-week abortion ban. Similarly, LB 89, a bathroom and sports ban that also imposed strict sex definitions across state law, had its bathroom provisions and sex definitions stripped away after Riepe insisted he “did not run for office to become part of the ‘Nebraska State Potty Patrol.’”

However, this time, he was unequivocal: no anti-trans legislation would pass in Nebraska this year.

And he kept his word.

Today, the Nebraska Legislature adjourned from its final day of the session, and as such, it means all bills that weren’t passed have officially failed. This includes 7 anti-trans bills—4 more than last year and a joint record in the state. These bills are:

• LB 552, which bans diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at Nebraska’s public universities.

• LB 655, a bill that allows medical providers to refuse to treat patients based on ‘conscience-based objections.’

• LB 730, Kauth’s latest attempt at a bathroom bill, which applies to schools, universities, and government buildings. Because the bill would also define sex as ‘biological’ in state law and regulations, it would’ve likely impacted Nebraska’s fairly progressive driver’s license gender change policy.

• LB 731, another Kauth bill, which would allow detransitioners to sue their doctors for malpractice up to twelve years after their medical transition while requiring any insurance company that has ever covered gender-affirming care to cover medical detransition.

• LB 732, Kauth’s third bill, which would repeal the regulations on care for trans youth and impose a total ban in the state.

• LR 301, Kauth’s final bill, which would commission a legislative study on whether or not allowing a child to medically or socially transition constitutes child abuse.

• LB 1071, a budget bill that contained a rider provision banning the state government and its public universities from promoting “allyship, transgender ideology…social justice…neopronouns, heteronormativity…gender theory…and any related formulation of these concepts.” Although the bill itself passed, this provision and some others were removed to win Riepe’s vote.

LB 730’s failure in particular presents a massive victory: it marks the fourth consecutive year that Kauth’s bathroom bill is defeated. Riepe, who initially supported the legislation in 2023 before changing his mind after speaking to trans constituents, has been the deciding vote on the measure for the past four years, and this year, Kauth doubled down on trying to win him over. Aside from making it her one ‘priority’ bill—which ensures it receives a debate on the floor—at the beginning of the year, she announced that she believed it now had Riepe’s support. However, Riepe disputed this characterization while speaking to Transitics in February, saying he “opposed it in 2025, and it makes even less sense in 2026.” When asked if his party could pressure him into changing his mind, Riepe replied:

“They have no leverage over me. The Nebraska Republican Party has already censured me, I have no aspirations to run for higher office, and I’m from a purple-ish district, so my constituents are better about these things.”

At least until next year, its failure means that Nebraska will remain one of the four GOP-controlled states without any bathroom restrictions. And among those four, Nebraska is by far the most conservative; in fact, the last time it voted to the left of any one of the other three in a presidential election was in 1936.

Thus, as it stands, here’s a map of current bathroom restrictions:

For sources, tables, and more maps, head to Transitics’ CATPALM 2.0 page.

On Tuesday, the Montana Supreme Court released its decision in Kalarchik v. State of Montana, a case concerning trans people’s birth certificates and driver’s licenses. In a 5-2 ruling, the court’s liberal majority upheld an injunction blocking the state’s restrictive gender marker policies, which were quietly implemented between 2022 and 2024.

On the surface, the ruling doesn’t appear to be that significant; after all, the Montana Supreme Court has a history of ruling against anti-trans laws—most notably its gender-affirming care ban in 2024. However, in that case, the court declined to address the plaintiffs’ argument that the law was discriminatory and instead based its ruling on the right to privacy, which, unlike at the federal level, is explicitly guaranteed by the Montana Constitution. But writing a concurring opinion, Justice Laurie McKinnon urged the court to adopt the US Supreme Court’s Bostock reasoning and rule that discrimination based on gender identity constitutes sex discrimination.

One and a half years later, the court’s majority has now sided with McKinnon, holding that “when [a person’s documents] do not accurately reflect a person’s sexual identity, the transgender Montanan is prevented, based on their sex, from obtaining the same attributes of public life that a cisgender Montanan may obtain.” Her reasoning is fairly simple:

“Upon discovering that her sex was incorrectly listed as male on her identity documents, a cisgender woman can update her identity documents. Thus, cisgender Montanans can obtain a birth certificate that matches their gender identity. However, a transgender Montanan, such as Ms. Doe [one of the plaintiffs], is not allowed to have birth certificates and identity documents which match her gender identity. Thus, transgender and cisgender Montanans are treated unequally in their ability to obtain amended birth certificates.”

Applying this concept more generally, McKinnon wrote:

“Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination. Discrimination based on sex is expressly prohibited under Montana’s unique Nondiscrimination Clause––’[n]either the state nor any person, firm, corporation, or institution shall discriminate on account of…sex…’ Thus, Article II, Section 4 is unequivocal in its intolerance for discrimination based on sex.”

As a result of this fact, the court declares that strict scrutiny—the highest level of judicial review—must be applied to discrimination based on transgender status.

On top of this, McKinnon also rebuked the state for misgendering the plaintiffs, calling out the fact that the evolutionary behavioral ecologist it hired to defend the law, Colin Wright, “uses the singular they/them pronouns to refer to Ms. Kalarchik and Ms. Doe throughout his declaration despite his insistence that both plaintiffs are biological males.”

And the court went even further. On page 18 of the ruling, the majority declares that “being transgender is also a suspect class under the Equal Protection Clause of Article II, Section 4,—‘no person shall be denied equal protection of the law.’” For some context, in discrimination law, a suspect class is generally defined as being a minority with a shared trait that has been historically discriminated against. Under precedent, laws that impose classifications based on suspect class status face strict scrutiny. Conversely, laws that discriminate against quasi-suspect classes face intermediate scrutiny, while laws that do neither are evaluated under rational basis review.

At the federal level, there are only 4 suspect classes—race, religion, immigration status, and national origin—and 2 quasi-suspect classes—sex and legitimacy of birth. Notably, up until this point, no state supreme court had ever declared trans people to be a suspect or quasi-suspect class. In fact, in the US Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision, Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion explicitly rejecting the notion. There, Barrett argued that “transgender status is not marked by the same sort of ‘obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics’” because “the category of transgender individuals is ‘large, diverse, and amorphous.’”

Montana Supreme Court Chief Justice Cory Swanson explicitly cited Barrett’s reasoning in his dissent, writing that “the Court’s vague description of transgender status incorporates something entirely subjective and fluid, turning on a person’s internal gender identification.” Moreover, he asserted that “once a subjective, fluid self-identity becomes a basis for a suspect class, there is no logical stopping point to equally recognizing any number of other suspect classes defined by one’s subjective motivations.”

And there’s a reason Barrett and Swanson are so reluctant, which Barrett herself explained rather succinctly: “holding that transgender people constitute a suspect class would require courts to oversee all manner of policy choices normally committed to legislative discretion.”

Here, it’s no different. This ruling effectively delivers a death sentence to all of Montana’s anti-trans laws, including its bathroom ban, sex definitions law, drag ban, forced outing law, Medicaid policy, and sports ban as well as any anti-trans laws passed in the future. It means that moving forward, whenever an anti-trans policy is challenged, courts will consider it to be presumably unconstitutional until proven otherwise. And without a change in the court’s composition, the Montana Legislature likely won’t be able to circumvent this ruling.

Simply put, this is an unprecedented victory. With federal courts more hostile than ever to trans people’s legal challenges, the Montana Supreme Court took it upon itself to stop the GOP’s assault on trans Montanans dead in its tracks. It ensures that, for trans people, Montana will remain among the least hostile red states for years to come. And in a year that has seen Republicans across the country launch unparalleled attacks on the trans community, it serves as a reminder that not all hope is lost.

Last Thursday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed House Joint Resolution 182, officially designating the month of June as “Nuclear Family Month” in the state. The resolution, which first passed the House last year before stalling in the Senate, marks the latest attack by Tennessee on same-sex couples and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.

Its purpose is made rather explicit. Aside from deliberately targeting Pride Month, HJR 182’s language is blatantly anti-LGBTQ+ from start to finish. In its first sentence, the resolution defines the “nuclear family” as “consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children” and labels it “God’s design for familial structure.” It then shifts to creationist language, asserting that the ‘nuclear family’ “has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world.”

And immediately, the mention of adopted and fostered children sticks out. In making the exception for straight couples without biological children, it becomes clear that the definition is really only meant to exclude same-sex couples.

The implication that same-sex couples aren’t families doesn’t end there. A few sentences later, the resolution brings up misleading statistics to provide reasons why this specific idea of the ‘nuclear family’ must be protected, saying that children from ‘fatherless families’ are more likely to live in poverty and have addiction and mental health issues. As part of this, it also mentions that “eighty-two percent of shooters were raised in an unstable family environment or without both biological parents together.”

This wording is intentional, and it’s made to suggest that children from same-sex households face significant challenges. Of course, it goes without saying that this idea is false: research has repeatedly shown that children raised by same-sex couples are not disadvantaged in any way.

After this, HJR 182 takes aim at more things that the GOP opposes, proclaiming that “Tennessee's values do not align with the humanistic, globalist ideologies of the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and like-minded organizations that fight for population control through the means of promoting sterilization and abortion practices.” Here, it seems likely that the term ‘sterilization,’ beyond being a reference to contraception, is also meant as a thinly veiled attack on gender-affirming care—something that many Republicans have repeatedly called ‘castration.’

Finally, the resolution asserts that “the nuclear family is God's perfect design for humanity and is aligned with the long-held traditional values of Tennessee” before declaring that “the nuclear family is under attack in our beloved State and nation.” This rhetoric isn’t new, and over the past few years, a number of Republicans have once again employed this exact same language when defending anti-LGBTQ+ positions. For example, in 2022, far-right House Republican Mary Miller (IL-15)—who authored a recent bill that aims to ban the mention of trans people in schools—justified her vote against the Respect for Marriage Act by saying it “attacks the traditional family.” Last year, Miller was also behind a bill that, if passed, would have similarly declared June as “Family Month.”

Nor is this Tennessee’s first time targeting same-sex couples. In February, the state’s House of Representatives passed a bill that allows businesses and individuals to ignore same-sex—but not opposite-sex—couples’ legally issued marriage licenses, though it’s worth mentioning that the proposal has since stalled in the Senate. And in other states, resolutions calling on the Supreme Court to overturn its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges have been introduced, and in Idaho, it even made it through one chamber. That said, last November, the high court notably refused to hear Kim Davis’ challenge to marriage equality.

Like Tennessee’s various anti-trans laws, House Joint Resolution 182 is meant to erase the state’s LGBTQ+ community. It takes Pride Month—a celebration of the LGBTQ+ fight for equality—and turns it into a dogwhistle while asserting that queer families don’t qualify as families. But even if it were ‘Nuclear Family Year,’ Republicans should know: no law, no bill, and no ‘nuclear family’ celebration will ever erase us.

Today, the Tennessee Senate voted 24-7—with one Republican joining Democrats in opposition—to pass anti-trans House Bill 754. The bill now heads back to the Tennessee House for a quick concurrence vote after it originally passed that chamber three weeks ago. From there, it’ll head to Governor Bill Lee’s desk, where, given his track record, it’ll almost certainly be signed into law.

As Transitics reported in mid-March, HB 754 is disguised as a bill that aims to mandate insurance companies that cover gender-affirming care to also cover care for detransitioners. This idea, one which Republicans have already passed in Texas and Utah, has the effect of raising trans people’s insurance costs, and this is something the bill’s main sponsor, Jeremy Faison, explicitly acknowledged last month.

However, unlike the other detransition insurance bills, HB 754 will also create what Faison calls a “right to public transparency” surrounding gender-affirming care, which mandates that providers “report statistics regarding all gender transition procedures” to the Tennessee Department of Health. And the data being demanded is highly specific: aside from a person’s age, ‘biological sex,’ and procedure information, providers would also be forced to report a person’s state of residence, “the date on which” a patient received a “transition procedure,” and a complete “list of any diagnoses that” a trans person “has received of neurological, behavioral, or mental health conditions.” On top of this, doctors will also have to submit their own names and contact information. A last-minute amendment, proposed by the bill’s Senate sponsor Brent Taylor, removed the county reporting requirement that was present in the original bill.

Finally, the bill stipulates that all this information will be released to the public as part of a “comprehensive annual statistical report,” and it explicitly specifies that the “data in the report on the department's public website [must not be] aggregated.” In other words, it’ll provide members of the public with detailed data instead of just an overview.

And if this is starting to seem like a violation of trans people’s medical privacy, that’s because it is. Under HIPAA’s federal medical privacy standards, providers are prohibited from disclosing any “individually identifiable health information…that identifies the individual or for which there is a reasonable basis to believe it can be used to identify the individual.” According to RFK Jr.’s HHS, this includes “all geographic subdivisions smaller than a State…including county” as well as “all elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to the individual…including admission date [and] discharge date.” Additionally, a person’s mental health diagnosis history is also considered identifiable.

HB 754 attempts to circumvent these concerns by stating that “forms required under this section must not contain individually identifiable health information” as defined under HIPAA, and despite that, it explicitly mandates that providers submit data that is clearly considered to be identifiable. And undercompliance is not an option. Under the bill, providers that don’t adequately abide by the reporting requirements will have their licenses suspended for at least 6 months while their employers will be hit with a fine of up to $150,000 and a potential investigation by the attorney general.

Thus, doctors will be forced to choose between risking their careers by following HIPAA and staying safe by handing over trans people’s medical information. But considering that HIPAA makes an exception for disclosures that are required under state law, the latter certainly seems to be the path of least resistance. And even worse, the bill allows the state to go after those that don’t see it this way.

It goes without saying that ‘individually identifiable health information’ is protected for a reason. Because of the data’s specificity—date of appointment, age, and mental health history—it’s highly likely that both members of the public and the state government will be able to use it to narrow down and, in some cases, fully identify many trans people—especially those that live in smaller counties. And this is particularly true given that the data is only being collected for a tiny subset of the state’s population.

Simply put, this bill is exceedingly dangerous: those who are re-identified could face violence and online harassment campaigns from right-wing trolls. It effectively leaves trans Tennesseans with 3 options: living in fear, pausing their medically necessary care, or fleeing the state in order to protect themselves. These choices are simply unacceptable, and they’re un-American in every sense of the word. No person—regardless of who they are—should be forced into this situation simply for being who they are.

And Tennessee Republicans clearly know the risks. They just don’t care.

Minutes before HB 754 passed the House, GOP representatives unanimously rejected a Democratic-led amendment that would’ve stripped out the provisions collecting and publishing trans people’s individually identifiable health information. Following that vote, while speaking before the full chamber, Faison outright lied about the bill’s contents while trying to justify the list-making provisions:

“I want to put your mind at ease: this bill does not break any HIPPA laws. We’re not sharing personal data about you. There is something that you need to know about you that you need to know about that I’ve learned through this called de-identified clinical data. De-identified clinical data is patient health information…that [has had] all direct identifiers removed so it can no longer be identified back to a specific individual.

“And here are the key elements that, per HIPAA…and according to this bill…we’re using the same de-identified clinical data methods: we remove all the names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, social security numbers, dates except for a year-specific, geographical data that’s anything smaller than a state, medical records…and any other unique code that could possibly identify a person.”

This is blatantly false. As previously mentioned, HB 754 unequivocally states that it will be collecting a trans person’s provider information, their age, and their entire mental health medical history, as well as “the date on which” they received gender-affirming care. And even if Faison is referring to the “comprehensive annual statistical report” in these remarks, this is still a lie. The bill does not mention that the information must be de-identified as part of the report. Quite the contrary: it only mentions that the report must be created from “all data obtained from forms required by this section” and, as discussed earlier, must be extremely detailed. The only data that won’t be published is doctors’ information, but it’s worth noting that this protection was only added by the Senate at the last minute.

The bill’s intent can be further demonstrated by a separate provision that will collect data on detransition care. There, insurance companies—not providers—will only be forced to submit the number of detransition claims they received in a month along with a person’s age, sex, and “if known, the date that the individual initially began a gender transition procedure.” Unlike for gender-affirming care, a person’s mental health history, appointment date, and provider details will not be reported.

These differences aren’t coincidental. There is simply no reason why the state would need to collect this data at all, let alone by subjecting trans people and detransitioners to different reporting requirements. In doing so, Republicans have made it abundantly clear: they’re fine putting trans people at risk—they only draw the line at endangering detransitioners.

If Tennessee Republicans’ goal is to run all trans people out of their state, they’re not hiding it well. Already, Tennessee is among the most restrictive in the country when it comes to trans people, but unlike Florida, Idaho, and Kansas, the state had thus far refrained from outright threatening the safety of its trans residents.

Now, the state is going much further than even these states have. Aside from making a list of its trans residents that is far more comprehensive than those made by Indiana, Kansas, and Texas, through House Bill 754, Tennessee will be painting a target on the back of every single trans person in the state.

This must be challenged. Simply put, if allowed to stand, Tennessee will become the first state where being trans truly is not an option. We can only hope that other states don’t decide to follow suit.

This year has marked an unprecedented escalation in Republicans’ attacks against trans people’s documents, and already, 5 more states have moved to restrict trans people’s ability to change their gender markers. Since January, 2 more states—Idaho and South Dakota—have been reported to have banned amendments to trans people’s birth certificates, while another 4—Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma—have banned gender changes on driver’s licenses.

But not all of them have done so publicly. Indiana implemented a similar policy through regulations and received little attention until the ban was finalized in February. Iowa did the same in November of last year, and in 2024, Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Montana, and Texas all adopted more restrictive policies—or in Texas’ case, an outright ban—with little to no warning or announcement. While it only took a few days for these restrictions to be reported, others, especially more recently, have slipped under the radar for a lot longer. In March, Transitics was the first to report that Idaho had actually implemented an ID ban two months prior, something that was done so quietly that not even Idaho Republicans knew to brag about it.

Now, Transitics has confirmed that Wyoming quietly implemented two separate bans of its own.

This story actually starts 6 years ago, with the 2020 Wyoming Supreme Court case MH v. First Judicial District Court of Laramie County. There, in a 4-1 decision, the court affirmed that gender changes to birth certificates were legal and held that state courts had the authority to issue court orders for those amendments. It’s worth noting that the lone dissent in MH—who argued the gender amendment policy was illegal—was Keith Kautz, who is now Wyoming’s attorney general.

However, in 2025, after the passage of the “Wyoming What is a Woman Act,” a district court denied a different trans woman’s petition for a gender change, kicking off another lawsuit that is once again before the state Supreme Court. As a result of the district court’s decision, the Wyoming Department of Health issued an emergency rule last November that temporarily repealed the regulation allowing trans people to obtain accurate birth certificates by submitting a court order—a policy that had been in place since 1993. Then, in mid-March, that new rule was permanently adopted.

Because the state remained silent on the issue and got no local media coverage over its proposal, the DOH received no public comments during the rulemaking process. In other words, the ban was implemented entirely unopposed. Local media didn’t pick up on it while covering the court case earlier this month, either.

Once that rule took effect, the state decided to secretly make another change, this time to its driver’s license policy. Speaking to two employees at the Wyoming Department of Transportation, Transitics has confirmed that the state now requires an amended birth certificate for gender changes, which, as previously established, the state will not issue. Like in Idaho, Indiana, and Iowa, this functionally prohibits most trans people in the state from obtaining accurate identification. Additionally, the state will revert any previous changes upon renewal unless the trans person also changed their birth certificate.

Prior to this, in June 2019, the DOT—entirely on its own volition—began requiring that trans people submit a medical provider’s statement confirming their gender identity in order to change their gender marker. Given that Wyoming is the most conservative state in the country, this was a surprisingly progressive policy. Among red states, it was only matched by Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, and West Virginia; of these four, only North Dakota adopted its policy without any sort of legal pressure.

But now, Wyoming has become the 9th state to ban gender marker changes on driver’s licenses and the 5th this year alone. And once Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signs SB 2322, that number will climb to 10. Thus, for the first time in 50 years, the number of states that ban gender marker changes on birth certificates and driver’s licenses will be equal. Just three years ago, those figures were 4 and 0, respectively. Here’s a map of current driver’s license policies:

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

That said, Wyoming isn’t a stranger to secretly implementing anti-trans policies. In 2025, the state was one of the three that banned Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care with no prior warning. And this entirely ignored the lack of political will to do so at the time: the state’s GOP supermajority, despite having the opportunity last year and passing numerous other anti-trans bills, only passed a formal Medicaid ban this year.

Taken together, these actions blatantly circumvent the democratic process. They’re carried out with the intent of suppressing trans people’s limited ability to push back against their rights being taken away, and unfortunately, it seems to be working.

But it also reveals something else: Wyoming Republicans aren’t doing this to score political points. If they were, they’d be bragging about it like many other states do—and like Governor Mark Gordon did when he signed the state’s ban on care for trans youth despite purportedly believing it to “stray into the personal affairs of families.” Instead, their actions have shown that they truly get nothing out of it; meanwhile, trans people have everything to lose.

It’s cruelty for the sake of cruelty. They’re just hoping they won’t have to look trans people in the eye as they continue to strip our rights.

Last year, I created the Comprehensive Anti-Trans Policy and Litigation Map, or CATPALM, with the aim of making trans policy research more accessible. At the time, it was a pretty short project, but it quickly became apparent that it was far from complete. Since then, I’ve continued to pour hours into tracking trans policies, and during this period, many more states have moved to quietly restrict trans people’s rights—in some cases doing so with no announcement of any kind. This is my way to ensure they don’t get away with that.

Overall, the feedback I’ve received has been incredibly positive. But I think I can do better. So, without further ado, I present to you CATPALM 2.0!

I’ve made the following changes:

1. Simplified all maps and added keys

2. Assigned ratings to each state’s policy, from ‘Most Progressive’ to ‘Most Restrictive’

3. Mapped each state’s overall policy score, ranging from 8 to -9

4. Added a number of new columns for some policy fields, including a 2 year risk rating for bathrooms, identity documents, and Medicaid

   1. Added enactment dates for policies surrounding bathrooms and documents to better quantify state-by-state efforts to restrict trans people

   2. Other fields were more difficult to quantify and/or the data seemed fairly useless

5. Updated the map color palettes to blue-red in order to improve readability for those with red-green colorblindness

6. Reorganized the tracker

Jump to:

• Overall State Ratings

• Bathrooms

• Identity Documents

  • Birth Certificates

  • Driver’s Licenses

  • Non-Binary Gender Recognition

• Care Access

  • Trans Youth Care

  • Medicaid

• Prisons

  • Gender-Affirming Care In Prisons

  • Prison Housing

• Sports

• Federal Action

Overall State Ratings

Bathrooms

Identity Documents

Birth Certificates

Birth Certificate Amendment Method

Driver’s Licenses

Non-Binary Gender Recognition

Care Access

Trans Youth Care

Medicaid

Prisons

Gender-Affirming Care In Prisons

Prison Housing

Sports

Federal Action

Last Friday, Transitics reported that the Kentucky GOP was quietly attempting to pass an unprecedented ban on trans teachers that additionally would’ve forced providers to diagnose trans people with a mental illness. The proposal, spearheaded by state senator Gex Williams in the form of an amendment to the bipartisan teacher certification bill House Bill 759, planned to weaponize the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 by prohibiting the certification of teachers that have been diagnosed with a disorder on the law’s relatively small exclusions list.

Although the amendment itself fails to make mention of trans people in any way, it hinges on the fact that the exclusions list contains “transvestism, transsexualism, and gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments” alongside other diagnoses like “compulsive gambling” and “kleptomania.” However, it’s worth noting that “transsexualism” and “gender identity disorder” were both removed from the DSM V in 2013 and are no longer diagnosed, meaning the hypothetical teaching ban, as written, wouldn’t apply to any trans people who medically transitioned after 2013.

Williams’ proposal aimed to correct this by additionally forcing all doctors in Kentucky to ignore the current standards and instead diagnose trans people according to the 40-year-old DSM III. As a result, this provision would’ve had the effect of designating being trans as a mental illness for the first time in over a decade.

Last week, HB 759 and its amendment were added to the consent orders, a fast-track process often used for bills that aren’t expected to be controversial. This last-minute play relied on Democrats not being aware of the amendment’s contents, as any objection would’ve sparked a lengthy debate the legislature, which had not yet passed a budget, simply did not have time for. Thus, following the backlash stemming from Transitics’ article, Republicans were forced to withdraw the bill from the consent orders calendar on Tuesday. By the time the legislature wrapped up this year’s session on Wednesday night, HB 759 had not been given a vote—meaning the proposal is now officially dead.

And there’s plenty to celebrate: HB 759’s failure means Kentucky will remain one of the few Republican-controlled states to not have passed any anti-trans laws this year. In a year that has seen unprecedented attacks on trans bathroom access and trans people’s driver’s licenses as well as an increased trend in states wanting to make lists of trans people, this by itself is a massive victory.

Plus, it also shows that public pressure can work. Thanks to the actions of activists and citizens, Kentucky Republicans were unable to get away with quietly passing an attack on trans teachers. It might not happen that often, but this is certainly a win for the entire trans community.

That said, it’s worth mentioning that Williams’ attempt to sneak these provisions through has also resulted in the defeat of a desperately needed teacher certification reform bill. Put a different way, Williams appears to have traded the education of hundreds of thousands of kids for a chance at passing a radical anti-trans proposal.

Now, attention turns to neighboring Tennessee, where Republicans continue to advance a bill that will make a public list of the state’s trans residents. There, public backlash has already resulted in a Democratic-led amendment that aimed to remove the portions of the bill mandating the collection of trans people’s identifying health information—though this attempt was defeated by a party-line vote last week. Still, as HB 759’s fate demonstrates, the battle is not over yet. Hopefully, that fight also ends in a victory.