Last night, an unprecedented blue wave swept across the nation as Democrats retook the House and Senate in overwhelming fashion. As things stand, Democrats have flipped 7 Senate seats—and currently lead in Alaska and Mississippi—along with around 40 House seats, with more potentially to come as votes are counted. Simply put, Americans delivered a sharp rebuke of Trump, his allies, and the broader MAGA movement, with races swinging upwards of 20 percentage points in many states.

But of these extraordinary wins, perhaps the biggest prize for Democrats was Texas, where a Democrat had not won statewide since 1994. Although the Democrat running for Senate—James Talarico—was expected to win narrowly, the state’s long-entrenched Republicans in other offices were predicted to hold on. Instead, what followed was total wipeout for the Texas GOP: Talarico won by over 12 percentage points and was projected as the winner merely 2 hours after polls closed, while three-term Republican governor Greg Abbott lost to Gina Hinojosa by 7.

Further down the ballot, a similar story unfolded as Democrats handedly won the races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, railroad commissioner, land commissioner, agriculture commissioner, and state comptroller. Dems also took all 4 (of 9) seats on the state Supreme Court that were up this cycle as well as all 3 seats on the 15th Court of Appeals, which has statewide jurisdiction and handles all appeals involving the state government. And best of all, Democrats secured a majority in the state House of Representatives for the first time since 2003.

For trans Texans—myself included—the significance of these victories cannot be overstated. Since 2021, the state’s Republican government has targeted trans people with impunity, systematically, undemocratically, and sometimes even illegally stripping our rights without even pretending to give us a say.

At the center of this aggressive push were two men: attorney general Ken Paxton and governor Greg Abbott. In February 2022, Paxton released an opinion declaring gender-affirming for minors to be child abuse, and a few days later, Abbott ordered investigations into several families as a result. Then, in March 2024, the state quietly banned its Medicaid program from covering all forms of gender-affirming care. In August, the right to change your gender marker on driver’s licenses and birth certificates was revoked virtually overnight, again at the behest of Paxton. And this year, Paxton announced that therapists and psychologists could not treat trans kids in any capacity unless they impose conversion therapy.

Through this quiet implementation, Paxton and Abbott did everything they could to ensure that these policies harmed as many trans people as possible. After all, leaving these questions up to the much slower legislature would’ve given people ample time to prepare themselves beforehand. And because of the extreme nature of some of them, it’s not even certain that they would’ve even passed in the first place; indeed, no other state has launched similar investigations into trans kids’ families or banned trans kids from seeking talk therapy.

Now, their arrogance, driven by the belief that they’d retain control of the state government, has doomed the very anti-trans policies they worked so hard to implement. As a result, once Democrats take office, many of Texas’ worst restrictions can be undone with the stroke of a pen. AG-elect Nathan Johnson has already indicated he’ll do so, condemning Paxton’s anti-trans actions—and explicitly naming one—in an interview with the Atlantic.

“We’re talking about not abusing your power to make certain people miserable, to rally your base,” he added, “and I’m happy to say that I don’t think that kind of behavior is being rewarded politically right now in Texas.”

He was right: he won without taking a single anti-trans position despite his Republican opponent, Mayes Middleton, attacking him heavily on his pro-trans stances. Furthermore, Johnson actually already pledged to not enforce the state’s bathroom law, calling it a “dumb law” and saying that Ken Paxton’s reporting hotline “will not have anyone answering it” during a primary debate.

As such, given his spotless record of voting against anti-trans legislation during his time in the state legislature, Johnson appears likely to rescind all three of Paxton’s extremely harmful anti-trans opinions once his term begins. And much like Abbott did during his time in office, governor-elect Hinojosa will have the power to direct the implementation of policies consistent with the AG’s new opinions.

But the most significant story isn’t even this; it’s the judiciary. As previously mentioned, Democrats swept all of the statewide judicial contests, bringing the state Supreme Court down to a slim 5-4 Republican majority while taking full control of the 15th Court of Appeals. Because the state has passed quite a few anti-trans laws—including youth gender-affirming care ban SB 14 and bathroom bill SB 8—the AG and governor can’t undo them alone, but unlike before, those wishing to challenge the laws suddenly find themselves in a much more favorable environment.

The most important factor is that should trans Texans sue the state over these laws, AG-elect Johnson would be tasked with defending them. Except, like other Democratic AGs have done in the past, he may not want to in the first place. As such, once a verdict is issued by a district court or the fully Democratic 15th Court of Appeals, he could simply choose not to appeal to a higher court, and under Texas law, he has that discretion. The Texas GOP does not currently have a way to hold him accountable over that refusal, either, as only the Democratic-controlled state House can initiate impeachment proceedings. Meanwhile, the only other person who could realistically intervene is the governor, and given her track record she almost certainly won’t.

But even at the Texas Supreme Court, there shockingly now appears to be a majority willing to overturn the state’s youth gender-affirming care ban. Specifically, one of the 5 conservative justices, Debra Lehrmann, is on the record opposing the law already. In fact, when it was challenged before the court two years ago, Lehrmann wrote a scathing 31-page dissent characterizing the ban as an infringement on parental rights that “is not only cruel—it is unconstitutional.” Since then, Texas voters approved a constitutional amendment explicitly enshrining the right of a parent to “exercise care, custody, and control of the parent’s child,” meaning Lehrmann’s argument has only grown stronger.

Because of this, the state’s aggressively enforced gender-affirming care ban may very well be on its last legs. It remains to be seen how exactly the litigation will play out, but once it’s challenged, expect it to fall fairly quickly.

The bottomline is, in the next four years, Texas may very well go from being one of the most anti-trans states in the country to being a state that is mildly protective of us. And despite what the GOP and Elon Musk would want you to believe, Texas voters really don’t care either way. Hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-trans ads only resulted in an electoral wipeout for Republicans in the state, showing once and for all that Democrats’ support for trans people isn’t the salient issue that conservatives have wanted it to be.

I still remember reading the news about the child abuse investigations from four years ago. I was 15 at the time and I was scared into silence by those headlines for over a year, afraid I’d be taken away from my parents. I still remember being denied the medical care that I needed for nearly three years. I still remember therapists refusing to see me out of fear of going to prison.

For almost five years, I’ve only been able to feel anger and sadness at the state that raised me.

But today, I feel hopeful.

For the first time, I can rest knowing that Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott won’t hurt any more trans kids like me.

And Texas, once a testing ground for the GOP’s extreme anti-trans push, has fallen to Democrats who seem eager to dismantle as much of that extremism as they can.

For the first time in a long time, trans Texans are finally free.

In 1968, Louisiana passed a law allowing trans people to update their birth certificates. According to historical records, the law—which made Louisiana the 4th state to allow such changes—was introduced and passed because a trans woman had asked them to. Indeed, that was all it took for the legislature to act. And the final vote tally? 87-8 in the state House and 38-0 in the state Senate.

It may be hard to imagine a conservative state willingly doing anything to help trans people now, let alone after we ask them to, but until relatively recently, that was pretty much the norm. In 2009, Nebraska dropped its surgery requirement for driver’s licenses after it was asked to. In 2013, Idaho did the same. And in 2015, the GOP-held West Virginia Senate successfully pushed the equally red state House into removing the surgery requirement for driver’s licenses as well.

When the term ‘disenfranchisement’ is used, it often refers to the suppression or removal of voting rights. Although historical methods like poll taxes and literacy tests have been done away with, this literal form of disenfranchisement still occurs. Even now, some states—including Mississippi, Tennessee, and Florida—ban people who have been convicted of felonies from voting once they are released. Meanwhile, other states like Texas make it harder for people to vote by limiting voter registration, closing polling locations, and restricting mail-in voting.

Federally, Republicans have heavily pushed the SAVE America Act, a voter ID bill that, as Transitics has reported in the past, would make it much more difficult for many trans people to vote because of the barriers we face in obtaining accurate identification. Although the bill failed to pass, some trans people have nevertheless complained of facing extreme difficulties when voting this cycle.

But fundamentally, the right to vote exists to give every American a voice, however small, in our government, and efforts to remove or suppress that right serve the sole purpose of suppressing those voices. In that sense, disenfranchisement doesn’t just stop at voting rights—it includes any efforts to silence unwanted voices and systematically write them out of the political system.

For years, Republicans have been working tirelessly to do just that: write trans people out of the political system entirely. To that end, many GOP-led states have restricted the rights of their trans residents without informing them beforehand or giving them a chance to fight back. In some cases, it may take months or even years for trans people and the media to even notice that these restrictions are present. It’s worth noting that these policies are often implemented and/or approved by state governors and attorneys general, both of whom are typically elected officials.

In April, for example, Transitics was the first to report that Wyoming had quietly removed the ability for trans people to change their gender marker on their driver’s license. As if that wasn’t bad enough, documents obtained by Transitics a few months later eventually revealed that the ban had been implemented on May 2nd, 2025—11 months before anyone caught on. And it isn’t just Wyoming: by Transitics’ count, 20 other states have recently implemented at least one (though often more than one) anti-trans policy without either telling the trans people they affect or allowing the public to provide any sort of input. On the other hand, 11 states have also implemented pro-trans policies without notice; paradoxically, 5 of the states with quiet anti-trans policies—including Wyoming, which enacted a still-unnoticed ban on conversion therapy back in 2021—can also be found on this list. Here’s a map:

Although most of these states are controlled by Republicans, a few notably aren’t. As Transitics reported earlier this month, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Virginia all quietly cut Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care for minors in response to federal pressure, with New Jersey eventually following suit in recent days. Meanwhile, Kansas, which is governed by term-limited Democrat Laura Kelly, cut Medicaid coverage of care for all trans adults—despite state law only calling for a ban on coverage for minors—in October 2025. And worse, the state went out of its way to declare gender-affirming care as ‘experimental’ to get around specific federal coverage requirements for people between the ages of 18 and 20; other states that have implemented similar bans, like Ohio, have not taken this extreme step.

But regardless of who enacts them, the outcome of these policies is exactly the same: trans people are disenfranchised, our voices silenced and our rights taken away without the consent of the governed (and also without giving the governed an opportunity to consent in the first place). Furthermore, they indicate that politicians increasingly believe trans Americans are few enough in numbers that we don’t have to be listened to at all. That’s exceedingly dangerous.

Subscribe now

Of course, Republicans already know this, and through their vehemently anti-trans platform, have essentially abandoned any possibility of competing for trans people’s votes. Even the Log Cabin Republicans—which has long been considered the LGBT wing of the GOP—gave up on this idea earlier this year, dropping the ‘T’ and officially declaring itself an organization for LGB Republicans only.

Now, some Democrats running for office this cycle are taking the hint. By Erin Reeds’s count, 31 Democrats have leaned into anti-trans messaging at some point in their current campaigns. While most have only ceded ground on trans people’s participation in sports, a few have gone further. Iowa Senate hopeful Josh Turek, for example, has publicly opposed “taxpayers paying for sex changes,” a statement that carries with it the implication that gender-affirming care isn’t healthcare. Meanwhile, Ohio House Democrat Marcy Kaptur ran ads declaring that she “voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of schools.” Another, South Carolina Senate candidate Annie Andrews responded to Trump calling her an anti-trans slur by branding trans women ‘biological men.’ Finally, Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor, ditched a meeting with local LGBTQ+ advocates a few days after she promised to “enforce and uphold” the state’s existing anti-trans laws. After she faced intraparty blowback, the Ohio Democratic Party responded by silencing her critics with impunity.

Republicans’ attempts to systematically disenfranchise trans people show us that when a party believes that it does not have to compete for the votes of a group, it does not involve that group in the political system it controls. The message that Democrats like Amy Acton, Josh Turek, Marcy Kaptur, and Annie Andrews, as well as others like Kathy Castor, Vicente Gonzalez, Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Sarah Trone Garriott, are sending us could not be more clear: they do not believe that they have to compete for our votes.

That tells us everything we need to know about how they will govern us.

Of course, not all Democrats have followed suit. Even many in competitive races, Democrats like Sam Forstag in Montana, Troy Jackson in Maine, Abdul El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, David Crowley in Wisconsin, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, JoAnna Mendoza in Arizona, Christina Bohannan in Iowa, and Cait Conley in New York have refused to join the GOP’s anti-trans crusade, while others like James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa in Texas and Adam Hamilton and Cindy Holscher in Kansas have been somewhat ambivalent this cycle but have nevertheless been very supportive of trans people in the past.

Thus, in a handful of races across the country, trans people are being given a false choice between two candidates who do not think their votes or their voices matter. But in the races where Democrats have held the line, trans people have the opportunity to send a message to those who haven’t. And when it comes to the worst offenders, we must take advantage of that opportunity.

Simply put, we as trans people are not fighting for the future or the direction of the Democratic Party or for our place within that party. Rather, this election season, we are fighting for our continued inclusion in the American political system, to remind those in our government that our votes—our voices—matter and that we deserve to be heard.

This Tuesday, our disenfranchisement is on the ballot. It’s our responsibility to use our voices accordingly and do our best to ensure that this November will not be the last time that our voices matter.

Our rights depend on it.

Immediately upon entering office for a second time in January 2025, Trump shocked the nation’s trans community with his announcement that trans Americans would no longer be able to obtain passports reflecting their identities. “The Secretary of State,” Trump’s order—Executive Order 14168—reads, “shall implement changes to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports [and] visas, accurately reflect the holder’s sex,” where sex is defined as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”

Within a few weeks, the ACLU filed a challenge against the ban, and that June, Massachusetts District Judge Julia Kobick—a Biden appointee—issued a nationwide injunction blocking it. After a couple weeks of delays, the State Department complied and once again began issuing accurate passports to trans people. However, it wouldn’t last: on November 6th, 2025, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction via shadow docket ruling, clearing the way for the Trump administration to enforce the policy in its entirety.

As Transitics reported last November, the State Department’s implementation of the ban is extremely airtight. Even back then, there were several known cases where first-time trans and even cis applicants reported being asked to submit extra documentation that established their ‘sex at birth’ and/or had their gender markers changed against their will. All details relating to this process, which the State Department termed ‘adjudication,’ were kept entirely confidential even as the litigation played out.

But now, after nearly 20 months of secrecy, the State Department has finally declassified its full guidelines for ‘adjudicating’ sex markers on passports, and unfortunately, it’s even worse than was previously believed. The policy in question, which is codified as Section 403.3 of Volume 8 of the Foreign Affairs Manual and is simply titled ‘Sex Markers,’ is divided into four subsections: Summary, Procedures, Eligibility for a Fully Valid Passport or Passport Card, and Indicators of a Prior Change to Sex Marker.

Although the first subsection is fairly barebones and only serves to remind employees of Trump’s executive order, the same cannot be said about the second. That section, ‘Procedures’ (8 FAM 403.3-2), opens with a statement informing employees that “most applicants have a consistent sex marker on all their documents and applications” and that they “do not need to do extra research to confirm an applicant’s sex marker unless there is an indicator he or she previously changed his or her sex marker.” What counts as an ‘indicator’ is found in the 4th subsection, which we’ll get to soon.

After directing employees to “establish [a person’s sex] by the preponderance of the evidence” if an applicant requests to either change their gender marker or to be issued an ‘X’ marker, the manual further instructs passport workers to “review conflicting information and relevant Department databases to best determine which document accurately reflects the applicant’s biological sex at birth.” It should be noted that the ‘Department database’ in question is the American Citizen Records Query (ACRQ), which is an internal database containing an electronic record of a person’s past passport applications as well as copies of all the supporting evidence that the person has ever submitted to the State Department.

As part of this lengthy process, if a person’s sex cannot be properly adjudicated, employees are told to “suspend the application with information request letter (IRL) 708-21.” According to a copy of IRL 708-21 that was posted online last year, if this happens, the State Department will require that a person submit “early public records that show [their] name and sex at the time of your birth,” which includes “medical records, hospital records, religious records, early school records, and/or any other public documents created at or near the date and place of [their] birth.” Applicants that fail to submit this information—information that not everyone has access to—may see their applications denied.

Lastly, in cases where an applicant either “does not select a male or female sex marker” or “cannot submit documents showing a binary biological sex at birth,” or if “there are no database records showing the applicant’s binary biological sex at birth,” the application will be referred to AskPPTAdjudication@state.gov, which is an email address belonging to the State Department’s Office of Adjudications. It must be noted that this office existed well before the current anti-trans policy was implemented and receives requests from a variety of topics.

The third subsection, known as “Eligibility for a Fully Valid Passport or Passport Card” (8 FAM 403.3-3), is fairly short, and aside from barring employees from circumventing the policy by issuing limited validity passports, it only does one other thing: needlessly prohibit trans people from obtaining a second passport book. Under State Department guidelines, a person is issued a second passport book under a few limited circumstances, including when their passport is being held at a foreign consulate and will not be ready in time for their trip. According to the new policy, however, trans people will be denied this right just because they’re trans, with the policy clearly stipulating that “if the primary passport has an incorrect sex marker, it must be corrected prior to issuing a second valid passport.”

Subscribe now

Finally, there’s the fourth subsection: “Indicators of a Prior Change to Sex Marker” (8 FAM 403.3-4). As the policy explains, “conflicting sex markers on documents submitted by the applicant and/or previous passport records can demonstrate a previous change to his or her sex marker.” But even if those are absent, it also notes that “other applications may show that an applicant is requesting a sex marker that differs from his or her biological sex marker at birth.” Keeping with this, the State Department proceeds to list its ‘indicators’ of a ‘prior sex change’:

While some of those are typically associated with trans people, half of them actually aren’t. Of course, it’s possible for anyone to mistakenly “leave the sex marker field blank,” and although the other sections are meant to weed out trans people’s legal changes, cis people are equally scrutinized too. Furthermore, there are several reasons that a person would have an amended birth certificate that are not related to a gender change, including name changes, clerical errors, other information changes, and certain kinds of adoptions.

Lastly and perhaps most glaringly is (6). Needless to say, under the current administration, trans people really aren’t eager to renew their passports early; rather, it’s usually married women who are forced to apply for a passport early after changing their last names. Under the wording of this provision, they’d be flagged too. Thus, it can be said that the State Department is effectively including getting married in its list of “indicators of a prior sex change,” which is beyond absurd.

As if that wasn’t concerning enough, if a person checks any of those seven boxes, employees have been ordered to conduct thorough checks for a person’s legal history through various third-party commercial databases. This includes LexisNexis (which often returns their legal history (including information on court processes for a potential name change), home address, business/employment information, and full property portfolio), Nlets (which can pull up a person’s vehicle registration and DMV records, Social Security information, concealed carry permits, and criminal records), and EVVE (which contains information on birth certificates; although it should be noted that if a state issues a new certificate to a trans person—and 29 of the 40 that allow gender changes usually do—this search will be useless).

Finally, should these “database checks show the use of a different binary sex marker,” employees are directed to once again go through the adjudication process outlined in subsection 2.

8 FAM 403.3’s convoluted gender marker adjudication process is as dangerous as it is ridiculous. Under its extreme requirements, all Americans, both trans and cis, are being needlessly policed and scrutinized when applying for the very documents that are required to exercise the basic human right to travel. That scrutiny serves no legitimate purpose, as gender markers have absolutely no bearing on national security. And given that Trump ran in part on promising to cut back on “wasteful government spending,” it’s particularly hypocritical that government resources are now being put towards the extra labor it takes to adjudicate thousands upon thousands of applications.

However, thanks to its release, the policy’s enforcement is no longer shrouded in mystery. For the first time, trans people and our allies know exactly what we’re up against and exactly who else is being surveilled as part of the policy. For the first time, we know exactly why the Trump administration is being able to find out who’s trans and who isn’t. For the first time, we know exactly how our constitutional right to Due Process is likely being violated by the policy. And when arguing against it, we finally know where to start.

At the end of the day, the lengths the State Department will go to in 'adjudicating’ sex markers show just how much the policy’s sole purpose is to guarantee that no trans Americans slip through the cracks. Indeed, a ban that does not revert changes that have already been made would’ve accomplished the same rhetorical result; in many states, similar actions already have. But through this system, Trump ensures that all trans Americans are suffering equally under the policy.

To them, that’s all that matters.

Editor’s note November 5th, 2026: Michigan backtracked on its cut, publishing another update indicating that it will again cover gender-affirming care for minors. The original text of the article has been preserved below.

Two months ago, as part of its ongoing assault on gender-affirming care, the Trump administration finalized a rule banning federal funds from being used to cover care for trans youth through Medicaid and CHIP. Both programs, which are funded jointly by the federal government and individual states, provide health insurance to low-income Americans and, through that structure, allow states to determine what care they will and will not cover. As part of the new rule—which went into effect today—states wishing to continue covering gender-affirming care for minors would need to take on “the full cost of sex-rejecting procedures” with their own funds.

Last Thursday, Transitics reported that Arizona and Virginia—two states with Democratic governors—had responded to the rule by quietly updating their Medicaid programs to begin denying care to trans youth. Being the most unprecedented Democratic capitulation to Trump’s anti-trans demands yet, the news immediately sparked backlash among trans Americans; especially in Virginia’s case, many felt betrayed by the state’s refusal to continue coverage of trans kids’ care. But today, Transitics can confirm that two more Democratic-led states are following in their lead: Colorado and Michigan.

Firstly, and arguably the most problematic, is Colorado. Under full Democratic control since 2018, Colorado has often been at the forefront of passing protective measures for LGBTQ+ residents. Just this past May, the state responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down its conversion therapy restrictions by passing an updated law allowing victims of the practice and their families to sue their providers even decades after the ‘therapy’ took place. And last year, the state also enacted a law mandating that all insurance companies in the state cover gender-affirming care without limitation.

Ironically, the first known violation of that law is now coming from the state itself. On September 18th, the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF) informed providers that “certain Physician-Administered Drug (PAD) services for the purposes of gender-affirming care will no longer be covered benefits for members under 18 years of age.” Two weeks later, HCPF released its full policy surrounding its updated coverage, and it somehow manages to be worse than the policies enacted by Arizona and Virginia. As Transitics reported last week, the federal rule allows for a 6-month ‘tapering’ period for youth currently receiving gender-affirming care where federal funds can still be used. And although HCPF does mention that stipulation in its policy, it also introduced a strange exception:

“Effective October 13, 2026, claims payment for GnRH/LHRH agents prescribed for gender-affirming care therapy for members under the age of 18 will not be allowed… Prior authorization for testosterone, estrogen, progesterone or medroxyprogesterone therapy for members under the age of 18,” the policy reads, “who are receiving and stabilized on therapy for gender-affirming care prior to October 13, 2026, may receive approval to allow for tapering and discontinuation of therapy.”

The exclusion of puberty blockers in the tapering policy isn’t accidental. The state’s prior authorization guidance that was updated the same day mirrors the policy and once again does not allow for a tapering period for trans kids receiving puberty blockers. And like Arizona and Virginia, Colorado has provided no indication that it has notified patients and their families. In doing so, Colorado is going far beyond what even the Trump administration intended—immediately cutting many trans kids’ care and leaving them scrambling for options.

When news first broke of the state’s decision to comply with the rule back in August, HCPF claimed that it “does not have the statutory or budget authority to cover these services without federal funding” despite the negligible impact doing so would’ve had in the state budget. But it’s also worth noting that, as discussed before, the state also lacks the authority to decide not to cover this care. This means that, once forced to choose which law it would violate, Colorado willingly went with the option that harmed trans kids.

Meanwhile, Michigan has been much less public about its plans. In fact, it’s only offered one piece of information signalling its compliance with the new rule: a provider letter titled “Prohibition on Federal and Children’s Health Insurance Program Funding for Gender Affirming Care in Youth” that was sent out on September 9th. In the letter, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) announces that it will be amending its Medicaid State Plan to “indicate MDHHS’ adherence to the prohibition of claiming federal and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funding for gender affirming procedures furnished to individuals under the age of 18 years with Medicaid and under 19 years of age for CHIP, in accordance with [the new rule].”

However, unlike the 3 other states that have made similar decisions, this letter wasn’t even sent to all of Michigan’s medical providers—it was only sent to around 30, all of which are either ‘Tribal Chairs’ or ‘Health Directors’ for native American communities. Furthermore, only those individuals were given the opportunity to comment on the proposal. Although the details are scant, MDHHS stresses that it “expects this change to adversely affect Native American beneficiaries, Tribal Health Clinics, and Urban Indian Organizations as the SPA will result in a reduction of covered services for these individuals.”

Because this statement can only be true if Michigan were not planning to make up for the lost federal funds with its own funds, this effectively serves as confirmation of Michigan’s capitulation. When compared to Colorado, though, this decision to comply is a little more understandable. The Michigan State House is currently controlled by Republicans who have repeatedly taken aim at the state’s Medicaid funding, and it’s certainly plausible for the state to lack the ability to take on these costs, especially given the fact that its Medicaid program is already running significantly over its budget.

All of that said, there is another state that had indicated it would follow the trend: Delaware. At some point after the rule was finalized, the state added a new page to the Delaware Health and Social Services (DHSS) website titled “Federal Funding Changes for Gender-Affirming Care.” There, it said that it “must comply with this new federal law and will begin to take action to do so” and that “any Delawarean and healthcare provider who is impacted by this new rule will be receiving a notice about the change.”

Nevertheless, when Transitics inquired about what ‘changes’ the state was referring to last Friday, the DHSS said that it “will be continuing that care using state funds” until those funds run out. Delaware’s budget for the year did not include extra funding for gender-affirming care, and Transitics was told this decision came directly from the governor, Democrat Matt Meyer. As such, for the time being, Delaware’s Medicaid and CHIP programs will continue to cover gender-affirming care for trans youth.

And Delaware isn’t alone. 11 other states have confirmed that they will be continuing to cover gender-affirming care by using their own funds. Those states are: California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. Interestingly, Maryland’s announcement referenced the fact that, like in Colorado, state law requires that it “provide gender-affirming treatment in a nondiscriminatory manner to all participants.” Thus, in order to comply with both “federal and state requirements,” it said, “Maryland Medicaid will continue to fund GAC services for minors using state dollars.”

Taken together, these facts establish what we all knew: Colorado’s excuse for its actions is just that—an excuse. Ultimately, when faced with a situation like this, state officials get the final say in which laws they will violate and which laws they will follow, and, as public servants, it is their duty to choose the least harmful option. Simply put, Colorado’s governor Jared Polis has abdicated that responsibility. At virtually every turn, he chose the most harmful option, violating his own state’s laws and needlessly ending coverage of puberty blockers well before Trump’s deadline.

For Colorado and Jared Polis, ‘indefensible’ doesn’t even begin to describe this betrayal.

On August 13th, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule blocking federal Medicaid and CHIP funds from going towards gender-affirming care for trans youth. Medicaid and CHIP—both of which are joint state-federal programs that provide healthcare to low-income Americans—rely on the federal government to match individual states’ funding for the program, and as part of that framework, states are generally free to determine their own coverage policies. Keeping with this structure, the new rule explicitly doesn’t ban Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care for trans youth. However, under it, states would be forced to fully fund this care themselves if they want their coverage to continue.

Within a few weeks, a coalition of 21 Democratic-led states announced a lawsuit against the rule, arguing that the HHS lacks the authority to implement it. As the rule’s authors admitted when proposing the rule, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has “not previously relied on [the statutory provisions it relies on in the Rule] to establish a purpose-based restriction on FFP for a specific category of services in this manner.” Rather, restrictions on reimbursements usually stem from laws that have been passed by Congress. This includes the ‘Hyde Amendment,’ a longstanding ban on federal funding for elective abortions that was first passed in 1976.

While the litigation plays out, several states, including California, Maine, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Oregon, have confirmed that they will be taking on the full costs to ensure that trans youth continue to have access to the care they need. However, as Transitics has now learned, two Democratic-led states—Arizona and Virginia—will be going in the opposite direction starting next Tuesday.

On September 24th, Virginia posted a bulletin to its Department of Medical Assistance Services (DMAS) website informing providers, and only providers, that Virginia Medicaid and CHIP will no longer cover gender-affirming care for trans youth under 18 and 19, respectively. Concerningly, the statement offers no apology or explicit justification for the change, instead simply reading:

“The purpose of this bulletin is to notify providers that, in accordance with a new federal final rule for dates of service on or after October 13, 2026, DMAS will no longer cover gender dysphoria services for Medicaid members under the age of 18, and CHIP members under the age of 19. Under the final rule, federal Medicaid and CHIP funding will be available for a tapering-off period of up to six months from the effective date of the final rule for youth who are receiving medications related to gender affirming care as of October 13, 2026.”

As of writing, DMAS has not directly notified patients, families, or the general public of the new policy, likely leaving doctors to inform Virginia trans youth that their care will no longer be covered. The state’s governor, Abigail Spanberger, has fought to repeal many other anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ policies—recently tearing up when announcing she killed her state’s restrictions on trans kids’ bathroom access in schools—which makes this decision even more of a mystery.

Then, on September 30th, Arizona made a similar change; only this time, it will be banning coverage for those under 19 through both programs. It should be noted that the rule’s restrictions on Medicaid funding apply to care for those under 18; as was noted above, adults are only included in the CHIP ban. And somehow, Arizona is handling it in an even worse way than Virginia. In fact, the only information it has offered about the new policy is buried deep in its prior authorization criteria for pharmacies, where it states:

“[Hormone therapy and puberty blockers] when used for gender dysphoria in patients less than 19 years of age are no longer covered under Medicaid and will be denied as benefit exclusion. If [hormone therapy or puberty blockers] was started ON or BEFORE October 13, 2026, patients will be grandfathered for 6 months.”

Although Arizona Medicaid has maintained an exclusion for “gender reassignment surgeries” since 1982 and bans those surgeries from being performed on minors, it has explicitly covered other forms of gender-affirming care for all ages since Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs took office in 2023. Hobbs has vetoed Republican legislation targeting that coverage, and she also signed an executive order removing the gender-affirming care exclusion that was present in the health plan for state employees. Now, some of that allyship is being undone.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s Attorney General Kris Mayes—who is the first openly lesbian woman elected to a statewide office in Arizona—is one of only two Democratic AGs sitting out of the lawsuit over the Medicaid rule; the other, Jeff Jackson of North Carolina, likely lacks standing to sue because his state already bans gender-affirming care for minors. Both Hobbs and Mayes are up for re-election next month, and it’s possible that they may be looking to avoid provoking GOP attacks on the issue.

Whatever the reasons behind these sudden shifts, the result is the same: Arizona and Virginia are joining Kansas in needlessly restricting gender-affirming care access through Medicaid without much explanation. In Kansas’ case, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly expanded Republicans’ ban on Medicaid coverage for trans minors to adults without explanation, going as far as designating all gender-affirming care as ‘experimental’ to get around specific federal rules regarding medically-necessary care for people between the ages of 18 and 21. Transitics has spent months seeking information about this change, but these attempts have been ignored.

Above all, both states’ compliance sends an important signal to the Trump administration: when it comes down to it, neither one is truly willing to take on the costs of protecting trans people—not even when those costs would almost certainly have a negligible impact on the state budget. Instead, Arizona and Virginia will give in to the threats; not because they have to, but because they want to.

With Democrats like those, who needs Republicans?

On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Supreme Court released its ruling on the legality of gender marker changes in the state, where it found that trans Oklahomans have never had the right to change their birth certificates. The relatively short 6-3 decision—which was requested by the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals as part of the ongoing trans birth certificate case Fowler v. Stitt—upholds the state’s anti-trans policy and further complicates trans Oklahomans’ path to obtain accurate documents.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way. In 2007, the Oklahoma State Department of Health (ODH), then under the state’s last Democratic governor, Brad Henry, started allowing trans people to update their birth certificates if they were able to obtain a court order confirming their identities. Even as the state’s Supreme Court acknowledged last week, the policy “was largely non-adversarial and persisted with little notoriety,” and as per Transitics’ prior research, it brought Oklahoma in line with the other 44 states that allowed these changes. As early as 2018, the ODH included instructions for legal gender changes on its website, where it stressed that it “does not require a physician’s statement.” Although the website was redesigned after the current governor, Kevin Stitt, took office in 2019, those instructions remained on the page well past that point.

In fact, it wasn’t until 2021 that the policy attracted any controversy. That October, the ODH announced a settlement with an Oklahoma-born non-binary Oregon resident—who had obtained a court order in Oregon for a non-binary marker—and was seeking to have their identity recognized. Under the terms of the agreement, the state would allow ‘X’ designations on birth certificates using the same court order process; in doing so, it made Oklahoma the first southern state to implement such a policy.

However, this victory was ultimately short-lived. After significant backlash from the state’s Republican supermajority, Stitt issued Executive Order 2021-24, which prohibited the ODH from recognizing trans people’s identities. The resulting lawsuit, Fowler v. Stitt, quickly moved to challenge the policy, but after securing a favorable ruling from the 10th Circuit in 2024, the Supreme Court vacated the order the following year and remanded the case back to the 10th Circuit. In the interim, the state’s Republican legislature quickly moved to codify Stitt’s ban, passing a law banning the state from recognizing non-binary markers in 2022. Earlier this year, the state passed a separate law explicitly requiring birth certificates to contain a person’s ‘biological sex.’

Because of those developments, the 10th Circuit asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court to answer three related questions about the state’s birth certificate laws:

1. Whether Oklahoma law currently permits “changes to the sex designation on an Oklahoma birth certificate.”

2. Whether Oklahoma law has “ever permitted changes to the sex designation on an Oklahoma birth certificate.”

3. Whether Oklahoma law “does now or has ever permitted changes to the sex designation on an Oklahoma birth certificate based on gender identity.”

On Tuesday, the court reached its verdict, and unsurprisingly, it simply answered ‘no’ for all three questions. But unlike other courts that have issued similar rulings in trans birth certificate cases, the Oklahoma Supreme Court went much further, asserting that sex markers cannot be changed under any circumstances.

At the center of its decision is the provision of state law regarding amendments to birth certificates, 63 O.S. § 1-321—which was first adopted in 1963—and its accompanying regulation, OK Admin Code 310:105-3-3—which was last amended in 2007. According to the court, the stipulation in 63 O.S. § 1-321 that birth certificates ‘may be amended only in accordance with this article and regulations thereunder’ “conveys exclusion and limitation,” and as such, “amendments to birth certificates are limited to those explicitly listed under article 3 or the regulations promulgated by the State Commissioner of Health in Title 310:105-3-3 of the Oklahoma Administrative Code.”

That regulation further allows for names to be added or changed when incorrectly recorded and for “other changes” to be ordered by an “Administrative Law Judge.” If the regulation conflicts with the law, however, “the agency has no discretion to act outside the agency’s statutory powers,” the court wrote. Where it gets more interesting, however, is that between 1978 and 2007, OK Admin Code 310:105-3-3 (and its precursor) actually used to be much broader. Under that version, virtually all amendments were allowed at the discretion of the ODH.

In the absence of a permissive provision, the court interpreted the regulation in a more restrictive way. In its words, “neither 63 O.S. §1-321 nor Okla. Admin. Code § 310:105-3-3 provides for changing a sex designation” in any explicit sense, and thus, those changes are not allowed—and have never been legally allowed—under any circumstances, even when a clerical error was made on a cis person’s certificate. Because the questions regarding “changes to the sex designation” and “changes to the sex designation…based on gender identity” were addressed separately by the court, there is little room left for ambiguity.

The ruling applies to and burdens cis, trans, and intersex Oklahomans equally.

Coupled with the fact that under the new laws passed by the legislature, this means that a person’s birth certificate will reflect their “biological sex…as identified at the time of birth,” whether or not it was correctly identified at the time of birth. In other words, all Oklahoma gender markers have been effectively ‘locked’ in place until either the law changes or the 10th Circuit strikes down the ban.

And this ‘locking’ isn’t new. Earlier this year, the state abruptly repealed its longstanding regulations allowing for gender changes on driver’s licenses. According to information obtained by Transitics, Service Oklahoma lost the authority to change gender markers altogether as a result of that repeal and can now only do so if there was a “typo or data entry error” (this presumably only applies to issuances from March onwards) on their end. Even then, those requests “require approval from a Regional Manager or Lead.” Most notably, this loss of authority also means that updated gender markers will not be reverted, either.

At the end of the day, Oklahoma shows that restrictions on trans people’s access to accurate IDs don’t just stop with trans people. As conservatives work to strip the ability for gender markers to changed in any circumstances, cis people will be caught in the crossfire, and like us, some of them will also be forced to carry inaccurate documents, impacting the opportunities they have and the way they’re treated by society.

Above all, this situation raises an important question: if society agrees that cis people do not deserve to have their lives affected by an incorrect gender marker—because it emphatically does—then in what world would trans people ever deserve that?

Since appearing on Fox News a few weeks ago, Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico has been harshly criticized over a pair of comments he made regarding trans rights. “I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it risks safety or fairness,” he told the network during the televised interview, adding a bit later that he’d “absolutely” vote for a national ban on what his interviewer called ‘transgender surgeries’ for minors. What procedures Talarico considers to be ‘transgender surgeries’ is not clear. When pressed on the latter position, however, he explicitly stated that he stood by his vote against 2023 Texas Senate Bill 14, which he called ‘overly broad.’

Nevertheless, many LGBTQ+ supporters felt betrayed by his comments. After all, Talarico had won them over through his promises to bring a more inclusive form of Christianity to Texas politics, and now, it seemed as though he was looking to shy away from that inclusivity once it became politically inconvenient. He certainly wouldn’t be the first: in recent months, Marcy Kaptur and Amy Acton of Ohio, Rob Sand, Josh Turek, and Sarah Trone Garriott of Iowa, Blake Gendebien of New York, and Mary Peltola of Alaska, as well as Colin Allred, the Texas Democrat who ran for Senate in 2024, have all turned on trans people in one way or another.

For example, Kaptur, who is running for reelection in Ohio’s 9th district, released an ad saying she’d “voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of schools.” Garriott, who is hoping to flip Iowa’s 3rd district, ran an ad telling voters that she “opposes letting men in women’s locker rooms.” Although some other Democrats have limited their flip-flopping to opposition to so-called “men in girls’ sports,” many supporters were hoping Talarico—who is looking to be the first Democrat to win statewide since 1994—would be different.

Last week, while speaking at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Talarico attempted to clarify what he’d said during the Fox News interview, telling the crowd that he still stood by his 2021 vote against Texas’ ban on trans athletes and that his position was “exactly the same.” Instead, he argued that policies on the issue should allow trans athletes to participate on a case-by-case basis. This is a similar position to that adopted by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger during her election last year, and recently, it was reported that she did away with her state’s restrictions for trans athletes.

Talarico also added that he’d “stand up to politicians who bully students, who bully kids to score political points.”

Now, Talarico has provided yet another indication that his support has not waned. Earlier today, his opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, released a video, seemingly taken by a Republican operative—who posed as a Talarico supporter and said she had a trans niece—at a recent campaign stop. When asked if he could be ‘counted on to support’ the apparently fictitious niece, Talarico simply replied: “Always.”

“The way I fought for trans kids in the legislature,” he continued, “is how I will fight for [them] in the U.S. Senate.” Like before, he told her that his “position hasn’t changed” and that he “still thinks these should be local decisions.”

“I know things are getting clipped and stuff, but my position hasn’t changed, and I’m gonna have your loved one’s back,” he concluded.

See the full exchange here:

Of course, Paxton’s campaign is already using the video to attack Talarico. That isn’t new: over the past few months, Paxton and his allies have spent upwards of $100 million on the race, and most of that money has gone towards anti-trans ads. In fact, that appears to be the GOP’s main line of attack against him, with figures like Vice President JD Vance, Texas’ other senator Ted Cruz, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and President Trump himself all working to desperately characterize Talarico as a pro-trans extremist.

And it isn’t working: Paxton hasn’t led in an independent poll since mid-August, and according to poll aggregator FiftyPlusOne, Talarico currently leads the race by 3 points. Nate Silver’s model puts that lead slightly higher, at 3.6 points. That advantage is only growing.

It should also be mentioned that Ken Paxton’s own record on trans issues is simply appalling. As I wrote earlier this month, Paxton is likely the single most dangerous anti-trans Republican in the country, and his extreme actions—which include denying trans kids access to talk therapy and mental health support services, as well as trying to take trans kids away from their families—have brought tremendous suffering to Texan trans kids.

In Texas, Talarico stands in sharp contrast to Paxton’s extremism. Unlike other Democrats in close races, he’s refused to run anti-trans ads or adopt the bigoted Republican framing on trans people in sports and bathrooms. And he’s certainly the only Democrat in these races who’s said he has a favorite drag queen.

But most importantly, he’s now made a promise that many other Democrats have thus far avoided: to fight for trans kids where it matters most.

In late 2023, a group of six non-binary Puerto Ricans sued the territory over its longstanding refusal to recognize ‘X’ gender markers on birth certificates. The case, Ínaru de la Fuente Díaz v. Jenniffer González Colón, is among the most high-profile lawsuits aiming to secure identification rights for non-binary people, and as part of it, the plaintiffs argue that it’s “arbitrary to allow the identification of transgender people while denying the identification of nonbinary people.”

It isn’t the first time Puerto Rico’s birth certificate policies have been challenged, either. In 2018, a federal court, in the case known as Arroyo González v. Rosselló Nevares, ruled that the territory had to allow trans people to change their birth certificates. In response, Puerto Rico’s Departamento de Salud—its equivalent of a public health department—implemented a fairly relaxed policy requiring either a simple provider form or an updated ID. At the time, the territory was slowly becoming more progressive on the issues affecting the trans community, and it opted not to appeal the ruling. Especially after its previous governor, Pedro Pierluisi, took office in 2021, it made a number of other strides to protect trans Boricuas, including declaring a state of emergency over anti-trans violence.

But things took a sudden turn after Pierluisi was succeeded by Jenniffer González-Colón in January 2025. Like a few other Republicans, González-Colón had formerly positioned herself as an LGBTQ+ ally, publicly supporting the Equality Act in 2019, and heading into her term, she gave little indication that she’d lean heavily into anti-trans policy. Meanwhile, a few months after her inauguration, the Puerto Rico District Court ordered the territory to recognize ‘X’ markers on its birth certificates. Although González-Colón initially refused to publicly take a position on the ruling, her administration eventually decided to appeal the decision in July. Worse, just a few days later that appeal was filed, she signed PS 350, which banned all forms of gender-affirming care for those under 21 and remains among the harshest bans in the nation.

Earlier this year, she signed another similarly harsh anti-trans law, PC 165, a bathroom ban that applies to all public bathrooms and additionally prohibits government buildings from designating any bathrooms as ‘gender-neutral.’ In a press release, she celebrated the ban as being “consistent with Executive Order 14168 [which declared there to only be ‘two sexes’ and has formed the basis for most anti-trans attacks at the federal level] issued by President Donald J. Trump.”

At the beginning of the month, the notably progressive 1st Circuit released its ruling in Ínaru de la Fuente Díaz. The 14-page unanimous decision, authored by Biden-appointed Judge Lara Montecalvo and joined by two other Democratic appointees, shockingly upheld Puerto Rico’s refusal to recognize non-binary identities, finding that its “Birth Certificate Policy is supported by a rational basis.”

“Unlike the transgender binary plaintiffs in Arroyo González,” Montecalvo wrote, “Plaintiffs here have not demonstrated that the Birth Certificate Policy violates transgender nonbinary Plaintiffs’ privacy rights.”

“Puerto Rico has a legitimate interest in protecting the privacy rights of people born in Puerto Rico, and as Plaintiffs have neither argued nor demonstrated that the Birth Certificate Policy infringes on their privacy rights or that privacy rights are not furthered by the Policy, there is a rational relationship between the challenged classification and this legitimate interest.”

When it comes to privacy, the court essentially said the opposite, declaring that “a nonbinary gender marker inherently discloses a person’s nonbinary status,” and therefore, states are within their rights not to recognize them. In upholding that justification, the ruling implies that Puerto Rico—and by extension, other states—actually protect non-binary people’s privacy by actively erasing them.

While that part about disclosure is true, it must be noted that a non-binary gender marker does still protect a non-binary person from having to reveal their sex assigned at birth, and this is parallel to a privacy interest the district court explicitly recognized in Arroyo González. There, it specifically ordered the territory to provide trans people with birth certificates that do not indicate that they’ve been amended. Furthermore, a process for non-binary identification usually allows non-binary individuals to keep their legal name changes private as well, and that right—which is enjoyed by binary trans Puerto Ricans—has now also been denied.

Through its decision, the 1st Circuit has effectively rubber stamped any and all bans on non-binary identification documents. Although the precedent only directly applies to the areas under the 1st Circuit’s jurisdiction—Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island, most of which already recognize non-binary identities—as is often the case with high-profile rulings on trans people’s documents, Montecalvo’s reasoning will potentially form the basis for other restrictive court rulings around the country. And given that the 1st Circuit is the most progressive in the country and frequently rules against anti-trans policies (including Trump’s trans passport ban), it unfortunately signals that, at least for the time being, US courts will not be receptive to lawsuits over non-binary IDs.

As horrific as this ruling is, Puerto Rico’s response has been similarly concerning. Two days after the ruling was issued, the governor released a statement celebrating it as “defending the authority of the Government of Puerto Rico” to only “recognize male and female sex markers on birth certificates.” But behind the scenes, other changes were taking place. That same day, all materials relating to the gender change policy were suddenly removed from Departamento de Salud’s website, including the forms, instructions, policy documents, and a PDF showing the annual statistics for gender changes in Puerto Rico. As of the writing of this article, the only remaining reference to the policy is present in an image listing ‘Cambio de género’/‘gender change’ among the services provided by the central office. However, that image was likely developed before the ruling occurred.

It must also be noted that these resources have not been removed out of a need to update them to remove the inclusion of non-binary markers, as last year’s district court ruling was stayed before the territory was forced to comply. Web archives show that none of those materials were ever changed in the first place.

Transitics has reached out to the Demographic Registry (Registro Demográfico, RD) for an explanation through several channels but is yet to receive a response on the matter. The few RD employees Transitics did manage to speak to were equally confused about the forms’ absence, and one was even insistent the information was still present until she checked the website herself and found them missing.

Sadly, this wouldn’t be the first time a lawsuit over non-binary recognition results in a crackdown on trans people’s documents more generally. After Oklahoma’s Department of Health settled a case over non-binary markers on its birth certificates in October 2021, the state’s governor quickly responded by signing an executive order banning all gender changes in the state. The lawsuit surrounding that ban is currently ongoing.

Unless Puerto Rico’s RD is able to adequately justify the total removal of the gender change materials, the likely explanation could very well be that Puerto Rico may be looking to relitigate the 2018 ruling as well. Should that case eventually reach the Supreme Court, the outcome almost certainly wouldn’t be positive. And even if Puerto Rico isn’t looking to change its policy for binary trans people, one thing is certain: just by removing those resources from its website, the territory has deliberately made it harder for all trans people to have their identities recognized.

Although the 1st Circuit may pretend that the impact of its ruling is only limited to non-binary people, it’s clearly affecting binary trans people too. Because, at the end of the day, our fight to have our identities recognized is one and the same, and as Puerto Rico and Oklahoma—as well as Arkansas and Indiana, which previously recognized non-binary markers on driver’s licenses—have shown, the push to limit that recognition won’t just stop with non-binary people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the full timeline at timeline.transiticsnews.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or at least it did.

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

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

View the Full Timeline Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the full timeline at timeline.transiticsnews.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That cruelty is the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another plaintiff, Carla Jones, wrote similarly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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