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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he kept his word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Applying this concept more generally, McKinnon wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve made the following changes:

1. Simplified all maps and added keys

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Reorganized the tracker

Jump to:

• Overall State Ratings

• Bathrooms

• Identity Documents

  • Birth Certificates

  • Driver’s Licenses

  • Non-Binary Gender Recognition

• Care Access

  • Trans Youth Care

  • Medicaid

• Prisons

  • Gender-Affirming Care In Prisons

  • Prison Housing

• Sports

• Federal Action

Overall State Ratings

Bathrooms

Identity Documents

Birth Certificates

Birth Certificate Amendment Method

Driver’s Licenses

Non-Binary Gender Recognition

Care Access

Trans Youth Care

Medicaid

Prisons

Gender-Affirming Care In Prisons

Prison Housing

Sports

Federal Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s note: the amendment has garnered opposition among Senate Democrats and some Republicans and now appears slated to fail tomorrow. Thank you to Olivia Krauth of Queer Kentucky for her work reporting this.

Yesterday, Kentucky State Senator Gex Williams quietly proposed an alarming amendment to House Bill 759, a teacher certification reform bill that has so far received bipartisan support. The amendment, which ostensibly does not mention trans people at all, would prohibit the certification of teachers who have been “treated for or diagnosed with any disorder that is excluded from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990…as these disorders were defined in the DSM III…at the time that federal act was passed”—a list that, according to the ADA, includes “transvestism, transsexualism, and gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments.”

Of course, these terms are outdated: in 2013, the DSM V replaced ‘transsexualism’ and ‘gender identity disorder’ with gender dysphoria and finally stopped considering being trans to be a mental disorder. Because of this change, the ban as written would not apply to trans people who medically transitioned after 2013, and Williams clearly knows this. As such, the amendment also requires that doctors licensed in the state “diagnose the disorders [excluded from the ADA] based on the disorder definitions in the DSM III,” a provision that will force doctors to utilize the outdated terms instead of gender dysphoria in all contexts and reclassify being trans as a mental illness for the first time in over a decade.

It’s also worth pointing out that ‘gender identity disorder’ and ‘transsexualism’ are the only ADA-excluded disorders that were not listed in the DSM V in any way, meaning it can be inferred that this part of the proposal is really only meant to facilitate the trans teacher ban. Furthermore, a separate section stipulates that teachers who “exhibit easily identifiable behavioral signs or symptoms characteristic of [an ADA-excluded] disorder” will be forced to submit to a medical evaluation, and if they are found to meet the DSM III’s criteria, their license will be revoked. In other words, under this proposal, teachers will face these invasive evaluations if anyone reports them for ‘looking’ trans, and, if they are trans, they’ll promptly lose their jobs.

Williams’ use of the ADA’s exclusions is certainly clever: the list also includes things like ‘pedophilia,’ ‘compulsive gambling,’ ‘kleptomania,’ and ‘psychoactive substance use disorders.’ As such, it allows Williams to argue that the amendment is meant to ban teachers who qualify for these diagnoses and that trans people are a necessary sacrifice to ‘protect kids’—the exact rhetoric Republicans have invoked numerous times in the past.

And so far, it’s worked: after today’s session, Senate Republican leadership placed HB 759 on the consent orders for this Tuesday, a fast-tracked process—meant for uncontroversial bills—that will see it voted on without debate as part of a larger group of bills. Unless at least one senator voices opposition to Williams’ amendment prior to the vote, it will be adopted and passed by default.

And even if the amendment is opposed, considering that Republicans control 32 of the chamber’s 38 members, it seems likely to pass regardless. At that point, the bill would head to the House—which also has a substantial GOP supermajority—for a concurrence vote before being sent to Governor Andy Beshear’s desk. Although Beshear, a Democrat and noted trans ally, would almost certainly veto the measure, overruling him would only require a simple majority.

Unfortunately, this idea isn’t new. In the 1970s, the anti-gay movement similarly sought to ban LGB people from working in schools and saw some success, but, after the failed 1978 California Proposition 6 referendum, many states pivoted towards laws banning positive depictions of same-sex attraction instead. Some of these laws, termed ‘no promo homo’ laws, are still in effect to this day. Starting in 2022, this push has even returned as broader ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws.

However, one thing is clear: for at least the past half century, no state law has explicitly banned gay or trans people from teaching. Now, 48 years after this idea was defeated at the ballot box, Republicans are ready to try again. As it stands, they are only days away from getting away with it unopposed.

And if Kentucky Democrats allow this amendment to go through without a fight, history will remember that.

Today, the Idaho Senate voted 28-7 to pass anti-trans House Bill 752, with only one Republican, Senator Jim Guthrie, crossing the aisle and joining Democrats in opposing the bill. Having already passed the Idaho House last week, it now heads to Governor Brad Little’s desk, where it is expected to be signed into law. Once signed, it will take effect on July 1st.

As Transitics reported when the bill was introduced, HB 752 is extreme. It implements an unprecedented bathroom ban that applies to government buildings and, for the first time, any “public accommodations”—a definition that includes virtually all private businesses. And the penalties are no less extreme, making Idaho only the 4th state to criminalize trans people’s bathroom use. Under it, a first violation is considered a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.

If a trans person violates the ban for a second time, the offense will be elevated to a felony and carry a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. Furthermore, if a person has previously been found to violate a bathroom law in another state, their first offense will also be considered a felony. Taken together, these provisions mean HB 752 is both the broadest and harshest bathroom law ever passed.

To put the bill’s severity into context, under Idaho law, indecent exposure is only considered a felony after the third offense, similarly carrying a 5-year sentence. Meanwhile, performing an abortion also carries a 5-year sentence, and this is something conservatives consider murder. It’s also worth noting that because Idaho has a “three strikes law,” a person’s third felony conviction will receive a prison sentence of “not less than five years and said term may extend to life.”

One Republican state senator, Josh Kohl, cast it as a bill that is needed to “protect Idaho’s cultural decency,” saying:

"We don’t want to become like California, or New York. We want to keep Idaho safe from so many of the cultural influences that are pressing down onto the different states.” Concluding his speech, Kohl then added he believed that “trans women aren’t women; they’re men and they need to be treated as such.”

However, a committee hearing this past Monday, one state senator, Brandon Shippy—a far-right Republican who made headlines during last year’s session for proposing a bill that would’ve charged anyone who seeks an abortion with murder, even in cases of rape or incest—made the bill’s intent much more clear:

“I think it reveals just kind of the truth of the matter: that there’s male and there’s female and there’s no other community.

“As we’ve said, it’s a myth. It isn’t true. And you know somebody will say that there’s a certain group of people that separated out and that there are trans people, [but] this bill doesn’t address a third group of people. It just addresses male and female.”

After spending the next minute going on a tirade over the ‘reality’ of ‘biological sex,’ Shippy concluded:

“But I think this is simple legislation. I think it’s needed; it’s prudent for Idaho. I think we have to keep reminding ourselves that there is no oppressed community that we’re dealing with here, because there is only male and female. So I reject the premise entirely.”

In other words, Shippy asserted that HB 752 doesn’t target trans people because they don’t exist. Even worse, he did so while staring down a room full of trans people that showed up to oppose the bill—including former substitute state senator Nikson Matthews.

But he gets one thing right: erasing trans people is exactly what this bill is meant to do. Under it, businesses that consider themselves allies will be forced to adopt policies making it clear that trans people aren’t welcome. At every turn, it’ll leave trans people with an impossible choice: prison or harassment.

If House Bill 752 survives an inevitable court challenge, Shippy will get his way, and Idaho’s anti-trans laws will no longer oppress anybody—because there will be no more trans Idahoans left for the state to oppress. And given Idaho’s history as a testing ground for anti-trans legislation, other states hoping to pass similarly harsh laws will be watching closely.

House Bill 752’s fate will serve as an inflection point: struck down, it may very well stop the growing assault on trans people’s bathroom use dead in its tracks; upheld, it opens the floodgates for an unprecedented onslaught of anti-trans hate across the country. Trans Americans can only hope it isn’t allowed to stand.

Last month, the Trump administration released its new policy concerning the treatment of trans people in federal prisons. As Transitics reported at the time, this policy is nothing short of egregious: 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.

When coupled with the controlled environment that is prison, this forced conversion therapy policy amounts to little more than medical experimentation—and it’s in explicit violation of most of the Nuremberg Code, which was created in the aftermath of WWII. Simply put, if the courts allow it to take effect, this policy will undoubtedly lead to tremendous suffering.

At the time the Bureau of Prisons’ policy was published, the biggest questions surrounded what, if anything, the Trump administration had relied on when making it. However, on March 12th, these questions were answered after the BOP was forced to release an administrative record for the policy, which contains everything the Trump administration considered during the policy-making process.

In this case, the administrative record lists around 80 different sources—including studies, journal articles, news stories, and policies—and these can be sorted into 3 broad categories. The first of these categories contains the sources supporting gender-affirming care access in prisons and more generally, and this alone makes up around half of the sources listed.

While the inclusion of things like the DSM 5, WPATH Standards of Care, and APA & Endocrine Society guidelines isn’t particularly surprising, it does establish that existing standards were acknowledged but willfully ignored by the BOP. Furthermore, the Trump administration also reveals that it evaluated prison policies from California, Minnesota, and Oklahoma—all of which explicitly affirm trans prisoners’ healthcare access—along with Kentucky’s policy, which does not provide gender-affirming care due to a 2023 law but still allows for social transition.

On top of this, the BOP overturns its own policies from over a decade ago and cites—but evidently ignores—two journal articles arguing that prisons are both ethically and legally bound to provide care to the trans people in their custody. Finally, the rest of the sources in this category are studies and statements from medical professionals that reinforce the scientific consensus surrounding gender-affirming care, including one concerning a trans woman’s psychosis that resulted from medical detransition and another that found most detransitioners do not regret the care they received.

The 20 sources that were clearly used to refute the established medical consensus fall into the second category, and through these sources, it becomes increasingly evident that the BOP did not create the prison policy in good faith. First of all, many of these are not relevant to the topic to begin with. In fact, the two most notable sources in this category, the Cass Review and the review conducted by RFK Jr.’s HHS, deal exclusively with the treatment of trans minors. Because minors are not housed in federal prisons, the BOP has no reason to consider these reviews—or the three other sources solely about trans kids, for that matter—when making this policy.

Secondly, a few more of these sources were not created in good faith, either. And here, three stick out: the Florida policy that the BOP copied word-for-word in many places, which was, by Florida’s own admission, created in response to political pressures against gender-affirming care; a 2024 detransition prevalence study conducted by Finnish psychiatrist Riittakerttu Kaltiala, who has deep ties to anti-trans SPLC-designated hate group Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM); and a declaration from Kristopher Kaliebe, a known opponent of gender-affirming care who was one of the nine authors of the HHS review, which was specifically sought by the BOP when it was creating this policy.

Finally, another 6 sources are being used rather disingenuously. These 6 are studies relating to the long-term health effects that could result from gender-affirming care—all of which were conducted in order to further understand trans people’s specific health needs. Most importantly, it’s worth pointing out that the studies analyzing trans people’s risk of developing cancer, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular disease emphasize that they were not able to establish a causation between these things and hormone therapy.

However, by including them, along with two studies dealing with gender-affirming surgery complications and another concerning weight gain, the BOP is arguing that, despite the proven benefits, gender-affirming care as a whole is dangerous and risky. Thus, under this framing, Trump officials are essentially asserting that withholding gender-affirming care is necessary to prevent these outcomes—outcomes this care has not been shown to cause in the first place.

The last category constitutes the Trump administration’s unequivocal admission of guilt, and it consists of the final 16 studies. The first 10 of these concern trans people’s suicide risk, and most of these explicitly emphasize the positive effects of social and/or medical transition. As a result, by admitting that it reviewed this research, the Bureau of Prisons is also admitting that its policy knowingly goes against these findings. Because of this, it can be said that the BOP is fully aware of the risks but is still choosing to endanger the trans people in its custody.

Of course, the ‘justification’ here seems to be that these suicide risks can be avoided entirely if the person simply stops being trans, and therefore, forced detransition is a legitimate course of action. Except that’s not and will never be how it works: the fact of the matter is, trans people can’t be forced to stop being who they are. Attempts to do so are known as conversion therapy—a discredited practice recognized by the UN to be a form of torture. As Transitics previously reported, that torture is exactly what this policy imposes.

The remaining 6 studies provide an even clearer window into what the BOP hopes to achieve and how it views trans people more generally. Firstly, there are the two menopause studies, one that recommends the use of menopausal hormone therapy and another that found a “tapering” approach should be taken when stopping menopausal hormone therapy. And the latter of these two seems to have had a profound impact on the policy: here, trans people will be put on a “tapering plan” when being forced off of hormone therapy.

It goes without saying that, outside of voluntary detransition, this “tapering” is not supported by gender-affirming care research, as it would be highly unethical to conduct it. In other words, the Trump administration relied on research for an entirely different condition when creating this policy—entirely ignoring trans people’s unique health needs. This testing of unproven guidelines evidences the medical experimentation this policy will carry out.

The inclusion of the third study in this category attempts to compare trans women who undergo gender-affirming surgery to those with an entirely unrelated medical condition known as ‘adult acquired buried penis.’ Equating these two is an entirely medically inaccurate and hateful rhetorical decision, and it’s telling of the manner in which the Trump administration is trying to frame trans people’s bodies.

Meanwhile, the fourth study analyzes fertility in 18 trans men who paused their hormone therapy in order to have children, and it constitutes the only fertility study the BOP admits to have reviewed. As if that wasn’t alarming enough, this specific study doesn’t evaluate if trans men can carry children after going off testosterone; it actually evaluates when. Given the fact that the BOP has no legitimate reason to concern itself with fertility, this implies that the Trump administration—at least in part—created the prison policy out of a desire to find out how soon the forcibly detransitioned trans men in its custody will be able to carry children.

Finally, perhaps the greatest confession is provided by the last two sources. The first of these is a medical article providing commentary on a study—a study that was not reviewed during the creation of this policy—of trans patients at Kaiser Permanente clinics, and in its words, its sole purpose is to “describe methods of cohort ascertainment and data collection and to characterise the study population.” Put differently, it communicates two things: how to single out trans people through health information and what data a study on trans people should collect.

On top of this, the second source is a CDC document that sets data collection standards for research into suicide and self-harm specifically. When taken together, these two sources appear to serve as an instruction manual for the Trump administration to collect and evaluate the results of this policy. Additionally, knowing that the BOP also reviewed 10 studies pertaining to trans people’s suicide risk, it’s strongly suggested that the BOP expects an increase in trans suicides, and rather than preventing these outcomes, it wants to sit by and collect the data.

Make no mistake: this checks all the boxes of medical experimentation. By its own admission, the Trump administration is throwing out existing medical standards and instead wishes to force arbitrary guidelines onto a captive population—all the while being fully aware of the risks and actively documenting the results. As Transitics reported last month, this is being done with the intention of ‘helping’ trans people “recover” from gender dysphoria, which is a euphemism for conversion therapy. And this will be imposed onto the ~2,200 trans people in federal prisons until it ‘works,’ until they are released, or until it breaks them.

So far, the judge overseeing the ACLU’s lawsuit against this policy, Reagan appointee Royce Lamberth, has been surprisingly sympathetic towards the plaintiffs and, as a result, has blocked it from being enforced for the ~800 that have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. However, if the Bureau of Prisons’ policy is eventually allowed to stand by the Supreme Court, it will undoubtedly lead to tremendous suffering among the trans people in federal custody.

Simply put, the Trump administration cannot be allowed to get away with this. Trans people’s lives depend on it.

Editor’s note: HB 754 passed the Tennessee House this morning on party lines, 70-21. Democrats’ attempt to remove the provisions mandating the collection and publishing of trans people’s health information was defeated by Republicans again on party lines, 69-21. The bill’s Senate companion, SB 676, will likely be voted on sometime next week.

Yesterday, Tennessee Republicans voted unanimously to advance anti-trans House Bill 754. Sponsored by outgoing Republican Jeremy Faison, HB 754 has been framed as a way to force insurance companies to provide coverage of “detransition procedures” if they cover gender-affirming care. This idea isn’t new: last year, Texas passed a law mandating insurance coverage of detransition care, and in Utah, a similar bill—HB 258—is currently awaiting the governor’s signature after having already passed both legislative chambers.

But speaking at a House hearing, Faison departed from the narrative surrounding insurance companies and characterized it as an individual burden as well, stating that the bill aims to make it so that “if you want on your insurance the ability to transition, you also have to buy insurance that will also pay for a detransition.” In other words, it will force transgender Tennesseans to pay for coverage of detransition care that they will likely never need—extra coverage that will unnecessarily drive up their healthcare costs.

However, this is far from the worst thing HB 754 aims to do, because unlike other detransition coverage bills, Faison is attempting to use this one for a much more sinister purpose.

The bill would establish what Faison calls a “right to public transparency” surrounding gender-affirming care, which mandates that providers “report statistics regarding all gender transition procedures” to the Tennessee Department of Health. Some of these requirements are seemingly generic enough: through a form developed by the department, a provider would be required to report “the date on which” a patient received a “transition procedure,” the age and “biological sex” of the recipient, and information regarding the prescription or surgery.

Aside from these requirements, the bill would also impose a few more. First, a gender-affirming care provider would be required to report the “state and county of residence of the person receiving the gender transition procedure.” On top of this, each form must also include the prescribing doctor’s “name, contact information, and medical specialty.” Finally, the bill also requires that providers submit “a list of any diagnoses that” a trans person “has received of neurological, behavioral, or mental health conditions.” To wrap it all up, this data will be made readily available to the public via a “comprehensive annual statistical report” published on the DOH’s website.

If this is beginning to sound like it violates trans people’s medical privacy, that’s because it does: under HIPAA—which sets medical privacy standards in the United States—providers are prohibited from disclosing any “individually identifiable health information…that identifies the individual or for which there is a reasonable basis to believe it can be used to identify the individual.” According to the Department of Health and Human Services, this is defined to include a person’s county of residence and “all elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to the individual…including admission date [and] discharge date.” And with some exceptions, data pertaining to a person’s medical diagnosis is also protected.

HB 754’s requirements conflict with this definition rather explicitly. Aside from mandating the collection of county-level treatment data, the bill requires that providers report “the date on which” a person received gender-affirming care—implying a specific date rather than just the year—something else HIPAA aims to protect. Furthermore, a person’s entire mental health diagnosis history is also considered identifiable.

The bill attempts to circumvent these concerns by stipulating that “forms required under this section must not contain individually identifiable health information” as defined by HIPAA, and Faison echoed this when he spoke in favor of the bill during a hearing last year. However, the very explicit reporting requirements make it virtually impossible for providers to comply with this section unless they interpret the definition of “individually identifiable health information” narrowly.

Doctors don’t have a choice here, either. Any healthcare professional that is found to be in noncompliance with the reporting requirements will have their license suspended for at least 6 months, and their employer will concurrently receive a fine of up to $150,000. Additionally, the attorney general would also be allowed to bring action to enforce compliance, including by seeking medical records. Conversely, HIPAA makes broad exceptions for the disclosure of protected health information when required by state law, meaning medical professionals will not face consequences for breaching it.

That said, none of the purported safeguards make the information being gathered any less “individually identifiable.” After all, this information is considered protected for a reason; if shared with a member of the public, there’s considerable risk for it to be used to narrow down, and in some cases fully discern, a person’s identity. And in the hands of the government, that risk goes up significantly—especially if the data is only being collected for a tiny subset of the population, a subset that has already been targeted by the state in other ways.

Therefore, through HB 754, Tennessee will be effectively creating a list of the state’s trans people, and by targeting gender-affirming care, that list will be far more comprehensive than those made by Indiana and Kansas. Worst of all, given that there are no safeguards for the yearly “comprehensive report” the bill would commission, it’s highly likely that some or all of this data will end up in the hands of the public—which can then be used to identify and harass trans Tennesseans. And worryingly, that seems to be Faison’s goal.

This can be inferred by analyzing the bill’s other data collection provision, this time for detransition care. First and foremost, the data here will be collected by insurance companies and sent to the Department of Commerce and Insurance, a sharp contrast to the gender-affirming care data, which will be submitted to the Department of Health by medical providers. On top of this, the data being sought is much less specific, only requiring the number of detransition insurance claims made during a month, the age and “biological sex” of the detransitioner, the day they started their initial gender transition, and the patient’s state and county of residence. Like before, a “comprehensive annual statistical report” on this data will also be published.

Compared to the requirements for gender-affirming care reporting, the difference is stark: it doesn’t include the day the person sought care, the name of their doctor, or the person’s entire mental health diagnosis history. In fact, the only somewhat sensitive data being sought is county, which poses a much smaller risk without the other fields. At the same time, noncompliance with this requirement is not nearly as harsh, imposing no penalties aside from allowing the attorney general to enforce it through legal action.

This wouldn’t even be the first time Tennessee attempted to compile a list of the state’s trans people, either. In 2023, it was revealed that the Vanderbilt University Medical Center had turned over trans people’s medical records to the attorney general, who requested them under the guise of an investigation into “medical billing fraud.” And as concerning as this was, it was only limited to one organization, and, most importantly, the information was not made public.

So far, Faison has done his best to remain silent about the fact that HB 754 will create a public list of Tennessee’s trans people. When speaking on the bill, he often avoids mentioning the data collection clause entirely, and if he’s directly asked about it, he makes sure to quickly downplay the horrific nature of the provision before changing the subject back to detransitioners.

Until now, that’s worked well for him. The bill has received minimal media attention despite Faison having first proposed it 2 years ago, and even though the gender-affirming care data reporting portion forming the longest section of the bill, it isn’t mentioned in the bill’s summary at all.

As of this moment, House Bill 754 has not passed yet, and because of that, the fight is far from over. And it must be fought. Unless it’s defeated, every trans Tennessean will suddenly find themselves at risk of being singled out and targeted—both by the state and by members of the public wishing to harass and even potentially harm them. Simply put, the bill cannot be allowed to pass in its current form. The safety of Tennessee’s entire trans community depends on it.

Yesterday, the Trump administration finalized a new rule titled “Enhancing Vetting and Combatting Fraud in the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.” For those unfamiliar, the Diversity Visa Program, commonly known as the “green card lottery,” is a program set up by the Department of State that annually awards green cards to around 55,000 applicants—randomly selected from a pool of 20,000,000+—from all but a few countries with large immigrant populations already in the US.

Under this rule, the State Department will now require applicants to the program to indicate their “biological sex at birth” during all stages of the process, “even if that differs from the sex listed on the applicant’s foreign passport or other identifying documentation.” As if that wasn’t enough, the rule concurrently mandates that all applicants submit their passport information and a scan of their passport’s biographic page with the aim of “combatting fraud.”

Here, the State Department will be effectively forcing a mismatch between trans people’s applications and their passports—something it can then use to declare their applications fraudulent and disqualify them entirely. Furthermore, if it finds out that a person is trans and didn’t fill out the form using their “biological sex at birth,” it will also be able to declare their application fraudulent, even after they’ve entered the country. But it gets worse: while this rule supposedly only applies to the green card lottery, in its response to public comments about the new gender requirements, the State Department went even further. In fact, according to the department, this “biological sex at birth” requirement now applies to all visa applications.

This is where the policy starts to get concerning. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(6)(C)(i), a foreigner who is found to have obtained a visa either “by fraud or willfully misrepresenting a material fact” will have their visa revoked and face deportation. Although the term ‘material fact’ should only apply to facts that influence the visa decision—which sex isn’t, at least in theory—the State Department has chosen to interpret this phrase a bit differently. As per 9 FAM 302.9-4(B)(5), a section of the Foreign Affairs Manual that contains all public State Department policies, “misrepresenting a material fact” includes instances when an applicant “provides a fake birth certificate in support of an Immigrant Visa application.”

While what constitutes a “fake birth certificate” is currently a mystery, the Trump administration’s previous actions can provide a clue. Already, Trump has directed the federal government to not recognize legally issued birth certificates in two cases: birthright citizenship and trans people. For the former, Trump issued Executive Order 14160, stipulating that birth certificates issued by states—which states have sole jurisdiction over—to children of undocumented immigrants or tourists will not be recognized. When it comes to trans people, the State Department does not recognize any gender marker amendments on birth certificates—even for foreign births—when issuing passports. As these examples show, Trump refusing to recognize trans immigrants’ birth certificates isn’t just within the realm of possibility—it’s something he’s done before.

Furthermore, the Trump administration has explicitly designated “misrepresentation of sex” as grounds for ineligibility in some circumstances. According to State Department guidance released shortly after Trump signed the executive order targeting trans athletes in February 2025, trans people’s visas will be denied if they are “traveling to the United States for an athletic competition.” Given that this has been enforced for over a year despite having no constitutional or legal basis of any kind, it stands to reason that the Trump administration will be able to expand it fairly easily.

Worse, even for green card holders, these accusations of misrepresentation can be brought up to five years after they were first granted permanent residence in the United States. If the attorney general or an immigration judge finds that an immigrant did indeed misrepresent themselves, their status will be revoked, and they will likely face deportation. Moreover, these same grounds can also be used to initiate denaturalization proceedings against naturalized citizens, but the burden of proof is higher in those cases.

And this isn’t even the biggest threat—ICE is. In general, ICE agents have significant leeway to assert that any person could potentially be an immigrant and search them. The factors that lead ICE to make that conclusion involve traits they claim are disproportionately prevalent among migrants—most notably their race, language, and workplace. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that ICE officers could utilize racial profiling, as well as these other factors, in order to conduct immigration stops.

According to Kavanaugh’s concurrence in that decision, this rationale extends to any “reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned…is an alien illegally in the United States.” As such, ICE was effectively also permitted to use the fact that someone ‘looks’ trans—regardless of whether or not they actually are—as the “specific articulable fact” allowing its officers to question, harass, detain, and even deport both citizens and non-citizens—as long as it has a reason to claim that being trans makes a person more likely to be in the US illegally.

Now, the Trump administration has given ICE the reason it needs. Under this rule, ICE agents now have the enforcement rationale to assert that trans people—especially those belonging to racial minority groups—are more likely than cis people to have “misrepresented” themselves during the visa process and, therefore, are more likely to have entered the country “unlawfully.” Like the other factors ICE uses, this will burden both citizens and non-citizens, as ICE cannot reliably determine whether or not a person is a citizen without physically checking their documents.

Thus, ICE will be free to scrutinize trans people’s documents and detain those whose documents show any inconsistencies—where they face a heightened risk of sexual violence now that ICE has removed the protections for trans people in its custody and additionally have their medications withheld. Given that Kansas has left its trans residents with no way to identify themselves after it revoked their documents, this also has the potential to burden the state’s trans community with another devastating repercussion of the extreme law.

This rule, ostensibly about the green card lottery, demonstrates that trans people can face severe consequences from all anti-trans actions—even something as seemingly insignificant as a policy regulating gender markers on visa forms. How deep those consequences run is entirely up to the State Department and ICE, both of which have demonstrated a willingness to enforce Trump’s political prerogatives by any means necessary.

Because starting today, all trans non-citizens—permanent residents, undocumented immigrants, international students, H-1B workers, and tourists—currently present in the United States are effectively at Trump’s mercy. They can only hope he doesn’t pull the trigger.

Moments ago, a Kansas district court declined to grant the ACLU’s request for a temporary restraining order that aimed to block the enforcement of Kansas’ extreme anti-trans law SB 244. The law, which passed on February 18th after Republicans overrode the Democratic governor’s veto, criminalizes transgender people’s bathroom use in public buildings, enacts the first ever bathroom bounty provisions, and revokes trans people’s IDs and birth certificates if they don’t display their sex assigned at birth. At least for now, this decision means that trans Kansans will continue to face the consequences of the most severe anti-trans law passed so far.

Even before SB 244 went into effect around two weeks ago, trans Kansans began receiving letters notifying them that their driver’s licenses would be invalidated the next day as “the legislature did not include a grace period” to allow trans people to update their licenses. This swift implementation, which was made possible because the state had internally flagged trans people’s document changes, has left many in Kansas without the ability to drive entirely, as driving without a valid license is considered a class B misdemeanor—punishable by up to 6 months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Even worse, Republicans did not make exceptions for those driving to the DMV to get a new license, meaning trans people would get punished for complying with the new ID restrictions.

Despite being faced with these facts, Judge James R. McCabria—who was appointed by Kansas’ last Republican governor Sam Brownback—determined that the court “simply does not have the information the law requires to enter Temporary Restraining Order at this stage of the proceedings.” As part of this reasoning, McCabria wrote in the decision that because the plaintiffs did not provide examples of them facing harassment over their bathroom use, the court cannot “exercise the tremendous power of an injunction” based purely on “speculation.”

The decision goes even further, stating that for the plaintiffs to be successful in their challenge, they may have to prove that “every restroom visit is fraught with the potential for violence or embarrassment”—a nearly impossible standard. And it cites, among other things, the US Supreme Court’s rulings against gender-affirming care and trans people’s passports, to say that the court cannot assume trans people are protected by the Kansas constitution.

For some background, the lawsuit, Doe v. State of Kansas, is being brought by the ACLU on behalf of two trans men—one a government employee and the other a PhD student at a public university. And here, the ACLU is attacking the law from all sides. First, the filing argues that the law violates procedural due process as it did not give trans people “sufficient notice and reasonable opportunity to comply” with both the driver’s license and bathroom provisions. Second, the ACLU asserts that because carrying an inaccurate ID or using a restroom that doesn’t correspond with their appearance forcibly outs trans people, SB 244 violates trans Kansans’ rights to personal autonomy, privacy, and free expression.

Third, the plaintiffs claim that the law imposes a sex-based classification that unfairly burdens trans people, running afoul of the Kansas Bill of Rights’ requirement that “​​similarly situated individuals should be treated alike.” Finally, the ACLU argues that SB 244 violates Kansas’ “single subject” rule, which prohibits the legislature from passing bills containing more than one subject with limited exceptions, by imposing restrictions on both documents and bathrooms.

Although McCabria can still agree to block the law later in the proceedings, today’s decision means that outcome is unlikely. Thus, transgender Kansans will be left to fight alone until the case can make it before the friendlier Appeals and state Supreme Court, which could take years.

You can read the full decision here.

Doe Decision

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I’ll be honest: when I wrote my first post on Transitics exactly 1 year ago, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted it to be—or why I was even writing in the first place. Was it a blog? Was it a place for me to vent? Was it a place for me to break down things for the community I care about? One thing’s certain: I never would have imagined that Transitics would turn into full-fledged independent journalism.

Seriously, this past year has been far beyond anything I could’ve ever dreamed of. Knowing my work has helped inform people has made me unbelievably happy, and it makes the amount of time I spend doing this—trust me, it’s more than you’d think—worth it. And over the last few months, Transitics has become the number one priority in my life; I’ve even begun thinking of it as my job! While I don’t actually get paid at the moment, I see it like this: I work for you. Thankfully, being a student allows me to get away with that.

I’ve been asked quite a few times for ways you can support my work, and it’s actually fairly easy: share it, share it, share it. Because Transitics is still a relatively small publication, I often rely on you to spread my work to the people that need to see it. So, if you think a story of mine is important, others probably will too. I cannot tell you how much of a difference it makes.

That said, a number of you have pledged me subscriptions, and I will be accepting those when I get my banking stuff sorted out (legal name changes are complicated). Thanks to all of you who want to support me financially! However, I do want to make one thing clear: as a strong believer in access to information, Transitics will always be 100% free. I hate paywalls and I definitely don’t do paywalls. Really, these subscriptions will just be a way for you to sustain my work, especially once I graduate.

Over the past year, Transitics has developed the most up-to-date trans policy tracker out there, found loopholes in many anti-trans policies, forced a response from the State Department over trans people’s passports, discovered Medicaid & ID policies that had gone unnoticed for years, spoken with politicians and journalists, been the first to expose 2 of the 3 states known to be making lists of trans people, and, the one I care about the most, played a key role in highlighting the horrific treatment of trans people in prisons.

And this is only the beginning.

So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you all so much for a wonderful first year.

Aleksandra

Now for some general announcements!

Let’s start with a big one: Transitics is now on TikTok and Bluesky! Follow me on TikTok if you want to see short-ish explainer videos, and follow me on Bluesky if you want to see me occasionally add a bit of commentary to both trans and non-trans news. I’m very bad at managing social media, so both are obviously a work in progress—but I’m excited to be getting them off the ground.

Also, Transitics hit 3,000 subscribers last week! This is a huge milestone (and came less than a month after hitting 2,000), and I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you!

Lastly, I want to take this opportunity to tell you all a bit more about me, so I’ll open the floor up to an AMA! I have notifications enabled for the comments on this post, and I’ll be answering your questions as I see them come in. Feel free to ask me as much as you want about pretty much anything!

Just five months ago, the legal landscape for trans people seeking to update their documents was vastly different than it is today. At the time, Trump’s passport policy was still blocked, the Kansas Supreme Court had just allowed gender marker changes on IDs, and overall, only 3 of the 7 states with active bans on trans people changing their birth certificates also extended that policy to driver’s licenses.

Since then, the list of states that deny trans people the ability to amend their birth certificates has grown to 9: Idaho was allowed to enforce its ban back in January, and South Dakota’s Supreme Court ruled against the changes last week. However, the same can’t be said for driver’s licenses, because during this same period, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma have all stripped trans people of their ability to obtain accurate IDs. Or at least that’s what had been previously reported.

Now, Transitics has confirmed with an Idaho Department of Transportation representative that Idaho has banned gender marker changes too—and it did so around 2 months ago. In fact, this ban was implemented so quietly that not even some Idaho DOT employees seemed to know.

Interestingly, the policy itself—despite never having been publicly acknowledged or reported on—was actually implemented in 2024. That year, Idaho joined other Republican-led states in passing a strict “sex definitions” law, in this case HB 421, mandating that all governmental agencies recognize “sex” as inherently binary and “biological.” While laws strictly defining sex have had little impact on IDs in states like North Dakota, Ohio, and Wyoming, the same cannot be said about Idaho.

Instead, the DOT opted to interpret the law narrowly and began requiring amended birth certificates for any gender changes, reversing the state’s 11-year policy allowing trans people to obtain accurate IDs by submitting a note from a physician confirming their identity. At the time, this wasn’t visibly problematic. After all, thanks to a 2018 injunction, trans Idahoans were able to obtain accurate birth certificates by simply completing a form and waiting a few weeks. But injunctions don’t last forever.

Thus, when the injunction was lifted in January, trans people’s ability to update their driver’s licenses went along with it. Although gender changes aren’t explicitly banned, they have become impossible for most. Like in Indiana and Iowa, whether or not a person’s documents reflect who they are will be dependent on where they were born—a factor entirely beyond their control.

And worse, this fact has gone entirely unacknowledged by the state itself: on the day of the ruling, Idaho’s attorney general released a statement celebrating that Idaho can now require that “birth certificates…reflect biological sex recorded at birth.” Even in court filings, the secret driver’s license policy was never mentioned. Furthermore, despite serving as a testing ground for many anti-trans laws that have since spread to other states, the Republican-dominated legislature has not attempted to weigh in on the issue at all since it first began passing anti-trans laws 6 years ago.

As a result of these actions, the number of states that ban trans people from obtaining accurate driver’s licenses has already doubled in just the first three months of 2026. And currently, Mississippi is actively advancing a bill that would see it join this growing list. So, at least as of right now, here is what the current landscape for trans people’s IDs looks like:

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

But based on how Idaho’s policy was implemented, one thing is clear: Idaho Republicans know that they don’t gain anything from restricting trans people’s IDs. Here, there was no fanfare, official notice, small statement on the Idaho DOT website, or any sort of justification. It’s just naked hate. And trans Idahoans pay the price.

Last week, the trans community was rattled when Kansas began revoking the IDs and birth certificates of trans people in compliance with what has proven to be the most extreme anti-trans law passed by Republicans to date. Up until this point, no state had resorted to taking trans people’s IDs when implementing new restrictions, with the handful that did so prior to Kansas instead opting to revert gender markers whenever documents are renewed. And that’s with good reason: retroactively compiling a list of trans residents is an expensive and time-consuming process; this alone was responsible for halting a similar attempt in Texas.

However, as Transitics revealed last Thursday, Kansas already had a list, which it built by internally flagging trans people’s documents whenever they were changed. As a result of this, the state was able to quickly and easily revoke trans IDs by simply filtering its records for the flag. In fact, the only costs that arose from this ordeal were because of a need to mail the revocation notices and develop guidance.

Following this, Transitics asked employees in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia—which, like Kansas, handle gender changes administratively and were, with the exception of North Dakota, forced by courts to implement progressive policies—about whether or not their states were also tracking trans people’s document changes.

Fortunately, all of them emphasized that gender marker amendments are not flagged in their systems. West Virginia, for example, keeps handwritten notes, and I was told that simply identifying trans people’s birth certificates would necessitate a manual review of every certificate in the state. Meanwhile, Montana outright seals the old certificates.

Nevertheless, the same cannot be said about Indiana, the fifth state that Transitics contacted as part of this investigation. Last December, Transitics broke the story that Indiana, by holding onto and not processing birth certificate gender amendment requests, has effectively been compiling a non-exhaustive list of trans people in the state. And because certain counties are still amending trans people’s birth certificates within their own birth records systems—which are separate from the state’s—those unprocessed requests are indeed accumulating. Moreover, the memo concerning this policy also states that any requests that had already been received by the time it was implemented would be sent to the attorney general for review.

So far, Indiana has refused to acknowledge this publicly and has ignored emails specifically asking about the policy. Furthermore, when Transitics filed a public records request demanding the state’s Department of Health produce a policy detailing what it does with trans people’s unprocessed amendments, the DOH claimed no such policy existed and denied the request.

But speaking to a supervisor at the DOH who oversees amendment processing, Transitics has learned that the DOH is holding onto trans people’s amendment requests indefinitely and, prior to last year, internally flagged trans people’s certificates when they were amended. Like Kansas, records can be filtered for this flag, something the state utilized in court when it provided the exact number of certificates that had been amended for gender identity reasons: 1,558.

While this is obviously concerning, it pales in comparison to what the Department of Health has been doing with the requests it’s received: as it turns out, the department has been instructed to forward all trans people’s amendment requests to the Office of the Attorney General, Todd Rokita, while it “awaits guidance.”

Except in the year since Indiana Governor Braun signed Executive Order 25-36, which directly led to the new birth certificate policy, that guidance has never arrived. Instead, Rokita’s office has continued accumulating these requests, and like the Department of Health, it has also refused to disclose what it is doing with the data when directly asked.

During that time, Rokita has further moved to restrict trans people’s documents. In July 2025, he announced that he was intervening in seven gender change court cases—including one that had concluded the previous year—in order to “protect the integrity” of Indiana birth certificates. In court, the state framed these interventions as “litigating the validity of the trial court orders commanding IDOH to amend birth certificates.” And Rokita has made clear the ruling he’s hoping for: in the initial declaration, Rokita asserted that, under Indiana law, trans people are “falsifying records” when they change their birth certificates.

But he doesn’t just care about birth certificates. In September, Rokita’s office was the only party to file an amicus brief in the trans passport case, Orr v. Trump, which he used to argue that trans people don’t deserve accurate IDs—or any legal protections, for that matter—while urging the court to uphold Trump’s policy.

Then, after the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles finalized its policy banning most gender marker changes on driver’s licenses, Rokita reacted by implying that IDs that don’t “reflect reality” are also “falsified records.” Speaking to BMV employees, Transitics was able to confirm that the BMV also internally flagged gender marker changes—termed “gender reassignment”—when they were still possible and thus, like Kansas, can also produce a list of all the trans people in the state that have changed their IDs.

And this is where the problems arise. As has been previously established, there are only two conditions a state needs to meet in order to revoke trans people’s IDs and birth certificates: first, the state has to want to take trans people’s documents, and second, the state must either spend heavily to create a list of trans people or already have one. Florida and Texas met the first condition but not the second, and as a result, no mass revocations took place.

Meanwhile, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach wished to rectify his court loss over IDs—the first condition—and because the state could already produce the list—the second requirement—he was able to push the extreme revocation plan through the legislature. Todd Rokita also meets both conditions: he calls trans people’s documents “falsified” while both making a list of trans people himself and having the ability to easily procure a broader one from the BMV and DOH.

It’s true that Kobach needed the legislature to act, but that wasn’t for any legal reasons. Rather, it was political, as an attorney general can only enforce their opinions by either going to court or having the government comply in advance. And in Kansas, the executive branch and courts are both controlled primarily by Democrats—meaning Kobach’s safest bet was through the friendlier state legislature.

But this analysis doesn’t apply when the executive branch is receptive to the idea. For example, Texas AG Ken Paxton successfully banned gender marker changes in the state by convincing the agencies in question to implement policies in line with his opinion asserting that court orders changing someone’s gender are invalid. However, because Texas lacks the ability to find out which documents it’d need to revoke, this only applies to new issuances.

Similarly, if Rokita were to release an opinion demanding all trans people’s documents be revoked by formally declaring them “falsified,” he likely would not have trouble implementing it. Already, the Department of Health voluntarily sends him information on trans people, and on top of that, both the DOH and BMV have willingly blocked gender marker changes. And generating the necessary list wouldn’t even cost them. Furthermore, the state’s Republican-controlled courts have increasingly upheld restrictions on trans people’s IDs in recent years.

However, should Rokita go in this direction, the risks to the state’s trans community would be high: under Indiana law, “knowingly or intentionally making a false statement, concealing a material fact, or otherwise committing fraud” when applying for a driver’s license is classified as a Level 6 felony, punishable by up to 2.5 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine. But considering that retroactively enforcing this would pose a significant legal question and greatly increase the legal harms trans people would face (which would make courts more sympathetic), Rokita almost certainly won’t push his luck.

Thus, given the evidence, it’s likely not a question of if Rokita will move to revoke trans people’s documents, but rather a question of when. After all, he’s established that he wants to do it, and he’s established that he can. That said, it’s unknown what will prompt him to pull the trigger. Maybe he’s waiting for a favorable court ruling in one of the gender change cases he intervened in. Or perhaps he will wait until after the midterms to use it as a springboard for a potential 2028 gubernatorial or Senate run. He might just be waiting for the moment it can get him the most media attention.

Because one thing is clear: Todd Rokita is laying the groundwork that will allow him to take trans people’s documents. That doesn’t happen by accident.