Anti-Transgender Legislation on the Rise in the US
Fury Basso-Davis | March 4, 2024
Since 2021, there has been a record-breaking amount of anti-trans legislation in the U.S., from bathroom bills to restrictions on who can and cannot play sports. As of Donald Trump's reelection, the number of anti-transgender bills passed rose, and President Trump himself has taken dramatic anti-trans actions since returning to the White House.
According to Reuters, in 2021, 37 States introduced 142 bills that restrict gender-affirming care for trans people. “Four-fifths target gender-affirming care for trans children under 18, while the remainder target adults or anyone regardless of age,” Reuters reported.
The Human Rights Campaign reported that 2021 was the deadliest year on record for trans people. The trans community faced the threat of a large number of anti-trans bills and state legislation, 10 states passed anti-trans legislation.
In 2022, Republicans introduced more than 500 bills that affect LGBTQ+ people, and 48 of them passed, a large amount of those bills targeted trans people. While some sought to ban trans girls and women from participating in girls/women’s sports, others required trans people to use the bathroom that matches their assigned sex at birth, and some prevented trans people from changing their sex on government-issued documents such as IDs, passports and birth certificates.
In Feb. 2022, Gregg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, suggested that the Department of Family and Protective Services begin to classify gender-affirming care for transgender youth as child abuse. The demand was blocked by an appeals court and sparked public outcries nationwide.
The order was part of a letter he sent telling them to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation” of any reported instances of minors undergoing “elective procedures for gender transitioning,” according to NBC News. Abbots’ letter followed an opinion from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, which said “Allowing minors to get transition care such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery is child abuse under state law.”
In January, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 28 “The Protect Women and Girls Act of 2025.” This bill would ban trans athletes from playing in women’s and girls’ sports under Title IX. The bill was previously passed in 2023 before it failed to pass in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The involvement of trans youth in sports is very minimal; only 1.4% of trans youth between the ages of 13-17 participate, according to a 2022 study from the Williams Institute. “Many states have enacted laws or have legislation pending that would restrict the rights of transgender youth.” The Williams Institute stated that 237,500 transgender youth from ages 13-17 live in the states that have passed laws banning access to gender-affirming care or where laws have been introduced and are still pending.
Within hours of returning to office in January, Donald Trump issued an executive order that aimed to dismantle protections for transgender people and “Denies the validity of gender identity itself,” said Ryan Thoreson, a writer for Human Rights Watch. The order's success follows a federal judge ruling from January that blocked the Biden Administration's new Title IX rules, which were aimed at strengthening the protections against discrimination on gender orientation and sexual identity.
Trump’s executive order also stated that the U.S. government will only recognize two sexes, male and female, and that they are fixed at birth. The redefinition threatens federal programs that transgender people use, such as defunding or terminating. This order also pledged to withdraw federal funding from programs that use “gender ideology."
The order included a requirement for all federal agencies to remove language related to gender identity and LGBTQ+ issues from government communications, and that the federal government should only recognize individuals as "immutable biological classification."
It called for federal agencies to “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages.”
A consequence of this order is that pages on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website related to gender identity and LGBTQ+ issues are offline.
The leaders of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association said in a statement that taking down any information on HIV and LGBTQ+ related resources from the CDC website is "deeply concerning and creates a dangerous gap in scientific information and data to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks."
Cam Cannon is a Warren Wilson College (WWC) alum and doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at George Washington University. They are doing their dissertation on Trans Activism and the struggle for gender-affirming care in the United States. Cannon voiced how their opinions on these legislations.
“There's a level of intensity that's just different, and a level of potential for federal outlying of gender-affirming care that I don't think there ever has been in the U.S.,” Cannon said.
In February, the Pentagon gave the news that trans troops will be removed from the military.
“Under the trans military ban Trump issued during his first term, trans service members who had come out prior to the ban taking effect could no longer continue to serve openly and receive transition-related medical care. Those who had come out after it took effect had to serve in a manner consistent with their birth sex and could not receive transition care.”
The memo states during 30 days, the Pentagon must identify service members who have “a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria.” Trans individuals who are identified by the Pentagon will no longer be eligible for service and will be removed from their jobs.
The increasing number of anti-trans legislation and executive directives demonstrates the community's evolving issues, both past and present. These implementations, which range from restricting gender-affirming care to prohibiting trans athletes from competing in sports, represent a larger cultural effort to deny the trans community's rights. These rules have an impact that extends beyond legal fights; they feed stigma and increase the danger of violence. However, not all view this situation as a hopeless one.
“I would say there's a lot of great people fighting these things on the legal level, and we'll see how that plays out. I think there's also a lot of historical kind of examples and lessons for how people have dealt with these things in the past,” Cannon said.