There is a sense that President Donald Trump will face less resistance during his second term, that activists are tired, that the country is complacent. I cannot speak for others, but I can say for myself and those around me: we are bracing ourselves with eyes wide open, measured, strategic, and ready to fight. As a transgender person doing transgender advocacy work, I see no other way.
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Trump’s election came on a wave of anti-transgender advertising spending during the 2024 Presidential and Congressional campaigns. According to the data that we have, approximately 1.6 million people ages 13 and over identify as transgender in the United States. That is 0.6% of the population. This tiny minority of people was the subject of nearly $215 million in negative ad spending during the 2024 election cycle. If someone unfamiliar with American politics tried to assess life in the U.S. in 2024 only by reviewing campaign ads, the likely takeaway would be that the greatest threats facing the country include trans kids playing sports and receiving “brutal operations” while at school.
One of the first actions that the House took in 2025 was to pass a ban on transgender women and girls participating in women’s sports. This measure comes after Charlie Baker, current NCAA President and former Republican governor of Massachusetts testified before a Senate panel earlier this year and reported that out of 510,000 NCAA athletes, there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes currently competing in collegiate sports. That means that transgender athletes represent 0.002% of athletes at the collegiate level in the United States. And the numbers are even lower in the many states passing categorical bans on sports participation for transgender athletes of all ages. For example, when Kentucky banned transgender girls from sports in 2022, there was only one known transgender girl playing sports in the entire state: a thirteen-year-old field hockey player who was then banned from the team she helped to start.
Alongside the rhetoric about the “threat” of trans thirteen-year-olds playing field hockey, Trump and Congressional leadership have aggressively attacked gender-affirming medical care for transgender adolescents. Throughout the 2024 Presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly suggested that medical care for transgender youth was so widely available that kids were getting surgeries at school. The statement is so patently absurd that it is difficult to engage with, but it was designed to tap into two fundamental fears of the American public unfamiliar with transgender people: that care is provided to minors without parental consent and that surgical care is routine and widely available. Neither is true. In the U.S., gender-affirming medical care for adolescents is only provided under the supervision of a medical provider and with parental consent. Surgical care related to gender transition is rare in the United States and in the rare instance when a minor is treated with surgery for gender dysphoria, it is generally the same form of surgical procedures routinely provided to non-transgender adolescents.
Additionally, a recently released study of private insurance claims over the last five years showed that less than 0.1% of minors received prescriptions for puberty blockers or hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria. In other words, this is a tiny population of people and among that tiny population, a small fraction of them receive medical care, only with parental consent, under clinical supervision. But the outsized focus and rhetoric on the care have greatly—and deliberately—distorted the public’s sense of what has wrongly been cast as a “problem.” The result is that half the country has already banned this care, overriding the careful and loving decisions of parents responding to the needs of their own children who they know best. To ensure that their adolescent children do not suffer, many families now travel hundreds of miles for care or move to different states.
Now, the trans community is understandably fearful of what lies ahead. Many of President Trump’s promises boil down to ridding schools and other facets of American life of “transgender insanity.” One of the scariest parts of Trump’s inauguration is anticipating the chaos of the unknown. What we do know is that the Trump administration will not limit its attacks to transgender youth. Trump has promised to ban the over 15,000 currently serving transgender service members from the military and instruct “every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age.” As trans people have been saying for years, these attacks on our restroom use, sports participation, health care access, and pronouns are not expressions of genuine concern, but rather a clear and calculated effort to push us out of public and civic life.
It might be easy for people to dismiss the impacts of sweeping anti-transgender policies since, despite this outsized fixation we provoke in our opponents, we only represent .6% of the U.S. population. However, none of these rhetorical, political, or legal attacks on transgender people will ultimately end with us. The anti-trans rhetoric that fueled the 2024 elections was accompanied by a larger message about how men and women are supposed to act, live, and raise families. What emerges in 2025 is a chilling message to everyone about not transgressing proscribed gender roles. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on the House floor in the debate over the ban on transgender athletes, “What this also opens the door for is for women to try to perform a very specific kind of femininity for the very kind of men who are drafting this bill, and to open up questioning of who is a woman because of how we look, how we present ourselves, and yes, what we choose to do with our bodies.” A ban on transgender women and girls in sports has meant that the same political leaders who voted against the Violence Against Women Act, who voted to ban abortion, who may be taking aim at contraception, are celebrating themselves as “pro-women”.
There is no clear way to be ready for a world where those in power wish for your demise. But we have no choice but to be ready to fight and we will—in court, in legislatures, in our local communities. This is about protecting and defending transgender people from pointed and imminent attacks, but it is also about so much more.
When a small group of people is targeted, the attacks never stop there.
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