Transgender issues barely registered on voters’ lists of top policy priorities in 2024, according to polls. But as a front in America’s culture wars, the topic has become increasingly contentious. The growing visibility of transgender people in society and pop culture, and the spread of new ideas around sex and gender, particularly among young people, have led to emotional public debates about single-sex spaces and sports – and prompted a backlash on the right that’s gone into overdrive since President Donald Trump returned to office.
As part of his “war on woke,” Mr. Trump has enacted a flurry of policies directly impacting various aspects of life for transgender people. The president has issued executive actions barring transgender women from women’s sports teams and women’s prisons. He’s ordered the military to oust transgender soldiers and stop recruiting others. He’s banned federal funding for gender-transition medical treatments for minors, threatened to withhold funding from schools that “indoctrinate” children, and prevented transgender individuals from self-selecting their gender on passports and other official documents.
The barrage of actions has left members of the transgender community reeling, while Democrats have been divided over how to respond. “It’s truly terrifying,” says the Rev. Lazarus Jameson, a transgender pastor in Oregon. “Every trans person is asking, How are we going to survive?”
Why We Wrote This
Actions by the Trump administration have been pushing back on transgender inclusion, amid sharp public divides and emotional debates over things like women’s sports and care for children.
The Trump administration casts all these moves as a return to “common sense,” protecting women and children from the impacts of what they say is a dangerous social contagion. “Ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong,” states one of Mr. Trump’s executive orders. “Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.”
Transgender people and their allies reject those characterizations, calling transgender inclusion a matter of human dignity and basic rights. Many of the president’s directives have already triggered legal injunctions halting their implementation; on Tuesday, a judge temporarily blocked the transgender military ban from taking effect. Some appear to contradict a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2020 that protected transgender people from workplace discrimination. Democratic-run states are also pushing back and strengthening legal protections for transgender residents.
Riley Robinson/Staff/File
Yet the politics surrounding the issue are dicey for both parties. Following November’s election, some Democrats have grown concerned that their party’s full-throated support for protecting transgender rights under all circumstances was alienating mainstream voters and ignoring valid concerns about women’s rights and the unknown effects of transgender youth medicine. The shifting political winds were underscored recently when California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a longtime ally of the transgender community, said on his podcast that he believed allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports was “deeply unfair.”
Other Democrats, however, predict Mr. Trump’s aggressive policies may soon invite a backlash of their own. While polls suggest the president’s position on transgender athletes has widespread public support, the sheer scope of his directives, and the open hostility expressed by some of his allies toward transgender individuals, may ultimately strike voters as needlessly punitive toward a vulnerable minority population. One of Mr. Trump’s very first executive orders, signed Jan. 20, states flatly that there are only “two sexes” and they are “not changeable” – essentially making it the official position of the United States government that all people must adhere to this binary. Critics say it amounts to denying transgender individuals’ very existence.
Most Americans’ views tend to be far more nuanced than the political positioning being put forward by either party, experts say. Polling shows that a majority of people support transgender rights when it comes to things like housing and employment. But when accommodations for transgender individuals are in apparent conflict with other people’s rights, “Support is a lot more squishy,” says Donald Haider-Markel, a politics professor at the University of Kansas who studies LGBTQ+ issues and public opinion.
For now, he adds, the greater political dilemma lies with Democrats, who pride themselves on championing minority rights, but are also trying to chart their way back to an electoral majority. They need to win some of the culturally conservative, working-class voters drawn to Mr. Trump’s masculine imagery and emphasis on traditional gender roles. “The party is really in the weeds on how to go forward on this, and nobody has staked out a middle path that everyone can agree on,” says Professor Haider-Markel.
A difficult issue for both sides
To Mr. Trump’s critics, the administration is scapegoating what amounts to a tiny number of people purely for political gain. According to a recent Gallup estimate, 1.3% of all American adults are transgender. The numbers have been rising among young people, however: Among Generation Z respondents, 4.1% identify as transgender, compared with less than 1% of adults born before 1980. Far more adults identify as gay, lesbian, or bixsexual, a percentage that has been steadily rising since Gallup began counting in 2012. (Nearly 1 in 10 now identify as LGBTQ+.)
While gay rights advocates rapidly gained popular support and then a 2015 Supreme Court victory established a constitutional right for same-sex marriage, the transgender community is facing growing skepticism and even hostility from conservatives.
Michael Nigro/Sipa USA/AP
Mr. Trump’s biggest ad buy in the 2024 campaign highlighted Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners – an ad that strategists from both parties described as devastatingly effective. Mr. Trump’s campaign flooded battleground states with versions of the ad, which concluded with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” A postelection poll by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, found that 64% of voters had seen ads that criticized Ms. Harris for supporting transition surgery for prisoners and allowing transgender athletes to play on girls’ sports teams.
The president has leaned particularly into the sports issue, where polls show his position has high levels of public support. A New York Times survey from January found that 79% of respondents believed that athletes who were male at birth should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Since recapturing the White House, Mr. Trump has held photo ops with female athletes, and invited a volleyball player who suffered an injury competing against a transgender player to his speech before a joint session of Congress.
“Asking people to pretend that sex isn’t real or doesn’t matter, or that it’s the same thing as gender, has been a huge unforced error” by Democrats, says Doriane Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School. “It’s also been an unnecessary one, as there are different strategies that could have secured protections for trans people that didn’t go to the core of such a significant aspect of most of our lives,” she adds, referring to the sports question.
When some Democrats have tried to modulate their party’s position, they’ve often experienced significant pushback. After Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton told The New York Times shortly after the November election that he didn’t want his daughters “run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” he was hit with a flood of criticism from fellow Democrats, and his campaign manager resigned. The recent comments from Governor Newsom, along with moves from other Democrats to drop pronouns from their bios and move away from “woke” language, suggest those internal debates are far from over.
Still, others argue that the actions the president has taken have unleashed a wave of hostility toward transgender people that’s likely to repel swing voters. In the first few days of this congressional session, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina publicly and successfully campaigned to prevent the House’s first transgender member, Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride, from using the women’s restrooms in the Capitol. More recently, GOP lawmakers have publicly referred to Representative McBride in hearings and elsewhere as “Mr. McBride.”
Eric Stern, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania who worked to elect Sen. John Fetterman in 2022, says “being cruel” toward transgender people will ultimately come back to bite Republicans, even if they reap short-term electoral gains. Voters “are going to come around and see what it is, which is a bully picking on a vulnerable community,” he says.
Senator Fetterman has frequently criticized his fellow Democrats for using “woke” language and has sharply broken with the pro-Palestinian left. But he’s remained a staunch defender of transgender rights. Earlier this month, after a GOP bill to bar transgender girls from school athletic competitions failed along party lines, Senator Fetterman posted on the social platform X, “The small handful of trans athletes in PA in a political maelstrom deserve an ally and I am one.”
Mr. Stern argues that Democrats who distance themselves from transgender issues that seem unpopular right now are making a bad long-term calculation. “I don’t believe it’s in the interest of Democrats to throw the trans community under the bus. It’s completely reprehensible morally, and I don’t think our base will reward us for sacrificing a community,” he says.
Public opinion: not a simple yes/no
Polls point to a mixed picture when it comes to public support for transgender rights. A Gallup poll from May 2024 found that a majority of Americans opposed state laws banning medical treatments for transgender youth, but half also said it was “morally wrong” to change one’s gender. The January New York Times poll found that 71% of Americans believed no one under age 18 should have access to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormone treatments.
Another poll in 2023 by The Washington Post/KFF found that 57% of Americans believe it’s not possible for a person to be a different gender from their sex at birth. But a majority of respondents in that poll also supported laws prohibiting discrimination, including 65% who opposed discriminating against trans people serving in the U.S. military.
Some Democrats argue that Republican targeting of transgender rights echoes the party’s opposition to same-sex marriage in 2004 under President George W. Bush. The Bush campaign leaned heavily into that issue, using ballot referendums against same-sex marriage to help turn out religious voters in the presidential election, while many Democratic officials tried to strike an uneasy middle ground, supporting civil unions rather than marriage. But in the years that followed, public opinion abruptly shifted, with Democrats and ultimately many Republicans embracing the landmark Supreme Court ruling affirming a right to same-sex marriage in 2015.
Some experts point to key differences between the two issues – and the ways the campaigns for rights were waged. Advocates for same-sex marriage purposely highlighted traditional values as part of their campaign. “[People said,] ‘Oh, same-sex couples, they just want to be normal. They want to get married,’” says Darel Paul, a politics professor at Williams College and author of “From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage.”
While social and religious conservatives argued that allowing same-sex unions would undermine the institution of marriage, they ultimately failed to persuade the majority of Americans, who generally support allowing consenting adults to make their own decisions. But that’s not the case with gender-transition treatments for children under age 18.
One of Mr. Trump’s executive orders, which is already being litigated in federal court, prohibits federal funding or support for gender-transition treatments for minors, which he labels “chemical and surgical mutilation” procedures that young people may regret later in life. While U.S. medical associations support these treatments and say they are evidence-based, authorities in Europe have begun restricting them and urging greater caution in diagnosing gender dysphoria, the condition of feeling trapped in the wrong gender.
Last month the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving a challenge to a Tennessee ban on transition medicine for minors. Tennessee is among more than a dozen Republican-run states that have imposed bans and restrictions on these practices in the past few years. In 2023, Missouri passed a ban on transition care over the opposition of parents of transgender children amid a controversy over alleged malpractice at a leading transgender clinic in St. Louis.
That was when Jameson, a social-care worker who had led a church in St. Louis, decided to leave Missouri, relocating to Portland, Oregon.
Jameson has been disappointed by the muted response from Democratic leaders to Mr. Trump’s executive actions, though welcoming of the support from blue states. “A lot of politicians don’t seem to think trans people are worth the fight,” Jameson says.
A battle over inclusion in the military
Transgender advocates argue that, like same-sex marriage proponents in the early 2000s, they also just want to pursue a normal life – and the Trump administration is standing in their way.
A group of transgender service members has sued the administration over its ban on transgender troops, arguing that it violates their constitutional rights to equal protection. This week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the ban’s implementation while the lawsuit works its way through the courts.
The executive action issued Jan. 27 makes categorical and unfounded claims about transgender soldiers and why they are unfit to serve, says David Gans, a constitutional attorney.
His organization, the Constitutional Accountability Center, filed an amicus brief in the suit that highlights the parallels between the exclusion of transgender service members and that of other groups once deemed unfit to serve their country – including Black people, gays and lesbians, and women in combat roles. In all these cases, the argument against integration was essentially the same: that allowing them to serve would endanger military effectiveness and unit cohesion.
“The lesson of history is that these [arguments] tend to rest on prejudices and discriminatory stereotypes,” says Mr. Gans, who directs his organization’s Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program.
The Pentagon says the number of transgender service members is in the low thousands. But one outside study estimates the number might be as high as 15,000, which would make the Department of Defense the largest employer of transgender adults in the U.S., one that has provided gender-transition treatments for active and reserve service members. On Monday, the Department of Veterans Affairs said it would no longer provide hormone therapy to veterans who weren’t already receiving such treatment.
In his executive action, Mr. Trump states that adopting a transgender identity “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
The action essentially says: “You’re an outsider to a really basic part of being a citizen, which is defending your country,” says Mr. Gans. This type of language “puts a brand on you.”
