Transphobia in the United States
Appearance

Transphobia in the United States has changed over time. Understanding and acceptance of transgender people have both decreased and increased during the last few decades depending on the details of the issues which have been facing the public. Various governmental bodies in the United States have enacted anti-transgender legislation. Social issues in the United States also reveal a level of transphobia. Because of transphobia, transgender people in the U.S. face increased levels of violence and intimidation. Cisgender people can also be affected by transphobia.
Recently, hate crimes and violence against transgender and non-gender conforming people has increased, especially in states that have enacted anti-transgender legislation.


B
[edit]- A New York Times bestseller that chronicles the true story of a nonbinary teenager set on fire by another teen while riding a bus in Oakland, California.
A collection of stories and poems by a New York Times bestselling author about the feelings and experiences of teenagers in love.
An NPR “best book of the year” award winner featuring authors and illustrators sharing personal stories about their conversations with their kids about race in America today.
This is a small sampling of the kinds of books that have been marked for “quarantine” in school libraries run by the Defense Department’s Education Activity, or DoDEA. For months, officials atop this agency have been quietly flagging and banning dozens of books in response to President Donald Trump’s executiveorders requiring federal agencies to eliminate programs or materials related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The effect is that tens of thousands of kids in U.S. military families living on military bases worldwide no longer have access at their school libraries to celebrated and highly recommended books that happen to talk about LGBTQ+ people and people of color.- Jennifer Bendery, "The Military's K-12 Schools Are Banning Award-Winning Kids’ Books To Appease Trump", HuffPost, 10 May 2025
- HuffPost obtained an internal list of 80-something books that have been banned, or are in the process of being banned, at schools across the DoDEA system, which provides K-12 education to more than 67,000 kids in 11 countries, seven states, Guam and Puerto Rico. HuffPost isn’t providing the full list at the request of the DoDEA employee who shared it; they feared they could lose their job. But the clear theme to these books is that in one way or another, they talk about gender identity, sexuality and race.
- Jennifer Bendery, "The Military's K-12 Schools Are Banning Award-Winning Kids’ Books To Appease Trump", HuffPost, 10 May 2025
- Still, senior DoDEA officials’ focus on rooting out books that talk about transgender people stands out the most, said this DoDEA employee. “They are really trying to deny transgender people exist,” said the employee. “It makes me physically ill.” A second DoDEA employee told HuffPost it’s clear that, in their scramble to comply with Trump’s executive orders, the agency’s leadership has had “a tendency to err far on the side of caution.”
DoDEA students last month sued the agency over its book bans, arguing that it is violating their First Amendment rights. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on behalf of 12 students from six families, ranging in age from pre-K to 11th grade. All are children of active-duty U.S. service members stationed in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy or Japan.- Jennifer Bendery, "The Military's K-12 Schools Are Banning Award-Winning Kids’ Books To Appease Trump", HuffPost, 10 May 2025
- HuffPost previously talked to an active-duty military officer overseas with kids attending a DoDEA school. He described Trump’s anti-DEI policies as a constant source of stress and fear for people around him, including at home: His spouse is a DoDEA teacher and he has LGBTQ+ children.
Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ+ kids and transgender service members “hits home in so many ways,” said the officer. “It’s dehumanizing.” Members of Congress previously wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, urging him to stop to the “Orwellian book purges” within DoDEA schools. “We write to express our grave concern about the escalating censorship taking place in schools run by the Department of Defense,” reads a March letter to Hegseth from more than two dozen lawmakers, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. “You are plainly violating the constitutional rights of DoD families,” they wrote.
A Defense Department spokesperson on Thursday declined comment on the lawmakers’ letter, saying only, “As with all congressional correspondence, we will respond directly to its authors.”- Jennifer Bendery, "The Military's K-12 Schools Are Banning Award-Winning Kids’ Books To Appease Trump", HuffPost, 10 May 2025
E
[edit]- The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of General Counsel (OGC) today sent a letter to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) urging them to restore to female athletes the records, titles, awards, and recognitions misappropriated by biological males competing in female categories.
The Department has called on the NCAA and NFHS to continue the progress made in recent days and strip the records, titles, awards, and recognitions wrongfully credited to the biological males who unfairly competed against girls and women in athletics. Correcting the record is entirely consistent with the NCAA’s new policy intended to preclude males from competing in women’s sports.
“Because of President Trump’s bold leadership, men will no longer be allowed to compete in women’s sports regardless of how they identify, and the NCAA has correctly changed its tune on its discriminatory practices against female athletes,” said Candice Jackson, Deputy General Counsel. “The next necessary step is to restore athletic records to women who have for years been devalued, ignored, and forced to watch men steal their accolades. The Trump Education Department will do everything in our power to right this wrong and champion the hard-earned accomplishments of past, current, and future female collegiate athletes.”- U.S. Department of Education press release, "U.S. Department of Education Urges the NCAA, NFHS to Restore Female Athletics Records Wrongfully Erased by Male Competitors", 11 February 2025
- The Department’s letter follows the NCAA’s policy change to “align NCAA policy” with President Trump’s Executive Order Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports. That Order set forth "the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports...as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”
Last week, the Department also launched investigations into two educational institutions and an athletic association where violations of Title IX have been reported. Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments provides that no student “shall on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under” any federally funded education program or activity. As such, K-12 school districts, colleges, and athletics associations are strongly encouraged to keep factually accurate athletics records and to make corrections where male athletes were allowed to erase female records during the Biden administration.- U.S. Department of Education press release, "U.S. Department of Education Urges the NCAA, NFHS to Restore Female Athletics Records Wrongfully Erased by Male Competitors", 11 February 2025
M
[edit]- Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.
- Christopher Miller, "Department of Defense," Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise: 2025 Presidential Transition Project (2023), edited by Paul Dans & Steven Groves, Washington: The Heritage Foundation, paperback, p. 104
- [Gender transition] is a major problem. I will be actively lobbying to criminalize making severe, irreversible changes to children below the age of consent. Shame on those who advocate this! It is utterly contemptible.
- Elon Musk, quoted in "Elon Musk Calls to Imprison Therapists Helping Trans Kids". New Republic. June 2, 2023.
R
[edit]- Donald Trump had recently finished a familiar riff about banning gender transition surgery for children when the former president, speaking to an audience of Evangelical voters, moved on to something new: a policy that would affect transgender adults. “I will ban all taxpayer funding for sex or gender transitions at any age,” said Trump, receiving thunderous applause at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington last month. The Republican leader, who moments earlier had also pledged to reinstate a ban on transgender men and women serving in the military, paused for several seconds to soak in the crowd’s adulation. It’s the kind of moment — and the type of policy — increasingly common on the GOP presidential campaign trail this year. A Republican Party that in recent years has emphasized transgender issues related to children, teenagers and student-athletes is becoming more and more comfortable now also focusing on transgender adults, led by a field of GOP presidential candidates who, through rhetoric and policy proposal, have denounced elements of the transgender movement as a farce and sought to limit the ways in which these adults can have the medical procedures performed.
- Alex Roarty, "It’s trans adults, too: GOP candidates now back trans medical restrictions for all ages", Miami Herald, 14 July 2023
- It’s a shift led by Trump, whose proposed federal funding ban is just one of an array of policies designed to position himself as the Republican candidate most fiercely opposed to transgender rights. But the change isn’t confined to the former president’s candidacy, with many of Trump’s rivals also offering blunt assessments about the legitimacy of medical procedures that help people transition to their self-identified gender while adopting many of the former president’s own positions, including a ban on federal funds for gender transition surgery that LGBTQ advocates call a dramatic new front for the party’s anti-transgender agenda.
- Alex Roarty, "It’s trans adults, too: GOP candidates now back trans medical restrictions for all ages", Miami Herald, 14 July 2023
- In statements to McClatchyDC, the campaigns of many of the primary’s leading contenders — including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson — said they also support bans on the use of federal taxpayer money for gender transition surgeries for all ages. “Taxpayer money should not be used for transgender surgery,” said Hutchinson, who as a candidate has been generally more reluctant to embrace the sharp-elbowed culture-warrior persona of other GOP contenders. “It is an individual choice to undertake transgender surgery and it is objectionable to many taxpayers. Taxpayers should not foot the bill.”
Other candidates supportive of the ban offered an even broader condemnation of all gender-reassignment surgeries as a treatment option. “It’s wrong to treat anorexia with a liposuction, just as it’s inhumane to treat a person who suffers from gender dysphoria with genital mutilation,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for Ramaswamy’s campaign, told McClatchyDC in a statement this week. “These are mental health illnesses and should be treated as such.”- Alex Roarty, "It’s trans adults, too: GOP candidates now back trans medical restrictions for all ages", Miami Herald, 14 July 2023
S
[edit]- The CDC should immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa) and encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities.
- Roger Severino, "Department of Health and Human Services," Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise: 2025 Presidential Transition Project (2023), edited by Paul Dans & Steven Groves, Washington: The Heritage Foundation, paperback, p. 456
T
[edit]- Across the country, 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. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts. Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.
Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.
- It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.
- “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.
- Agencies shall 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. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.
- By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Policy and Purpose. Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.
Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.
Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.
- The phrase “chemical and surgical mutilation” means the use of puberty blockers, including GnRH agonists and other interventions, to delay the onset or progression of normally timed puberty in an individual who does not identify as his or her sex; the use of sex hormones, such as androgen blockers, estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone, to align an individual’s physical appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex; and surgical procedures that attempt to transform an individual’s physical appearance to align with an identity that differs from his or her sex or that attempt to alter or remove an individual’s sexual organs to minimize or destroy their natural biological functions. This phrase sometimes is referred to as “gender affirming care.”
- Sec. 3. Ending Reliance on Junk Science. (a) The blatant harm done to children by chemical and surgical mutilation cloaks itself in medical necessity, spurred by guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which lacks scientific integrity. In light of the scientific concerns with the WPATH guidance:
(i) agencies shall rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance, including WPATH’s “Standards of Care Version 8”; and
(ii) within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) shall publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.
(b) The Secretary of HHS, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, shall use all available methods to increase the quality of data to guide practices for improving the health of minors with gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion, or who otherwise seek chemical or surgical mutilation.
- Sec. 4. Defunding Chemical and Surgical Mutilation. The head of each executive department or agency (agency) that provides research or education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, shall, consistent with applicable law and in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, immediately take appropriate steps to ensure that institutions receiving Federal research or education grants end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
- Sec. 6. TRICARE. The Department of Defense provides health insurance, through TRICARE, to nearly 2 million individuals under the age of 18. As appropriate and consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of Defense shall commence a rulemaking or sub-regulatory action to exclude chemical and surgical mutilation of children from TRICARE coverage and amend the TRICARE provider handbook to exclude chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
- Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children not only violates longstanding anti-discrimination civil rights law in many cases, but usurps basic parental authority. For example, steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation without parental consent or involvement or allowing males access to private spaces designated for females may contravene Federal laws that protect parental rights, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), and sex-based equality and opportunity, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX). Similarly, demanding acquiescence to “White Privilege” or “unconscious bias,” actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity.
- Within 90 days of the date of this order, to advise the President in formulating future policy, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall provide an Ending Indoctrination Strategy to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, containing recommendations and a plan for:
(i) eliminating Federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology
(ii) protecting parental rights, pursuant to FERPA, 20 U.S.C. 1232g, and the PPRA, 20 U.S.C. 1232h, with respect to any K-12 policies or conduct implicated by the purpose and policy of this order.
(b) The Ending Indoctrination Strategy submitted under subsection (a) of this section shall contain a summary and analysis of the following:
(i) All Federal funding sources and streams, including grants or contracts, that directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology:
(A) in K-12 curriculum, instruction, programs, or activities; or
(B) in K-12 teacher education, certification, licensing, employment, or training;
(ii) Each agency’s process to prevent or rescind Federal funds, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, from being used by an ESA, SEA, LEA, elementary school, or secondary school to directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology in:
(A) K-12 curriculum, instruction, programs, or activities; or
(B) K-12 teacher certification, licensing, employment, or training;
(iii) Each agency’s process to prevent or rescind Federal funds, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, from being used by an ESA, SEA, LEA, elementary school, or secondary school to directly or indirectly support or subsidize the social transition of a minor student, including through school staff or teachers or through deliberately concealing the minor’s social transition from the minor’s parents.
- By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports, it is hereby ordered: Section 1. Policy and Purpose. In recent years, many educational institutions and athletic associations have allowed men to compete in women’s sports. This is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.
Therefore, it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy. It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.- Donald Trump, "Executive Order 14201: Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports", 5 February 2025
- The Secretary of State, including through the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ Sports Diplomacy Division and the Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations, shall:
(i) rescind support for and participation in people-to-people sports exchanges or other sports programs within which the relevant female sports category is based on identity and not sex- Donald Trump, "Executive Order 14201: Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports", 5 February 2025
- The Secretary of State shall use all appropriate and available measures to see that the International Olympic Committee amends the standards governing Olympic sporting events to promote fairness, safety, and the best interests of female athletes by ensuring that eligibility for participation in women’s sporting events is determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction.
- Donald Trump, "Executive Order 14201: Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports", 5 February 2025
W
[edit]- The U.S. Department of Education urged the NCAA and the NFHS on Tuesday to restore female athletes' records and awards that were "wrongfully erased" by biological males, who "unfairly competed" in women's sports. The letter, sent to the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Federation of State High School Associations, comes one week after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to ban transgender women from competing in women's sports "as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity and truth." The NCAA updated its policies Thursday to comply with the order and limit "competition in women's sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only." The Education Department called restoring female athletes' records the "next necessary step."
"The next necessary step is to restore athletic records to women who have for years been devalued, ignored and forced to watch men steal their accolades," said Candice Jackson, deputy general counsel. "The Trump Education Department will do everything in our power to right this wrong and champion the hard-earned accomplishments of past, current and future female collegiate athletes."- Sheri Walsh, "Education Department urges NCAA to erase records set by transgender athletes", 11 February 2025