#transgender-rights

#transgender-rights

Along with using his wife's pregnancy announcement as proof that he gets action (shudder), Vice President JD Vance used his speech at the March for Life rally on Friday to announce a devastating expansion of the Trump administration's global gag rule. The rule, which already blocked federal funding for global organizations that even dare utter the word "abortion," will now include any organization that the administration deems as promoting transgender rights or diversity inclusion initiatives.

Guidance on how to implement the landmark supreme court ruling on gender is being adapted to lessen its impact on businesses and to ensure it tries to balance single-sex spaces with the lives of transgender people, the Guardian has been told. Lawyers from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) are understood to be in discussions with government lawyers over the practicalities of guiding businesses and other institutions about last year's ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex only.

The funding - supporting hospital clinics, HIV/AIDS programs, educational institutions, and more - would be conditioned on sweeping new restrictions barring "social transition" and gender-affirming care at any age, including therapy and counseling. While the administration has already frozen large portions of foreign aid, this rule would formalize those efforts and dramatically expand their reach, with potentially severe consequences for transgender people worldwide as the administration escalates its campaign against transgender lives both at home and abroad.

Anti-trans politics dominated the 2024 election season when Donald Trump painted former Vice President Kamala Harris as too far to the left on the issue and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads to hammer the message: "Kamala Harris is for they/them, President Trump is for you." The Harris-Walz campaign largely tried to avoid the issue, perhaps hoping voters would believe that Harris' position on trans rights was not that important in determining who should be president.

The riders that were originally a part of the spending package would have banned all federal funding from supporting gender-affirming care at any age, banned colleges and universities from letting trans people participate in sports or other activities, and banned K-12 schools from taking measures to support trans kids, like letting them use the restroom of their gender.

Griffin-Gracy, born in Chicago, spoke about her move to NYC in her youth on the LGBTQ&A podcast in 2021. "The trans community was everywhere," she reflected, "I went immediately to 42nd Street. Everybody went to 42nd Street: trans girls, everybody. Finding them was not a problem.... I found an apartment that I moved into. It was six floors of nothing but trans girls. It was fabulous. There were so many of us that it was a full life."

The sweeping bill replaces the term gender with sex in the state; repeals previous provisions related to gender identity (including protections for housing, employment, and crime); prohibits amendments to the sex designation field of a birth certificate; requires use of the term "biological sex" when referring to gender on state documents;

The bills are strikingly clean,

This week, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that it had initiated investigations into more than a dozen K-12 school districts in mostly blue states across the country. The investigations stem from complaints OCR has received alleging the districts are violating the presidential administration's anti-trans interpretation of Title IX by allowing transgender girls to participate in girls' athletics.

It just shows the breadth of these laws,

Professionally, the impact was absolute. For decades, I managed complex IT projects for global giants and, most recently, for Sanford Health. I am a builder of systems. But this year, I watched the federal government systematically dismantle the data structures that acknowledge LGBTQ+ people exist. When the administration stopped collecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) data, it wasn't just a policy change; it was an erasure.

"But you got to win the midterms, because if we don't win the midterms, it's just going to be - I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me," he said. "I'll get impeached." "We don't impeach them. You know why? Because they're meaner than we are. We should have impeached Joe Biden for 100 different things. They are mean and smart. But fortunately for you, they have horrible policy," he continued.

"During a Board meeting prior to the December break, there was a discussion regarding Policy AC (Nondiscrimination/Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action)," Superintendent Audra Beauvais said in a statement.

On January 3, 2026, the far-right political group Let's Go Washington announced that it had collected more than 400,000 signatures - enough to place a transgender sports ban for high school students on the ballot with genital inspections as a primary verification method. The group, bankrolled by conservative megadonor Brian Heywood, previously played a central role in pushing a forced outing policy through the Washington State Legislature in 2024, a measure that was later significantly watered down.

In a year marked by escalating attacks on transgender people, the Trump administration has seemed to outdo its own cruelty at every turn. While the administration has led a series of attempts to curtail trans people's rights, recognition, and safety, neither Congress nor the Supreme Court seem willing to provide a meaningful check on the administration's brazen targeting of trans people and other demonized communities.

And we just clean out that whole thing I don't know, something has to happen, but it's literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything's demolished, and people are dying there, so I'd rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.

The policy also forces [plaintiff] Elizabeth [Mirabelli] and others like her to violate faith,

"Sabre, who goes by Bottleneckloser on Instagram, recently posted side-by-side photos of herself on X depicting her pre- and post-transition. "God I love estrogen," she wrote. Almost three weeks later, Mace shared the post to her official X account and wrote, "Estrogen doesn't love you." She also shared the post on her personal X account and wrote, "Can we get @RobertKennedyJr on this? NO way is this healthy."

Soon after Ireland passed its Gender Recognition Act in 2015, Kevin Humphreys, a Labour politician, visited a residential home for senior citizens where an older woman thanked him for the new law. It was Humphreys who, as the minister of state for social protection 10 years ago, guided through the legislation that has meant transgender people in Ireland can apply to have their lived gender legally recognised by the state through a simple self-certification process.