Last year, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign notoriously made transgender issues a centerpiece of its charge that Democrats were out of touch with Middle America. The Trump team focused on matters where liberal activists and politicians had taken deeply unpopular stances: They would allow biological males in women’s sports; Trump wouldn’t. They supported medical transition for minors; he didn’t.
But in office, the Trump administration has gone far beyond those positions, issuing a series of executive orders and official statements that depict trans people as innately deluded, duplicitous, or dishonorable. The cumulative effect is to portray anyone who is gender-nonconforming as a traitor. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA,” Trump posted on Truth Social when he took over the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C.
Look at the language of one of Trump’s early executive orders, which prohibits trans people from serving in the military. The “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” a January 27 order declares. (Early last month, the Supreme Court allowed the ban on transgender soldiers to stand while legal challenges against it run their course.)
More recently, the Trump confidante Laura Loomer has called for the firing of transgender government employees, including one she described on X as a “Biden holdover.” This is noteworthy because Loomer’s other personnel interventions appear to have been successful; six officials were fired from the National Security Council in April, apparently at her request. Loomer’s animus against gender nonconformity is so strong that she has clashed with other MAGA darlings. She recently challenged Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, to “condemn” her own father, Grady, for having written a children’s book about a flamboyant flamingo exploring its identity.
When I asked Loomer by text why she opposed trans people working in national-security roles, she replied: “Transgenderism is a mental disorder. It’s important that only people of sound mind work in positions of national security. It would be reckless to appoint or allow transgenders to work at the NSC, given the fact that transgenderism is body dysmorphia, which is a mental disorder.”
The straightforwardly antagonistic tone in Trump’s orbit represents a big shift since his first presidential campaign, when he said that North Carolina’s so-called bathroom bill had gone too far and repulsed voters, and that Caitlyn Jenner, the Olympic champion and reality-TV star who’d publicly transitioned the year before, was welcome to use whichever bathroom she liked at Trump Tower.
In the second Trump term, however, gratuitous rudeness toward transgender Americans has become normalized. Representative Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of Congress, has been repeatedly referred to by some of her fellow lawmakers as “the gentleman from Delaware” and “Mr. McBride.” No doubt the people doing this see it as a punkish political statement. To me, they just seem pointlessly rude.
My conclusion might strike some trans-rights advocates as incongruous. I have previously argued against the inclusion of biological males in women’s sports and expressed skepticism of poorly evidenced treatments in youth gender medicine. I don’t believe that male rapists and killers who say they are trans belong in women’s jails—as California and some other jurisdictions decree. That creates an unacceptable risk to female prisoners.
But understanding that women’s rights sometimes conflict with those of males who identify as women is not the same as thinking that a lot of ordinary Americans are innately predatory or degenerate just because they are transgender. Adults should have broad latitude to make decisions about their own body, yet Republicans in Congress are considering the withdrawal of Medicaid funding for all hormonal and surgical gender treatments, not just those for minors. If you’re skeptical of people who put their pronouns in their email signatures, feel free to roll your eyes—We could have guessed you’re a man, Steve—while understanding that the gesture might be meaningful to them. Barring federal workers from including their pronouns, as this administration has done, is just as illiberal as mandating pronoun inclusion.
Trump’s actions on trans policies reflect a pattern across the administration of chaotic executive orders, inflammatory language, and counterproductive decisions. European reviews have found that American child gender-medicine practices far outstrip the available evidence for their safety and efficacy. But the Trump administration isn’t helping convince the champions of puberty blockers to reconsider. When the Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a balanced, well-evidenced report suggesting caution in child gender medicine, the administration preempted its release by calling the practice “chemical and surgical mutilation.” The White House’s emotive language duly gave liberals—along with the medical associations who were criticized by the report—permission to ignore the findings.
Even policies that may be defensible in substance have been carried out with a level of haste that seems vindictive. In January, Trump issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, and that they are fixed at birth. (Most Americans agree with these statements.) Yet the consequences of this executive order have been to throw trans Americans’ legal status into confusion: In February, the Euphoria star Hunter Schafer, a trans woman, revealed that her passport had been returned to her with the sex marker changed to “Male.” No support or explanation has been provided for people who have to navigate what this might mean for their travel abroad.
Trump has also said that any athletes who have changed their legal documents from their birth sex will not be allowed into the United States to compete in the 2028 Olympics. More than that, such athletes could receive a lifetime visa ban—even though their home country might well recognize their legal gender. “America categorically rejects transgender lunacy,” Trump said in February—hardly the kind of language that will convince liberals that his primary interest is fair competition in women’s sports.
Overall, these are the actions of an administration that wants to keep waging a polarized fight against a vilified enemy, not broker sensitive compromises that respect the dignity of a minority group. The same pattern is obvious in the scrapping of several grants by the National Institutes of Health whose abstracts used the word transgender. We need more research on gender-related medical treatments, for the simple reason that thousands of Americans have already been given them, with too little attention to their long-term outcomes. We don’t need grant refusals so haphazard that you suspect that a 20-something coder has done a keyword search and defunded entire studies as a result. If artificial hormones are dangerous, as some MAGA influencers contend, why would the government cancel grants dedicated to studying their side effects? Similarly, the only conceivable reason to scrap an LGBTQ suicide hotline is gratuitous meanness.
The most recent Pew Research Center survey shows that 77 percent of Americans believe that discrimination against trans people exists, including 63 percent of Republican-leaning people. Waging all-out war on transgender Americans is just as out of touch with popular opinion as supporting routine mastectomies for troubled teenagers.
One very good reason for the Democrats to retreat from their unpopular, maximalist Joe Biden–era positions on this issue is that they could then oppose the Trump administration’s overtly cruel decisions. At the moment, the entire party is paralyzed about the topic, unwilling to go against its loudest activists while also reluctant to endorse those activists’ demands. California Governor Gavin Newsom, for example, is now on the record opposing trans athletes in girls’ sports, but the practice is still legal in his state—and drawing both grassroots protests and threats from Trump. “Many in the Democratic coalition share, if only among close and trusted friends, the sense that we are walking on eggshells,” Jonathan Cowan, of the advocacy group Third Way, wrote in Politico late last month, adding: “That silence is proving a political disaster.” As it stands, Democrats are neither being honest with voters that they went too far before nor opposing the Trump administration’s overreach in the opposite direction.
It should be possible to express concern about trans-rights groups’ most dogmatic positions without being shouted down. But that does not also mean signing up to the premise that transgender Americans are inherently unworthy of basic respect.
Under Biden, the left went too far into bad and unpopular gender-identity policies. Under Trump, the same is true of the right.
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