Trump administration takes all-of-government approach to target transgender community

CNN

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From the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump has used a whole-of-government approach not only to limit the transgender community's rights but even to deny their existence.
Trans people make up less than 0.6% of the United States population ages 13 and older, according to the Williams Institute, a public policy research center focused on sexual orientation and gender identity at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and some experts are concerned that the Trump administration's efforts are only the lead-up to widespread crackdowns on all Americans' personal and medical choices.
Many of the new policies are tied up in the courts, and a full accounting of the administration's actions is difficult to pin down. But they have included:
Removing trans people from the military
Sending the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate hospitals that offer particular medical services for trans children
Eliminating any mention of trans people on federal websites; stopping data collection on health issues
Removing trans people from hate crime surveys
Suing states for allowing trans athletes to play on high school sports teams
Dropping Fair Housing investigations
Ending reimbursements by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for state and local agencies that investigate gender identity claims
Even unexpected agencies such as the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Transportation have issued transgender-specific communications and policies.
A recent AP/NORC poll found that more Americans approve of Trump's handling of trans issues than his overall performance as president, with about two-thirds also saying that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex assigned at birth. But a Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of adults support policies that protect trans people from discrimination.
Asked why the all-government effort is such a priority, White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai said in an email to CNN: 'The American people voiced a resounding Election Day mandate to restore common sense and reject the radical ideology that paved the way for irreversible child mutilation procedures and the undermining of girls' sports by biological men across our country. The Trump administration is committed to delivering on this mandate.'
There is some precedent for such government-wide efforts, said Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts & Sciences.
President Joe Biden used similar methods to promote environmental justice and labor unions, and to tackle gun violence. During World War II, an executive order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt mobilized multiple agencies to incarcerate about 120,000 Japanese people, many of them American citizens.
What's different now 'is a real change in how American government works,' Ginsberg said. Although the framers created a Constitution that had a separation of powers, power has been consolidated into the presidency.
'You could say the president has all the power and the new separation of powers is the president has all the power, and Congress is separated from it,' he said.
Trump is also bolder and more aggressive than any president since FDR, Ginsberg said, and he's 'stacked the agencies with loyalists and is prepared to fire anybody.'
The administration wants to 'create a country where transgender people are not welcome and have no protection,' said Shannon Minter, vice president of legal for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ people. It's an agenda unlike any the country has seen before, even in more conservative states, he said.
'It's clearly a very comprehensive agenda,' Minter said. 'They've been very clear that they want to eliminate any recognition or legal protection for transgender people in any area of life or law, health care, schools, employment, housing, homeless shelters, medical research. They're going after universities and businesses that offer any recognition or protection to transgender people. They're very committed to this.'
The effort isn't just about appealing to Trump's base, said Brad Sears, the associate dean of public interest law at UCLA and the Rand Schrader Distinguished Scholar of Law and Policy at the Williams Institute. 'Rather, this is a comprehensive attempt to eliminate trans people from public life, and so every department seems to be trying to wipe out representation and space for trans people in the country. They are true believers in binary gender and, I think, in traditional gender roles and are very aggressively trying to implement this agenda.'
Some experts fear that the endgame is about more than just trans people.
'I think these attacks on trans Americans are really just the canary in the coal mine for broader civil rights rollbacks. When we have the government stripping protections from one group, no one's rights are secure,' said Kel O'Hara, senior attorney for policy & education equity at Equal Rights Advocates, an organization that fights for gender justice in workplaces and schools. 'These attacks on transgender Americans, particularly transgender youth, they are using the community as a political pawn in a broader culture war and using that as a way to stage more sweeping attacks on marginalized communities.'
Many of the policy changes involving transgender people stem from an executive order that Trump signed on his first day back in office.
Titled 'Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,' the order redefined gender as 'sex' and said that humans are either male or female, determined by biology at conception.
Sexes are 'not changeable,' the order says, and gender identity is 'disconnected from biological reality' and 'does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.'
Experts say this order – and others like it – ignores existing science that shows the issue is much more complicated.
Research has found that sex and gender are different things that map differently on the brain. Saying there are only two sexes also doesn't account for people who are born intersex, meaning their sexual or reproductive anatomy doesn't fit a male/female binary.
After the order was signed, the US Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to all government departments requiring them to terminate any programs, contracts and grants that 'promote or inculcate gender ideology.'
Pages that mentioned trans people were quickly removed from government websites, including at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the US Department of Health and Human Services. Mentions of trans people were removed from the National Park Service website about the National Monument at Stonewall, commemorating the start of the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement, an effort initially led in part by trans people.
The State Department suspended applications for gender changes on passports. Federal prisons were instructed to stop offering medical care specific to a transgender person's needs. The Department of Homeland Security eliminated a ban on surveillance based on someone's gender identity or sexual orientation. Government workers were forced to remove their pronoun identifiers in their email signatures.
'This administration isn't just rolling back protections for trans folks, it is fast-tracking a really deliberate and comprehensive campaign to erase transgender Americans from public life,' O'Hara said.
The Trump administration took several steps to restrict trans and nonbinary children's access to gender-affirming care, which Trump has repeatedly described as 'child abuse,' including encouraging states to limit such care within their Medicaid programs.
Gender-affirming care is the umbrella term for the individualized approach to caring for trans people based on their age and other aspects. Major mainstream medical associations including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have backed the practice and say that it's the gold standard of clinically appropriate care that can provide lifesaving treatment for children and adults.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued a news release telling states that 'Medicaid dollars are not to be used for gender reassignment surgeries or hormone treatments in minors,' though studies show that such surgeries are exceptionally rare among trans children, and major medical associations do not recommend hormone treatment for children.
The administration also paused foreign aid to trans-inclusive health care programs backed by USAID.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to study issues that included transgender people were terminated, but in April, Trump ordered the National Institutes of Health to study feelings of regret after transitioning and detransitioning among the community, which studies suggest are rare.
In February, one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s first moves as HHS secretary involved issuing guidance for the federal government that offers a narrow definition of sex, similar to Trump's executive order, as well as a video focused on why trans women shouldn't play on women's sports teams.
In March, the Department of Veterans Affairs issued guidelines to VA hospitals saying that the system would phase out treatment for gender dysphoria, the official diagnosis given to some people who identify as transgender.
'Frankly, this commonsense reform should have been made years ago, but only President Trump and VA Secretary Doug Collins had the courage to do it,' VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said in an email to CNN on Thursday. 'VA has received almost no criticism in response to this decision – proof that the vast majority of Veterans and Americans support it.'
In May, Kennedy sent a letter to health systems across the US, telling them that care of trans children should rely on a highly critical and controversial review of the science that Trump had ordered. The review said it wasn't explicitly guidance and made no specific clinical recommendations, but it seemed to favor a version of a discredited kind of therapy meant to give children tools to essentially manage and decrease their feelings that they are transgender. Most research shows that this therapy doesn't work and can be harmful.
That same month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sent letters to hospitals that provide care for transgender children, demanding data on quality standards and finances and claiming that hospitals were performing 'high-risk procedures' on vulnerable children, 'often at taxpayer expense.'
In June, at the start of Pride month, the FBI tweeted that it was looking for whistleblowers on service providers who offer certain kinds of care for transgender children. At the beginning of this month, the Department of Justice had issued subpoenas to more than 20 providers of this kind of care, whom it has not named.
An HHS spokesperson says its focus on transgender issues is'restoring integrity, biological reality, and common sense across health policy. Secretary Kennedy is proud to lead a department that puts children's safety, data accuracy, and accountability ahead of ideology. Our approach is guided by science, transparency, and a focus on ensuring federal health policy aligns with the Trump Administration's commitment to medical integrity, the well-being of American families, and evidence-based decision-making.'
A large part of the administration's efforts has centered on keeping trans students out of sports competitions. It's a popular topic for political rhetoric, said Sears, the UCLA dean, since it is an issue where one group of people's rights 'are framed as interfering with another group's.'
An executive order issued by Trump banned transgender women and girls from competing on sports teams not aligned with their assigned sex at birth. The administration sued states like Maine for being inclusive of trans athletes.
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins sent a letter to Maine in April that said the state needed to 'demonstrate compliance with Title IX which protects female student athletes from having to compete with or against or having to appear unclothed before males.' The agency sent a similar letter to California's governor.
A USDA spokesperson told CNN in an email that the agency 'has brought about positive changes, reversing Biden Administration policies and practices that wrongly discriminated on the basis of race or sex. USDA going forward will endeavor to ensure that its policies and taxpayer-funded programs do not wrongfully discriminate on the basis of race or sex.'
The Department of Education says it is working with the Department of Justice to create a Title IX Special Investigations Team focused on keeping trans women and girls off sports teams and out of women's restrooms.
Another Trump executive order required schools to inform a student's parents or guardian if the student asked to use a different name or pronoun. In June, the administration threatened California's state funding because the state's sex education program includes gender identity.
On Thursday, the administration ended services on the 988 hotline that made available experts familiar with LGBTQ+ issues available to phone users, although some state support continues. That part of the hotline project handled 10% of all 988 contacts, according to KFF, a health research organization. Studies show that more than 82% of trans people have considered suicide, and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among trans youth.
Eliminating these specially trained workers will hurt the community, said Jackson Budinger of the Trevor Project, which had been helping with the suicide prevention efforts.
'If a Spanish speaker goes to the doctor because they are having heart problems and the doctor does not speak Spanish, they're going to spend the entire time fighting to communicate,' said Budinger, the nonprofit's senior director of communications.
The Trevor Project will still offer its crisis services, making counselors available to answer calls, chats or texts for free around the clock to help LGBTQ+ people who are thinking about suicide. But the loss of a multimillion-dollar grant from the federal government means it will serve far fewer people, Budinger said.
'Agencies writ large have been directed by the Trump administration to do something about trans people,' said Caleb Smith, director of LGBTQI+ Policy at the Center for American Progress, an independent nonpartisan policy institute.
Over the objections of some Federal Trade Commission employees who sent a joint letter to Congress, that agency held a daylong session about how medical care for transgender people was a dangerous fraud. The Trump administration has largely focused on children's access to some trans-specific health care, but the conference featured anti-trans activists who called for the end of medical care for transgender adults, as well.
The Department of Energy also took action, Smith said, issuing a suggested regulation in May that would limit trans people from playing sports and eliminate sex discrimination protections for students in education programs. One of the agency's offices ensures Title IX compliance at institutions that receive federal funding or grant money.
Putting this change through the Department of Energy could make it happen faster, Smith said, because it doesn't have as many policies on transgender people as a department like HHS.
'Because they have to go through less of a process, because, well, they don't really deal with sports and trans folks in sports, so they can get that out quicker than, say, the Department of Education or Department of Health can get something out,' he said.
But for now, the rule remains proposed. DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told CNN that the agency 'received significant comments on each of the direct final rules referenced. For this reason, DOE is extending the effective date to consider comments submitted in response to these direct final rules.'
Taking so many actions so quickly is partially intended to offer 'cheap political wins,' Smith said.
'Some of it is content generation that is as easy as possible for them to do,' Smith says. 'Some of this is just misuse of agencies.'
Using every tool available can also 'exhaust folks and confuse folks,' Smith added.
Rebecca Minor, who provides counseling for transgender patients and has written a book on raising transgender children, says she's been discouraged by the all-agency approach to limiting trans rights. Anti-trans laws have real-world consequences, she says. A 2024 study showed that more teens attempted suicide after their states passed anti-trans laws.
'Agencies that are focused on agriculture shouldn't be paying any attention to trans youth,' Minor said. 'It's certainly a scary time.'
Minor says many of her patients and families are deeply afraid of what the Trump administration has been doing. Some are even asking if it's safe for them to leave their home state on a family vacation.
'And the even bigger question is, they ask, 'How will we know when it is time to leave the country?' ' Minor said.
Lawsuits will continue to keep some of the new policies on hold. But for the transgender community to thrive under the Trump administration, Smith said, institutions will have to be 'really ruthless about not giving the administration what it wants, which is preemptive compliance.'
Minter, of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, believes that anti-trans policies may be a kind of Trojan horse created to undermine protections for cisgender women, too. Trans people, he says, 'are just an easier political target.'
If the Trump administration can legally control what kind of health care a clinician provides a trans patient, Smith says, it can regulate other personal decisions that may not fit with a certain agenda, such as birth control, IVF, interracial marriage or same-sex intimacy.
'It's really about bodily autonomy,' Smith said. 'What we've seen over the past couple of years is anti-trans sentiment being used as a foothold into other issues.
'If they can use this as a weapon, if they can use fear as the weapon here successfully, to curtail a population from existing and thriving publicly, then they will use that tool of fear elsewhere,' Smith added.