By the numbers, it’s the most legislatively hostile period in American history for transgender people. By experience, it’s worse than that.

Since 2023, state legislatures have introduced anti-trans bills at a pace that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. 2025 was the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for total anti-trans bills considered across the U.S. That’s not a trend. That’s a campaign.

The bills come in waves and flavors: bathroom bans, sports bans, healthcare bans, pronoun bans, book bans, ID bans. And since January 2025, the federal government has joined them.

The Federal Offensive

On his first day back in office, President Trump signed Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The name tells you the framing. The content tells you the intent.

The order directed federal agencies to replace all uses of “gender” with “sex,” required government-issued documents like passports and visas to reflect sex assigned at birth, barred trans people from using sex-segregated federal facilities aligned with their gender identity, and deleted LGBTQ+ resources from federal websites — which began disappearing within hours of the signing.

Within days, the State Department had started holding the passports of trans people who applied to update their gender markers. Some applicants got their documents back with the wrong gender listed. Others didn’t get them back at all. Ash Lazarus Orr, a trans activist in West Virginia, is suing after the State Department seized their passport, birth certificate, and marriage license with no indication of when — or whether — any of it would be returned.

Seven days later, Trump signed Executive Order 14183, banning transgender people from military service on the grounds that trans identity “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” The language wasn’t bureaucratic. It was contemptuous.

On January 28, a third order targeted healthcare for trans youth under 19, seeking to strip federal funding from any hospital or provider offering gender-affirming care.

The Courts: Some Wins, Some Devastating Losses

Federal courts initially pushed back hard. In March 2025, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes issued a nationwide injunction blocking the military ban, writing that the executive order “is soaked in animus” and that its conclusions “bear no relation to fact.” She noted that the government consulted no uniformed military leaders before issuing it, cited no data, and provided no evidence that trans service harms military readiness. The ruling was 79 pages of detailed rebuke.

It didn’t hold.

On May 6, 2025, the Supreme Court allowed the military ban to go into effect while challenges continue. The three liberal justices dissented. By August, the Air Force had announced that long-serving trans members who would normally qualify for retirement benefits would be denied them. The discharge code assigned to departing trans service members — JDK — is typically used to flag soldiers as national security threats, a designation that can follow them into civilian life and block future employment.

The bigger blow came on June 18, 2025. In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans minors 6-3, clearing the way for similar laws in more than half the states to remain in force. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the case “carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates.” Justice Barrett, in a concurring opinion, went further — indicating she would have ruled that trans people are not a “suspect class”, meaning future anti-trans laws will face the weakest possible judicial scrutiny.

In November 2025, the Supreme Court also allowed the Trump administration to continue blocking accurate gender markers on passports in a 6-3 ruling that the dissenting justices called “senseless sidestepping of the obvious equitable outcome.”

The States: Where the Volume Is

The state-level picture is staggering. By the end of 2025, 29 states had enacted at least one law restricting trans youth in healthcare, sports, bathrooms, or pronoun use. That covers nearly half of all trans youth in the country.

Some specifics that cut through the abstraction:

• Kansas stripped trans people of previously valid driver’s licenses. As of the legislature’s action, trans Kansans whose licenses don’t match their sex assigned at birth are breaking the law if they drive.
• Texas banned gender marker changes on state IDs and, according to reporting, Attorney General Ken Paxton began compiling a list of trans people who asked about updating those markers.
• Florida enacted some of the nation’s most sweeping restrictions, affecting everything from school curricula to healthcare access to what teachers can be compelled to say.
• Twelve states passed new bathroom bans in 2025 alone — not expansions, but new bans in states that didn’t previously have them.
• According to the ACLU’s legislative tracker, legislative attacks on trans people grew “exponentially” through 2023 and 2024. Anti-trans laws have been directly linked to a 72% increase in suicide attempts in some states, according to CDC data.

The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that approximately 170,000 trans youth now live in states restricting or prohibiting gender-affirming pronouns in schools. Over 348,000 live in states with bathroom bans. These aren’t abstractions — they’re kids trying to get through their school day.

A bill introduced in one state in 2025 proposed that providing gender-affirming care to a minor be punishable by imprisonment “not exceeding life”.

The Media Problem

Something else made this moment worse: much of it happened quietly.

Erin Reed, a trans journalist who tracks LGBTQ+ legislation through her newsletter Erin in the Morning, has been one of the few journalists consistently covering this beat. She’s been direct about what she sees as legacy media’s failure: bathroom bills and school restrictions were among the most commonly passed state laws in 2023 and 2024, and most national outlets barely covered them.

When North Carolina passed its bathroom bill in 2016, it became national news overnight. Corporations boycotted, protesters mobilized, and the bill’s sponsor lost reelection. The law was repealed the next year. That political accountability required a public that knew what was happening.

Now, with dozens of similar and more severe laws passing across dozens of states, far less of the public knows.

Where Trans People and Allies Are Winning — and Fighting Back

The losses are real. But so are the fights.

What’s Actually at Stake

In March 2025, Yes! magazine documented cases of trans asylum seekers in Mexico fleeing U.S. policies. Canadian immigration attorneys reported a surge in inquiries from trans and nonbinary Americans exploring asylum options after Trump’s January executive orders. Trans families in the U.S. are reportedly preparing “go bags.”

This is the situation in 2026. Trans people are not a political abstraction or a culture-war talking point. They are people who are losing access to healthcare, losing their driver’s licenses, being discharged from military careers they’ve built over decades, and in some states, being told that the doctors who treat them could face life imprisonment for doing so.

Lambda Legal, the ACLU, GLAD Law, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and dozens of state and local organizations are fighting these laws in court, every day. Victories are real and matter. But the volume and pace of the attacks — legislative, executive, and now judicial — have no modern precedent in American life.

The war on trans people isn’t a metaphor. It’s a policy agenda, and it’s years into execution.

Key sources: Williams Institute at UCLA | Trans Legislation Tracker | GLAD Law Litigation Tracker | LGBTQ+ Bar Exec. Order Tracker | ACLU Legislative Map | Erin in the Morning | Cornell Trans Rights Guide