On the campaign trail, Donald Trump used the fact that transgender people can’t use bathrooms and sports facilities to get conservative voters excited and move people who weren’t sure yet. Trump has made the problem even worse in his first few months back in office. He has tried to get transgender people out of the military and erased references to them from government websites and passports.
There is a big difference between cultures that can be seen in the numbers: Transgender people are less than 1% of the U.S. population, but they have become very important in politics, especially for Trump.
It’s a matter of human rights for a small group of transgender people and their supporters, as well as for several judges who have ruled against Trump in court cases. But a lot of Americans think those rights have grown too far.
This year, Transgender Day of Visibility has a different tone because of the president’s attention.
The head of Transgender Michigan, Rachel Crandall Crocker, who planned the first Day of Visibility 16 years ago, said, “What he wants is to scare us into being invisible again.” “We need to tell him we’re not going back.”
So why does this small group of people play such a big part in American politics?
Transgender people are the centre of a campaign that has been going on for a long time.
Trump’s actions show that he thinks transgender people are dangerous, guys trying to get into women’s spaces, or forced to change their gender in ways they will later regret.
The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Paediatrics, and other major medical groups have said that gender-affirming treatments can be medically important and are backed by proof.
Zein Murib, an associate professor of political science and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Fordham University, said that there has been a long-running campaign “to reinstate Christian nationalist principles as the law of the land.” This campaign has focused more on transgender people since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2015 to allow same-sex marriage across the country. It took a while, but some of the ideas started to stick.
One reason is that people who want the limits focus on bigger issues like safety and fairness, which get more attention from the public.
There is a link between sports bans and bathroom rules and keeping women and girls safe, even though studies show that transgender women are much more likely to be abused. Protecting parental rights is linked to efforts to stop schools from pushing gender transition. Some laws against gender-affirming care are based on the idea that people might regret it later, but studies have shown that this doesn’t happen very often.
Since 2020, about half of the states have passed laws that make it illegal for transgender people to compete in sports that are appropriate for their gender. These states have also banned or limited medical care for children that confirms their gender. At least 14 have passed rules that limit the bathrooms that transgender people can use in some buildings.
Iowa was the first state to take away protections for transgender people from civil rights law in February.
There’s more going on than just playing politics. “I don’t think that’s a politically viable strategy,” Murib of Fordham said. “I think that what that will do right away to trans people is more important.”
To a lot of voters, rights for transgender people have gone too far.
More than half of voters in the 2024 election (55% of those surveyed) said that support for transgender rights in the US has gone too far. About 2 out of 10 people said the amount of support was just right, and the same number said it wasn’t enough.
Still, AP VoteCast found that voters were divided on laws that would make it illegal for children to get gender-affirming medical care, like hormone therapy or drugs that stop puberty. One-fifth were in favour of the rules and one-fifth were against them.
Most Trump voters thought that support for transgender rights had gone too far, but less of Kamala Harris’ followers agreed. Forty percent of Harris voters said support for transgender rights has not gone far enough. Thirty percent said it has gone about right, and twenty percent said it has gone too far.
This year, the Pew Research Centre did a poll that showed that Americans, even Democrats, are slightly more in favour of making transgender athletes compete on teams that match their sex at birth and of making it illegal for transgender minors to get medical care that confirms their gender since 2022. Still, most Democrats are still against those kinds of laws.
