The far-right persecution of transgender people in the U.S. has intensified dramatically since Donald Trump came to power in January 2025, with a self-described aim of totally erasing and eliminating trans people from U.S. culture and society. Trans people have become the scapegoats for a litany of problems in U.S. society that are actually created by the billionaire ruling class — a typical divide-and-rule tactic used to alienate a small minority and keep working people from uniting against their common enemy: the bosses and the bigots.
Despite seemingly constantly occupying the minds of the extreme right wing, trans people are only roughly 1% of U.S. society, or around 3 million people. In fact, 59% of Americans say they have never met a trans person before, according to a recent poll. Accordingly, few people know the extent to which trans people’s fundamental democratic rights have been violated and curtailed over the last two years. These are attacks not just against a small and vulnerable minority, but against the entire working class. Only by understanding the scope of these attacks can we hope to close ranks around our trans siblings and fight back together.
Attacks from every angle
Denial of Existence: With an executive order signed just hours after taking office, Trump set in motion the legal erasure of trans people’s existence. According to the order, “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
Trans women in men’s prisons: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons has begun transferring all 5,000 trans inmates in federal prisons into those of their gender assigned at birth, where they are subjected to dramatically increased levels of physical and sexual violence. They are denied all forms of gender-affirming care and are forced to undergo torturous psychiatric and psychological treatments aimed at convincing them to give up their trans identities. On June 7, a federal judge stopped the transfer of 14 trans women into men’s prisons with a preliminary injunction, finding they are likely to suffer imminent and irreparable harm if transferred, but the order didn’t block the whole policy.
Barred from military service: Another early executive order banned trans people from U.S. military service and ordered more than 15,000 Active Duty and Reserve servicemembers to be discharged. On June 1, a federal appeals court ruled that trans servicemembers given discharge orders likely had their Constitutional rights violated.
Trans athletes banned: Yet another executive order banned trans athletes from playing on single-gender sports teams of their gender, including at K-12, college, and professional levels. All athletics records and medals won by trans athletes have been expunged. Trump has also pressured the International Olympic Committee, which has long discriminated against trans athletes with unfair restrictions, to adopt absolute bans on trans athletes ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
Cutting federal funding to ensure compliance: Whether it’s restrictions on artistic representations of LGBTQ people or themes, trans athlete bans, bathroom bans, or gender-affirming medical care programs, the Trump administration has used the threat of losing federal funding to force state and local institutions into compliance with their hateful agenda. However, many school districts have fought back, refusing to abandon their trans-inclusive policies.
Attempted back-door bans: Unable to pass a forthright federal ban on LGBTQ rights thus far, Trump and far-right lawmakers have made numerous attempts to attach anti-LGBTQ policies to other bills, including the “Big Beautiful Bill”, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and others. The Health and Human Services Department also attempted to force through a trans youth healthcare ban using an administrative rule change, but a federal judge blocked that attempt earlier this year.
Supreme Court rulings: The nation’s highest court upheld a state-level ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth by Tennessee in United States v. Skrmetti, and appears likely to uphold state-level trans athlete bans in a case argued before the court in January.
Declared an extremist ideology: The far-right has tried to cast trans people as violent extremists, falsely claiming that trans people are more likely to commit violent attacks like mass shootings. In late 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi described groups that promote “radical gender ideology” as “domestic terrorist groups,” and in May 2026 the White House published a “counterterrorism strategy” document that prioritized “the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”
State-level attacks emboldened: State and local legislatures have been ground zero for anti-LGBTQ bills and laws for most of the last decade, but Trump’s executive orders and hateful rhetoric have further emboldened the far-right to introduce even more extreme bills over the last two years. Whether it’s “bathroom bounty” laws in Kansas or Idaho; the immediate revocation of state IDs for all trans people in Kansas; the state registry of all trans people in Tennessee; or bans on Medicaid covering gender-affirming care for youth or adults in several states, the pace of hateful attacks has increased so much that more than 400,000 trans people have relocated from those states to parts of the country that afford trans people more rights.
Trans liberation is class struggle!
Many of these cruel measures have been challenged in the courts by human rights groups, but this is ultimately a reactive, defensive strategy. The best it can hope to do is preserve, for the moment, the meager rights trans people have. But even before this right-wing offensive began in the late-2010s, trans people lived in a state of crisis in U.S. capitalist society and were subjected to constant violence, discrimination, and hatred. Clearly the path to trans liberation lay outside the present system, not within it.
The examples for how to fight back effectively against the anti-trans onslaught can be found in our recent memory of struggle. The movement for a free Palestine unlocked immense energy and creativity among the U.S. working class after unhitching itself from the Democratic Party and looking to the masses for strength and solidarity. And the fightback against ICE terror showed us that when the working class unites in defense of a persecuted part of itself and exercises its power to shut down society in a general strike, the far-right can be stopped in its tracks.
Only when the working class is in charge can we build a new society where the people’s needs are protected and guaranteed and the bigots and the billionaires have no power. Defend trans rights – fight for socialism and liberation!
Featured image: Pride March in Columbus, OH; Liberation Photo
