Ilektra A. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Oregon–

While conditions for transgender people in the United States have long been suboptimal, the second Trump administration is making clear moves to not only erase what modest progress has been made in the past few decades, but to wholly eliminate transgender people as a population. 

In the years leading up to the 2024 presidential election, the political right’s anti-trans rhetoric significantly increased in its intensity and frequency. Everyone from conservative news pundits to Republican state representatives to the current president himself began openly drawing clear lines between “us”, the “normal”, “pure”, cisgender people, and “them”, the “wicked,” “untrustworthy”, “unsafe” trans people. Hearing blatantly exclusionary, dehumanizing speech, like Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles’ infamous proclamation that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” at the March 2023 CPAC conference became a near daily occurrence. This rhetoric served to normalize anti-trans tendencies and viewpoints, manufacturing public consent for the current fullscale curtailing of trans people’s legal protections and right to bodily autonomy. The present situation has progressed in such an alarmingly treacherous direction that many top genocide scholars, such as those at the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, are now warning we may be in the early stages of a genocide of trans people in the US. 

On Donald Trump’s first day in office during his second term as president, within hours of his inauguration, he signed Executive Order 14168, entitled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which legally defined sex in the view of the US government as a strictly “male-female binary,” completely and utterly immutable and without variation, a wholly unscientific assertion not based in reality whatsoever (see the existence of intersex people as a prime example of how preposterous this notion is). The order also required that the federal government halt all funding of gender-affirming care, and no longer allow people to self-identify their gender on federal documents. A week after that order was passed, Trump passed Executive Order 14183, barring trans people from military service, declaring that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful.. lifestyle,” essentially putting forth the assertion that the federal government itself considers all trans people to be inherently dishonorable and deceitful. A day later, the president signed yet another executive order which attempted to ban minors from receiving gender-affirming care, despite the majority of medical organizations in the country testifying to its safety and efficacy. Important to note, that at the time of this EO’s signing, more than half of states had already enacted their own bans on youth gender-affirming care, contributing to the mass migration of more than 400,000 trans Americans,  10% of the total trans population in the US, from their home states to states which have stronger protections in place.

Something many people reading this article may not fully understand is that “gender-affirming care,” as it’s commonly referred to, is not a luxury good or frivolous amenity for trans people. It is quite literally the difference between life and death. It is a miraculous achievement of modern medicine that, in its most common form as hormone replacement therapy (HRT), physically changes the patient’s body to more fully align with their internal sense of self. It corrects a serious sense of wrongness that makes it simply impossible to live a normal, happy life. It is completely and utterly life-saving, and of monumental importance that anyone who needs this type of care is able to receive it.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration hasn’t stopped at trying to take away life-saving medical treatments from trans people. It has begun attempting to criminalize their very existence and remove what few legal protections existed for them in the first place. In December 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi instructed the FBI to start offering cash bounties for information leading to the identification and arrest of trans activists promoting so-called “radical gender ideology.” It’s crucial to recognize here that “radical gender ideology” in the eyes of the federal government, as per Trump’s first executive order of his second term, is simply anything that differs from the government’s assertion that there are only two immutable and unchangeable biological sexes. And if federal law enforcement begins to follow through on these new instructions, rounding up and imprisoning these “gender terrorists” (people who exist outside the bounds of what is considered “normal”), there are now no longer protections in place to guard trans inmates in ICE custody from being sexually assaulted by their very captors. 

So what kind of situation are we in where the anti-trans right and the Democrats who enable them by conceding to their positions (or by simply failing to take decisive defensive action) begin sharply increasing the amount of hateful, transphobic vitriol they spew, directly setting the stage for the new Trump regime to begin systematically eradicating any legal protections that were in place, barring access to life-saving medical care? Where top federal law enforcement officials begin explicitly encouraging the arrest and imprisonment of an entire group of people by offering monetary incentives, based on entirely false pretenses and pseudoscientific nonsense, subjecting said group of people to unspeakable acts of inhuman violence with no means of escape? Make no mistake, we are not in simply the early stages of a trans genocide, as the experts of the Lemkin Institute suggest. We are nearing the final stages, that of the wholesale extermination of trans people entirely.

Categories: Discrimination, LGBTQIA+, U.S. News