Recent US policy changes that target trans communities are the thin end of the wedge for dismantling broader democratic rights. Protecting minority rights is a hallmark of democracy, meaning this is an issue not just about transgender people, but about democratic systems. Indicators on social acceptance of LGBTQI+ people go hand-in-hand with indicators of democracy – and while democracy is a precondition for acceptance, acceptance of diversity has become a fundamental value of liberal democracy.
Since taking office in January 2025, the new US Administration has launched a concerted and deliberate attack on transgender rights. Through executive orders, regulatory changes, and inflammatory rhetoric, the Trump Administration has sought to reverse and weaken prior legal protections and inclusive social norms in the name of ‘defending women.’
On International Transgender Day of Visibility, it’s important to outline the far-reaching implications on democracy, inclusive norms, and the human rights framework, by diving into an overview of key policy shifts and their impacts.
Policy shifts that target transgender rights
Education
The Administration’s targeting of education seeks, among other things, to change social norms about equality and gender. The Executive Order ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schools' is provocatively named and explicitly bans schools from teaching about gender diversity or providing LGBTQI+ inclusive curricula. It directs the federal government to monitor the curriculum (ages 5 to 18), threatening to withhold funding if schools use trans students’ chosen names or pronouns and allow access to bathrooms aligned with gender identity. This directive goes against a number of President Trump’s own policies, particularly the mandate for states to control their own curricula, and recognition of the right to free speech.
Healthcare
Another Executive Order ‘Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation’ mandates government to cease funding to hospitals and universities that provide gender-affirming care to young people under 19 years old. Several hospitals immediately stopped providing care such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, which are widely accepted to reduce suicidality, and improve mental health and overall wellbeing for trans youth. However, a federal judge has issued an injunction, indefinitely blocking enforcement of the Executive Order.
Cuts to HIV/AIDS funding in countries reliant on US aid have also strongly affected trans people. The USAID freeze impacted the PEPFAR programme, which provides life-saving support to people around the world living with HIV/AIDS, affecting significant numbers of LGBTQI+ people. Academics project that if PEPFAR were fully eliminated, there would be a full resurgence of the HIV pandemic by 2029, with an estimated 6.3 million AIDS-related deaths and 3.4 million AIDS orphans within 4 years.
Travel and visa restrictions
Executive Order ‘Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government’ explicitly only recognises two ‘fixed’ sexes. This has meant that trans people’s US passports are now only issued under their birth sex even where previously their passport aligned with their gender. The previous option to self-select ‘X’ instead of ‘M’ or ‘F’, used by many non-binary and trans people, has also been withdrawn.
The repercussions of this policy have reached the border, with the US State Department now denying visas to transgender athletes and others whose documents don’t align with their birth sex. Some trans and non-binary activists have chosen not to travel to the US out of fear of how they will be treated at the border.
Language fomenting anti-trans sentiment
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy manual is a guide for much of the Trump Administration’s positions and actions to date. As a wide-ranging administration gameplan, its domestic social agenda is to reassert the heterosexual married couple as the head of the nuclear family and the backbone of US society. This vision not only discriminates against LGBTQI+ people, but also affirms patriarchal norms and restrictive gender roles for women, and reinforces social inequalities.
This excerpt is representative of how Project 2025 frames queer people as a threat to the patriarchal vision of nuclear families:
'Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] are fraught with agenda items focusing on 'LGBTQ+ equity,' subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.' Project 2025 , Heritage Foundation
The manual asserts the primacy of the nuclear family as a solution to social ills. The rest of the manual weaponises language to foment anti-trans sentiment, referring to ‘the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda’ and ‘woke transgender activism’ that discredits and misrepresents rights-based approaches aimed at inclusion.
Project 2025 has provided the framework for the President’s series of executive orders, which pick up the rhetoric and take it further. These policies falsely claim to ‘protect women’. A central tactic is to use provocative language to elicit a knee-jerk, emotional response from the public: dehumanising language (‘maiming,’ ‘sterilising,’ ‘mutilation’) erodes public sympathy, and language such as ‘indoctrination,’ ‘extremism’ and ‘ideology’ engenders fear and creates an us versus them mentality. Such language is a deliberate tactic to recast the debate as one of competing ideologies rather than internationally agreed inclusive norms.
Global implications
The impact of such policies does not stop at the US border. This shift in US policy has contributed to an increasingly hostile landscape for LGBTQI+ people around the world, where anti-rights actors — from policymakers to far-right movements — are further emboldened to use state power and harmful discourse to reinforce structural discrimination or rollback hard-won rights.
The global ripple effects coming from the US are legitimising and accelerating the active rollback of rights and discriminatory measures in other countries. Peter Kaluma, a Kenyan MP, has already signalled that Trump’s leadership means it is time to resurrect his Family Protection Bill, which copies the infamous Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023:
Kaluma tweet
Kaluma tweet
The global scale of attack on trans people indicates a normative shift – where the world had been gradually becoming more accepting and protective of trans people’s rights and dignity, it is now more hostile than ever before.
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