In the campaign, Donald Trump used accounting around the access of transgender people to sports and bathrooms to light conservative voters and balance the undecided. And in his first months back in office, Trump has further promoted the problem, erasing the mention of transgender people on websites and government passports and trying to eliminate them from the military.
It is a contradiction of the numbers that reveals a deep cultural division: transgender people represent less than 1% of the American population, but have become an important piece in the political chess joint, particularly Trump’s.
For transgender people and their allies, along with several judges who have failed against Trump in response to legal challenges, it is a matter of civil rights for a small group. But many Americans believe that these rights had become too expansive.
The president’s care center is giving the transgender of transgender visibility on Monday a different tenor this year.
“What he wants is to be scared of being invisible again,” said Rachel Crandall Crocker, executive director of Transgender Michigan, who organized the first day of visibility 16 years ago. “We have to show you that we will not return.”
So why has this small population encountered such a huge role in American politics?
The focus on trans people is part of a long -term campaign
Trump’s actions reflect a constellation beliefs that transgender people are dangerous, are men who try to access women’s spaces or are pushed to gender changes of those who will later regret it.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and other important medical groups have said that the treatments that affirm the genre can be medically necessary and are backed by evidence.
Zein Murib, associate professor of Political Science and Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Fordham, said there has been an effort of decades “to restore Christian nationalist principles such as the law of the earth” that increased its focus on transgender people after a ruler of the Supreme Court of the United States in 2015 that recognizes the marriage between people of the same sex. He took some years, but some of the positions won traction.
One factor: Restriction defenders are inclined in broader matters of equity and security, which attract more public attention.
Sports prohibitions and bath laws are linked to the protection of spaces for women and girls, even when studies have found transgender women have much more likely to be victims of violence. Efforts to prohibit schools to encourage gender transition are related to the protection of parents’ rights. And the prohibitions of the attention affirmed by gender is based in part on the idea that people could regret later, although studies have found that it is rare.
Since 2020, approximately half of the states approved laws that prohibit the transgender people of sports competitions that are aligned with their gender and have prohibited or restricted the medical care that the genre affirms by minors. At least 14 have adopted laws that restrict what bathrooms transgender people can use in certain buildings.
In February, Iowa became the first state to eliminate protections for transgender people from civil rights law.
It’s not just about political games. “I think that that is a politically viable strategy is the second to the immediate impact it will have on trans people,” said Murib de Fordham.
Many voters think that trans rights have gone too far
More than half of the voters in the 2024 elections, 55%, said that support for transgender rights in the United States has gone too far, according to an AP voting decision. Around 2 out of 10 said the level of support has been correct, and a similar participation said that the support has not gone far enough.
However, the detection of AP votes also found that voters were divided into laws that prohibit the medical treatment that gender states, such as puberty blockers or hormonal therapy, for minors. Little more than half opposed these laws, while just under half were in favor.
Trump’s voters were overwhelmingly prone to say that support for transgender rights has gone too far, while Kamala Harris voters were more divided. Around 4 out of 10 Harris voters said that support for transgender rights has not gone far enough, while 36% said it has been correct and around a quarter said it has gone too far.
A survey this year of the Pew Research Center found that Americans, including democrats, have become more supportive of requiring that transgender athletes compete in equipment that coincides with their sex at birth and more support in the prohibitions of medical care affirmed by gender for transgender minors since 2022. Most of the Democrats still oppose such measures.
Leor Sapir, a member of the Manhattan Institute, a group of right experts, says that Trump’s positions and Republicans have given them a political advantage.
“They are putting their opponents, their democratic opponents, in a very unfavorable position by having to decide between attending their progressive and activist base or their medium voter,” he said.
Not everyone agrees.
“People throughout the political spectrum agree that, in fact, the main crises and the main problems faced by the United States at this time is not the existence and civic participation of trans people,” said Olivia Hunt, director of Federal Policy of Defenders of Trans Equality.
And in the same election that he saw Trump return to the presidency, Delaware voters chose Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of Congress.
The complete political consequences are to be seen
Paisley Currah, professor of political science at New York City University, said that conservatives go after transgender people in part because they constitute such a small portion of the population.
“Because it is so small, it is relatively unknown,” said Currah, which is transgender. “And then Trump has used Trans to mean what is wrong with the left. You know: ‘It’s too crazy. It’s too awake.'”
But democratic politicians also know that the population is relatively small, said Seth Masket, director of the American Policy Center of the University of Denver, who is writing a book about the Republican Party.
“Many Democrats are not particularly excited to defend this group,” said Masket, citing surveys.
For Republicans, the general support of transgender rights is evidence that they are out of tune with the times.
“The Democratic Party continues to be on the wrong side of overwhelmingly popular problems, and demonstrates how out of contact they are with the Americans,” said spokesman for the National Committee of the Republican Congress, Mike Marinella.
Some of that message may be happening. At the beginning of March, the governor of California Gavin Newsom, a potential Democratic presidential candidate of 2028, launched his new podcast speaking against allowing transgender women and girls to compete in sports of women and girls.
And several other Democratic officials have said that the party spends too much effort to support transgender rights. Others, including the American senator Catherine Cortez Masto, have said that they oppose transgender athletes in girls and women’s sports.
Jay Jones, president of the Student Government of Howard University and a transgender woman, said her classmates greatly accept transgender people.
“The Trump administration is trying to arm people from trans experience … to help give a archNiene or an scapegoat,” he said. But “I don’t think that will be as successful as the strategy as he thinks it will be.”
