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trans rights
Trump's GOP Attacked Our Rights Mercilessly in 2025, But We Will Not Be Erased
The Trump-Vance administration believed they could turn back the clock on the LGBTQI+ community by cutting services, weaponizing laws and regulations, and trying to erase our identities. They have deeply underestimated us.
Jan 14, 2026
As a Black queer advocate and policy professional, I have never been naive about politics. But 2025 surpassed even cynics’ worst fears. The Trump-Vance administration didn’t just change laws; it dismantled protections, erased identities, stripped away care, and declared that some lives don’t matter.
Black and brown communities already battling racialized policing, economic precarity, and limited access to care suffered new blows on multiple fronts. For women, girls, transgender youth, disabled people, queer folks, immigrants, the message was clear: Not only your rights, but your bodies, your health, and your lives are expendable.
President Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025 executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth” redefined gender as a binary fixed from birth. Across agencies, “gender” became “sex,” and gender identity was erased from federal recognition and protections.
Trump’s January 24 executive order reinstating Hyde Amendment-style restrictions cut virtually all federal funding for abortion, and clawed back health funding for reproductive services. The 1977 Hyde Amendment banned using federal funds for abortion (except in cases of rape or incest or a life-threatening pregnancy). Doubling down on it disproportionately impacts women, girls, low-income people, and communities of color.
Communities of color, LGBTQI+ people, women, girls, and transgender youth are not disappearing. We are organizing; we are resisting; we are making care, dignity, and justice real.
By mid-2025, all federal support for LGBTQI-specific crisis services through the national suicide prevention hotline 988 was suspended—a direct blow to people who rely on them when they have nowhere else to turn.
Over the course of the year, health-equity protections, data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity, nondiscrimination guidance, and federal support for queer and trans-inclusive care were all revoked.
Taken together, these actions aren’t just policy changes; they symbolize structural denial of the needs, identities, and very existence of people the administration doesn’t want to see in its vision for America, or indeed the world.
Last year it overhauled how the US reports on human rights, categorizing abortion access, gender-affirming care, and protections for LGBTQI+ people as “human rights violations” while ignoring systemic racism, police violence, economic inequality, and state-sanctioned oppression. This brazen rewriting of global norms on human rights gives cover to oppressive regimes and undermines US leadership and moral standing.
So where do we go from here?
We need to hold ourselves accountable for building real equity in real time. We must reclaim care as a form of resistance. Our laws at every level must guarantee access to healthcare, behavioral health services, gender-affirming care, mental health support, comprehensive data collection, and nondiscrimination protections. They must guarantee reproductive autonomy and community safety for everyone, and especially for those denied these rights the longest. Care, autonomy, and safety are imperative at all times, and can’t be suspended or soft-pedalled when ideological winds shift.
Those most impacted by the shifts must shape the path forward: Women of color should be at the center of reproductive health and justice efforts. Queer people from historically marginalized communities should guide design of mental health and crisis-response systems. Transgender youth should lead national conversations about their own safety and autonomy.
2025 was not just a bleak moment in our history; it is a warning about our future. It shows how quickly rights can be erased, how destructive the raw exercise of power can be, and who gets scapegoated for the ensuing chaos.
But it also demonstrates our strength and resolve. Communities of color, LGBTQI+ people, women, girls, and transgender youth are not disappearing. We are organizing; we are resisting; we are making care, dignity, and justice real.
The Trump-Vance administration believed they could turn back the clock by cutting services, weaponizing laws and regulations, and trying to erase our identities. They have deeply underestimated us. We are not waiting for permission to exist. We are still here. We are still building. And we will not be erased.
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The Psychology of Resistance
What famous experiments really teach us about fighting authoritarianism today.
Jul 06, 2025
In my last article, I detailed how U.S. President Donald Trump misunderstands the fundamental truth about human nature. He projects his own transactional worldview onto all of us, imagining that we're all determined to step on others to rise. I pointed out that our true nature is represented by the millions who have taken to the streets to speak out against injustices, by people like Mahmoud Kahlil (finally free!), and the mothers and fathers facing deportation whose children cry out as masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials abduct them outside schools. Our fundamental nature is rooted in care for one another. We are not killers but carers.
But what do we do with that information? How does that help us resist what's happening now?
To answer this, I want to talk about psychology, my disciplinary home, and what we can learn from some foundational studies about manipulation, power, and resistance. If you've taken psychology in high school or college, you've likely learned about these three infamous experiments: Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, Sherif's Robber's Cave Experiment, and Milgram's shock experiments.
If evil is inevitable, then resistance is pointless.
The rudimentary takeaway from each might sound like this: Ordinary people will do extraordinarily evil things in certain circumstances. This conclusion reinforces a cynical view of humanity that is both lazy and tragically disempowering.
Cynicism about human nature, fueled by the findings from these experiments, is lazy because it stops us from asking harder questions about systems, power, and how change actually happens. If we're all monsters deep down, then there's no point in organizing, no point in building better institutions, no point in fighting for justice. We can just shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, I guess this is who we are," and watch each other burn.
This kind of fatalism is exactly what those in power want. It lets us all off the hook, we don't have to show up for each other, we don't have to do the difficult work of dismantling harmful systems and speaking truth to power, we don't have to take responsibility for preventing the continuation of harm. If evil is inevitable, then resistance is pointless.
The cynical view, supported by the "findings" of these experiments, is dangerous propaganda that serves authoritarians.
What Really Happened in Zimbardo's, Sherif's, and Milgram's Experiments
Let's first correct the record on each of these studies, because the actual truth reveals something very different about human nature and gives us a roadmap for resistance.
Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment supposedly showed that people become sadistic when given power over others. In 1971, Zimbardo recreated a prison environment in Stanford's basement, paying students to act as guards or prisoners. It quickly devolved into what appeared to be guards relishing their role as violent dominators, torturing and abusing the "prisoners." Zimbardo, who had given himself the role of the warden, allowed it all to happen and instigated much of it.
Zimbardo, Sherif, and Milgram all built their careers on lies about human nature that serve authoritarians.
While the narrative pushed by Zimbardo, that good people will become evil in certain roles, made him famous, the truth revealed by the experiment is that we will try our best to meet the parameters of an assignment that are articulated to us. The students were acting because they wanted to make Zimbardo happy. They weren't revealing some dark truth about human nature; they were trying to be good research participants, following what they thought were the experimenter's expectations.
Sherif's Robber's Cave Experiment claimed to show how easily children form hostile groups. Sherif brought boys to summer camp and arbitrarily organized them into two teams with the exciting names of the Rattlers and the Eagles. The story, according to Sherif, goes that they quickly degenerated into "wicked, disturbed, and vicious bunches of youngsters," burning flags, raiding camps, and inventing weapons made of socks and rocks.
When psychologist Gina Perry dug into the archives, she found that this was a manufactured narrative with the boys actually wanting to be friends with each other. To get the outcome Sherif wanted to report, the one that could make him famous, he had to manipulate everything, rigging games, tearing down tents themselves and blaming the other group, stopping the boys when they tried to make peace symbols for their T-shirts. When the boys figured out they were being manipulated, the experiment collapsed.
Milgram's shock experiments supposedly proved that 65% of people will follow evil orders, delivering potentially fatal electric shocks to strangers when told to do so by an authority figure. For decades, this has been cited as proof that we're all potential Nazis, just waiting for the right circumstances.
But when researchers finally got access to Milgram's archives, they discovered he was more director than scientist. Anyone who deviated from his script was bullied and coerced. The man in the lab coat would make eight or nine attempts to force people to continue, even coming to blows with participants who tried to stop.
Not only that but a large percentage (44%) of the participants didn't believe the study to be real, they didn't actually think they were delivering real shocks. Among those who did believe the shocks were real, the majority refused to continue.
So how did Milgram get his results? Psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher discovered that participants weren't submitting to authority; instead they were trying to help with what they believed was important scientific research. When told their contribution would benefit science, participants expressed relief: "I am happy to have been of service" and "Continue your experiments by all means as long as good can come of them." It turns out people weren't mindlessly obedient. People were being tricked into thinking they were doing good.
The Real Lessons: How to Resist
What can we learn from these manipulated experiments? The true lesson isn't about human evil, it's about how some people will do anything to establish fame and power for themselves. Zimbardo, Sherif, and Milgram all built their careers on lies about human nature that serve authoritarians.
But buried in their own data is the real story of resistance. When researchers analyzed who successfully resisted in Milgram's experiments, they found three key tactics:
- Talk to the victim—Connect with those being harmed;
- Remind those in power of their responsibility—Hold leaders accountable; and
- Repeatedly refuse to continue–Don't give up after the first "no."
We can develop these capacities through practice and education. This is one reason we must fiercely protect our universities; they are critical sites where communication skills, critical thinking, and moral courage can be cultivated. It is not surprising that college students are often on the frontlines of fighting for justice, from the civil rights movement to anti-war protests to today's demonstrations for Palestinian liberation and immigrant rights. It's why being in community and knowing our neighbors is a necessary strategy of survival and resistance. It's evidence that calling our representatives and holding them accountable actually matters. We can resist questionable authority just as those participants in Milgram's studies who refused to continue did. And we can get better at it.
Why This Matters in Trump's America
My discipline of psychology has repeatedly told us lies that benefit men seeking power. As I shared in my previous article, Trump is exploiting a myth about us being fundamentally evil because it serves him to have us believing that, even though we are actually wired toward care. When we find ourselves in situations where we're asked to dehumanize someone, to cause someone harm, we now know what to do. When psychologists peeked into the actual archives of these famous experiments, that was the truth that was revealed.
As Trump's administration invents cruel ways to tear apart our communities, as they bomb Iran to distract us from domestic cruelties, as they tell us that entire populations are threats to justify dragging us into wars, we must remember the true lessons of these experiments. Powerful men will mislead us and try to convince us to act against our nature. Elon Musk and others who hoard wealth and power tell us that empathy is weakness, that caring is "civilizational suicide," that we must choose between compassion and survival. But the protesters and a few brave lawmakers standing between ICE agents and families know better. They understand what those manipulated experiments actually prove: that our instinct is to refuse to cause harm, to protect each other, to resist when asked to participate in cruelty.
Taking a lesson from the real truth behind these experiments, we must always reach out to those who are being hurt, know them, see them as fully human, refuse to let anyone talk us into dehumanizing our fellow community members. We must relentlessly remind those in power of their responsibility to the collective good. And we must refuse, refuse, refuse to be complicit in systems of harm, no matter how they're justified to us.
Now is the time to reach out to our trans community members under attack. Now is the time to create mutual aid networks and join ICE watches in our communities. Now is the time to call our senators and refuse to let this country be dragged into war with Iran. Now is the time to refuse to give up our democracy, to refuse to turn on our immigrant community members, to hold on tight to our LGBTQ beloveds. Keep protesting. Keep refusing. Keep holding on to one another. Keep being true to our human nature.
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What We Can Learn From Trans People in the Fight for Dignity and Democracy
Given the position of exclusion and criminalization in society, trans people know how to fight and it’s a massive fight that we need to wage right now.
Jun 07, 2025
This year, Pride Month arrives at an especially dire moment for the LGBTQ+ community. Under the second Trump administration, homophobic vitriol and violence are on the rise. On Elon Musk’s X platform, a “deepfake” video of President Donald Trump canceling Pride Month has gone viral. And even as Pride celebrations continue as planned (in many places without as many corporate contributions), the attacks against LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people, seem to be on steroids. After all, since taking office a second time, Trump has issued executive orders that ban transgender women in sports and transgender troops in the military, while limiting federal recognition to two genders. And his executive actions are only the spear tip of a significantly larger legislative attempt to target and scapegoat transgender people, who make up just over 1% of the U.S. population.
Believe it or not, so far this year, 701 anti-trans bills have been introduced in American legislative bodies at both the state and federal levels. More than $215 million was spent on anti-trans television advertisements during the 2024 election season alone. Now, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” barely passed by the House and at present in the Senate—which would gut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other lifesaving safety-net programs—takes explicit aim at gender-affirming care for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) patients. If the Senate passes it, the result will be devastating for trans people, who are already twice as likely as the general population to be unemployed and unhoused and four times as likely to live in extreme poverty. It should be no surprise, then, that almost half of transgender adults in this country have already relocated or are considering relocating to more trans-affirming places.
While executive orders, budget cuts, and other attacks threaten all trans and nonbinary people, the most vulnerable are, of course, at greatest risk, including the poor, people of color, the young, the disabled, and the incarcerated. In a recent report, the American Civil Liberties Union offers a horrific insight into this reality:
Some of the most immediate impacts will likely be felt by the more than 2,000 transgender people currently held in federal custody. [One] order specifically calls on the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to ignore the guidelines of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and enforce a blanket policy forcing transgender women into men’s prisons and detention centers against their will. This puts them at a severely heightened risk of sexual assault and abuse by other incarcerated persons and prison staff. The order also mandates that BOP withdraw critical health care from trans people in federal prison.
The overwhelming majority of anti-trans bills target trans and nonbinary children, youth, and young adults by taking away their sense of safety and belonging in healthcare locations, libraries, schools, sports, and so much more, while only accelerating anti-trans bullying and hate. In fact, according to a study from the Trevor Project, “When states pass anti-transgender laws… suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth ages 13 to 17 increased from 7% to 72%.”
It’s important to note that none of this is happening simply because Donald Trump himself is a bigot or because the Republican Party is just deeply cruel. It’s happening because there is a highly connected, well-funded, and strategically positioned Christian nationalist movement pushing forward anti-trans policy and its accompanying social violence.
But in the struggle against religious extremism and political oppression, trans people know what losing strategies look like. Preemptive compliance from the institutions we have often relied upon—including healthcare providers, colleges, and philanthropic foundations—has been a losing strategy. Submission to divide-and-conquer rule, theological idolatry, and biblical distortion, as well as silence from supporters and allies, also loses the day.
Given the position of exclusion and criminalization in society, however, trans people also know how to fight and it’s a massive fight that we need to wage right now. Trans people, who have always had to live with their backs against the wall, are now being joined by those from all walks of life. Indeed, as Trump and the Christian nationalist movement attack everything from decent healthcare to decent housing, more and more people are poised to enter a struggle for survival. In the fight for dignity and democracy, trans people have much to teach everybody.
A History of Resistance
Transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people have long resisted unjust laws, as well as mistreatment and oppression from those in power. The Compton Cafeteria riot in August 1966 sparked transgender activism in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, years before the Stonewall Uprising. Police violence was common in San Francisco then, and the staff at Compton Cafeteria called the police on poor trans women and drag queens who were harassed, subjected to genitalia checks, and subsequently arrested for crossdressing, which was illegal at the time. Tired of the constant oppression, violence, and harassment, trans women resisted arrest, sparking resistance throughout the Tenderloin district. This led to a picket-line presence at the café, as the establishment continued to ban drag queens and trans women.
Evidence of this early trans resistance was nearly erased from historical memory. Thanks to the work of transgender historian Susan Stryker and other activists and organizers, however, the important legacy of such organizing was confirmed to have indeed occurred.
It could not be more important to invoke this powerful lineage of protest and resistance today, not just for the trans and nonbinary community but for everyone.
Three years later, across the country in New York City, the Stonewall Uprising was led primarily by poor people, particularly poor, gender-expansive folks of color, who faced continual police harassment, violence, and discrimination. The Stonewall Inn, a dingy bar reputedly owned by organized crime and frequented by those in the poor gay and trans community in New York’s West Village, was raided by the police in June 1969. The liberation movement that followed saw heroic activism, organizing, and community care by poor, unhoused trans women who resisted constant erasure and violence from the government (and even from within the gay rights movement). Some of those leaders, including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Maxine Feldman, Bobbie Lea Bennett, and Miss Major Griffin Gracy, were as much a part of the movement to end poverty as they were of the gay rights movement.
Both Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were poor, unhoused trans women and sex workers, as well as organizers advocating for deep social transformation. In 1970, they founded S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) House where they worked to meet the material and community needs of poor trans youth. They held monthly political education meetings, offering support for queer folks who were arrested and couldn’t pay bail. They provided both jail and street support in tough times, while working to organize poor trans folks into a larger movement for transformational change.
The story of S.T.A.R. House is replete with lessons for anyone committed to resisting political violence, systemic immiseration, and authoritarian-style rule. In their melding of community-care and political activism, Johnson and Rivera successfully modeled ways to organize and build power in the shadow of extreme state repression. They insisted that everyone in their community had a right to live with dignity and that even the most marginalized among them should have a role in all movements for collective liberation. Through their work, they developed and protected a new generation of queer grassroots leaders, at a time when no one else was willing to do so. Theirs was a political ethic rooted in a deep understanding of the classic movement slogan: “When you lift from the bottom, everybody rises.”
Today, 2025 Pride organizers are doubling down on that radical history of protest and resistance. In fact, NYC Pride has made “protest” its theme of the year. As Kazz Alexander, its co-chair, explained:
The challenges we face today, particularly in this political climate, require us to stand together in solidarity. We must support one another, because when the most marginalized among us are granted their rights, all of us benefit. Pride is not merely a celebration of identity—it is a powerful statement of resistance, affirming that justice and equity will ultimately prevail for those who live and love on the margins.
Unholy Attacks on Children, the Poor, and the Vulnerable
It could not be more important to invoke this powerful lineage of protest and resistance today, not just for the trans and nonbinary community but for everyone. In the Trump years, the slew of homophobic and transphobic attacks has been inseparable from the rise of Christian nationalism and religious extremism. In many ways, the contemporary legislative, executive, and judicial attacks on trans and nonbinary people closely parallel a decades-long strategy of the Christian right to politicize abortion access, an issue previously not considered political by a majority of Americans, including a majority of Christians.
An eerie argument about “defending innocent children” is being deployed by Christian nationalists in their war on gender-affirming care, despite overwhelming medical evidence that such care saves young people’s lives. In fact, denying such care is part of a growing Christian nationalist mission to remake this country as an extremist Christian dominion, starting with our children.
For example, Oklahoma Senate Bill 129, introduced in 2023 to ban gender-affirming care to anyone under the age of 26, was named the “Millstone Act.” That title reflected an unsettling, even violent interpretation of Matthew 18:6 in the Bible, falsely asserting that gender-affirming care harms children and insinuating that anyone providing it should have “a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
In January, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty released its annual report, “The State of Religious Liberty in the United States.” It identified five areas of critical concern: immigration, antisemitism, in vitro fertilization mandates, parental choice in education, and scaling back “gender ideology” laws. It directly took up the rhetoric and politics of the soon-to-be-in-office Trump administration on trans rights and more.
Indeed, there is nothing innate or organic about the rise of anti-trans and anti-queer hate in the United States. As the research of Translash Media has made clear, organizations like the National Christian Foundation, the DeVos Family, and the Council for National Policy have been instrumental in funding, developing, and workshopping anti-trans and anti-queer sentiment, policies, and theology. Fundamentalist Protestant organizations like Focus on the Family, the Family Policy Alliance, and the Family Research Council have also been crucial to the launching of the anti-trans movement within the last decade, including the drafting of the first anti-trans legislation at a Summit on Protecting Children from Sexualization conference in 2019.
Such Christian nationalist-fueled attacks aren’t just about hurting the queer community. They are also a key way of wielding supposedly “traditional” values and identities to discipline dissent and nonconformity in Christian ranks as well, while sowing distrust of “the other” in this all-American world of ours. All of this, of course, played out in the 2024 elections, when trans rights were weaponized into a hot-button and divisive issue by the Trump campaign (with only the most half-hearted pushback from the Biden-Harris crew), despite the trans community being such a microscopic minority of the population.
What the Bible Really Says About Gender Justice
Christian nationalists like to weaponize the Bible as a primary way of justifying their attacks on trans and nonbinary people. And yet, like all Christian nationalist theology, theirs is heretical when it comes to actual Christian scriptures and the subject of Jesus’ teachings.
After all, the creation story in Genesis is fully inclusive of God’s greatness—from the creation of light and darkness to the nonbinary sunrises and sunsets in between. It should be a reminder that all of us are created in God’s image. While the anti-trans crew has sought to use the biblical phrase “male and female God created them” from Genesis 1:27 in defense of exclusionary violence, some of the oldest interpretations of that text hold that God created the first human beings to contain both “maleness” and “femaleness” inside one body. Indeed, the Bible repeatedly names third-gender people as important.
If Christian nationalists insist on using the Bible to underwrite their social and political violence, those of us who call ourselves Christians must be willing to defend LGBTQ+ people with fervor and theological rigor.
In Isaiah 56:3-5, for instance, God affirms not only the sanctity but the spiritual importance of people who exist outside of the gender binary, in essence promising LGBTQ+ people, “an everlasting name, a name better than sons and daughters.” The Book of Esther, for instance, identifies no fewer than 10 gender non-conforming people, some of whom are identified as playing a role in assisting Esther’s defense of her people against imperial violence. The Jewish Talmud reflects a similar affirmation of gender diversity, legally recognizing no fewer than seven genders.
This inclusivity carries through to the New Testament and the stories about Jesus as well. In Matthew 19:12, Jesus teaches that there are human beings who exist outside of the gender binary from birth. Acts 8:26-39 explicitly lifts up the spiritual leadership of gender nonconforming people of African descent in the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. In our time, that eunuch would have been far more welcome at the Stonewall Inn than at the Family Research Council’s annual summit.
There are numerous other biblical examples of gender diversity and of Jesus’ celebration of and identification with gender nonconforming people. The point is that if Christian nationalists insist on using the Bible to underwrite their social and political violence, those of us who call ourselves Christians must be willing to defend LGBTQ+ people with fervor and theological rigor.
This is a “Kairos moment” for faith communities that affirm the dignity and rights of LGBTQ+ people—especially trans and nonbinary people. Christian nationalism’s spiritual and political attacks on LGBTQ+ people are also an attack on our deep belief in God’s inclusive love. Isn’t it time, especially in the age of Donald Trump, to leverage our public witness, our pastoral presence, our theological voice, and the power of our institutions in defense of the surviving and thriving of all people?
For too long, religion has been used to attack LGBTQ+ people. Today, Christian nationalists are amassing power by claiming a monopoly on morality. But beneath theological distortions and manipulations exists an untarnished gospel that teaches love, inclusion, diversity, and justice. We must be brave enough to proclaim this gospel for all to hear.
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