LGBTQ+ advocates didn’t even have to wait until President Trump’s first day in office to see how an emboldened Republican-controlled Congress will act. On January 14, days before the inauguration, the U.S. House passed the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” prohibiting transgender women and girls from playing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity; companion legislation has also been introduced in the Senate. “This is obviously concerning,” said Emma Chinn, communications and policy manager at the Campaign for Southern Equality, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization focused on the Southern states. “Here in the South we’ve been dealing with anti-LGBT and especially anti-trans policies at the state level for a while, and we’re definitely concerned now that some of those policies, like restrictions on gender-affirming care and threats to marriage equality, are going to be replicated at the federal level. And we’re concerned about the bad policies we have in a lot of our Southern states actually getting worse.”
Some state legislatures that had previously passed sports bans, for example, have expanded the reach of the bans to other age groups, or to include trans boys, explained Chinn. The Campaign for Southern Equality’s Trans Youth Emergency Project offers funding to youth and families in every state that bans gender-affirming care to travel out of state for care, so the possibility of additional states passing such bans is also of great concern. And states that have banned gender-affirming surgery, or a specific type of surgery, might now move to include hormone replacement therapy and puberty-delaying medication in those bans. Federal funding for gender-affirming care could also be under threat, and there could be attacks on public hospitals providing this care.
Already LGBTQ+ advocates have been fighting back against an onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ bills in state legislatures that has “been happening at an increasing volume over more than ten years now,” said Jennifer C. Pizer, chief legal officer at Lambda Legal. Last year, close to 600 of these bills were introduced, a large percentage targeting transgender people. And while only 8% of the bills were actually signed into law, advocates are hardly celebrating.
“In one way, it sounds encouraging that 90% failed, but the trouble is the absolute number has been increasing exponentially,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “So 10% of what is now a very large number passing has been catastrophic for people living in more conservative states, and specifically, it has been catastrophic for transgender young people. We have to be realistic and acknowledge that this is a severe backlash and that a part of our community—transgender young people in particular—are suffering very severe harms at the moment.”
Advocates are worried about what will happen to transgender people, especially transgender youth, over the next four years. In a study published last year, the Trevor Project found that state-level anti-transgender laws increased suicide attempts by up to 72% in transgender and nonbinary youth. “These are lives that hang in the balance, and we really need to come together to support trans youth and we need people to speak up, if they can, because this is so critical,” said Meg York, director of LGBTQ+ family law and policy and senior policy counsel at Family Equality, which advocates for LGBTQ+ families.
Right-wing politicians have been deliberately introducing as many bills in state legislatures as they possibly can, without any regard for overlap with other proposed legislation. The close to 600 bills “doesn’t reflect 600 different ideas,” said Pizer. “Many legislators are introducing bills on the same subject. Why are they doing this? It’s about political theater, politics, fundraising, attention-seeking. But it’s targeting a tiny population and amongst the most vulnerable members of our society based on misinformation and indifference, if not cruelty, about the consequences.”
In Tennessee alone, 31 anti-LGTBQ+ bills were introduced in 2024, with six passing. “We have to come up with ways to do more every year, and we already deploy a tactically rich approach,” said Chris Sanders, executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, a statewide advocacy organization. Their advocacy work includes not only lobbying, bringing people to the Capitol for legislative hearings and floor votes, but also looking for other groups and professionals who will be affected by the anti-LGBTQ+ bills. “It’s really hard to run an anti-LGBTQ bill without it hitting some other area of life, and they often have spillover effects.” Health care professionals, psychologists, and counselors have been negatively impacted by some of the proposed bills as well as school funding and business recruitment. “We are happy for the bill to go down and we don’t have to be the ones at the front carrying the banner,” said Sanders.
The emphasis on coalition building has long been a strength of advocacy work among LGBTQ+ organizations. “One of most important things we know that helps us defeat these bills is having organizing in a state year-round,” said Vivian Topping, director of advocacy and civic engagement at Equality Federation, the national partner to a network of state-based LGBTQ+ organizations. “It’s the deep relationships that our network has been able to build with folks on the ground. When we have long, strong organizing in a community, we’ve been able to beat these bills. Strong coalitions need to include not only progressive partners, but also corporate partners and folks across lines of difference.”
Advocates will draw from their years of experience working to defeat anti-LGBTQ+ state bills as well as looking back at what happened during the previous Trump administration, when “the national ACLU filed around 428 lawsuits,” said Angela Cooper, communications director at the ACLU of Kentucky. “We can expect multiple legal challenges since it’s been made clear that the [Trump] administration does not care to do things by the letter of the law. But we’re not necessarily preparing any differently than we normally would in Kentucky as a state advocacy organization. We have a Republican supermajority [in the state legislature], and we review every single bill that is filed to look for legal challenges that we might bring, work with lawmakers to try to improve bad legislation, and move forward any proactive legislation. But these attacks are designed to give us compassion fatigue. It’s exhausting, and we have to be very careful during the legislative session to take care of ourselves, to be in top form to fight all these challenges.”
With Project 2025, Republicans themselves provided useful information about what advocates can expect during the next four years. The federal policy agenda and blueprint was authored and published by officials from the first Trump administration in partnership with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Sometimes showing their hand can be helpful—we saw Project 2025 come out and so we didn’t have to convince anyone that this is the goal because it’s right here, in writing,” said York. “Turning that on its head, when the playbook is open for all of us to read, it allows us to come up with new, creative, and more strategic responses to reach better outcomes.”
Advocates point to working across different issue areas as a strength of LGBTQ+ organizing. “We have continued to prioritize and increase our collective efforts at coalition building,” said Logan Casey, director of policy research at Movement Advancement Project, a think tank. “With the attacks on transgender people’s access to medical care, there are many similarities in the attacks on access to reproductive health care. Although there has already been a lot of collaboration, there has been a growing connection between LGBTQ people and organizations and reproductive justice work to help us learn from what folks in the reproductive justice space have been dealing with for years.” The right-wing attempts to restrict access to abortion care in some states is “exactly what we are seeing with attacks on access to transgender health care.”
But advocates are also realistic about what this moment really means. “We need to face up that we are in a moment of peril and backlash,” said Minter. “Our movement is attempting to adapt to this new situation, and it’s taking us longer than I wish it did. We are not immune to the same dynamics and cycles of change that happened to other civil rights movements. It’s a common pattern in our nation’s history of making very significant progress followed by periods of severe and sometimes vicious backlash, and we are experiencing that for the first time in my lifetime and probably most people in the movement in their lifetime.”
Advocates warn against letting despair hamper efforts to fight back. “As we go into the next four years, there will be many headlines that will be scary, many proposed things that will be awful, but [we need to] remember that a headline or a tweet isn’t itself law and there’s a lot of things we can do to stop these attacks,” said Casey. “Something important to keep in mind is that there are very few executive actions or orders by themselves that can immediately change policy, and lots of what [Trump] has talked about doing will require a regulatory process. And there are steps and a process that a lot of these proposed attacks must follow. Every one of those steps is an opportunity for the movement and our allies and the general public to slow it down or stop it. Many folks across this movement and many other movements for social justice and equality have been preparing for this, and if we work together, we can meet this moment.”
