The past year has seen the Trump administration systematically dismantle trans rights and autonomy, making the country a less safe place for trans people to live and thrive.
Rewire News Group has followed these political and legal assaults, and documented their human consequences. This Trans Day of Visibility, we’re highlighting our coverage of the people and places most impacted.
Laws targeting trans youth
In June 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that Tennessee could stop transgender minors from receiving gender-affirming care via hormone therapy, puberty blockers, or surgery. The decision, United States v. Skrmetti, “blessed anti-trans discrimination,” wrote RNG Executive Producer Jessica Mason Pieklo. While the case narrowly focused on trans youth in one state, “conservative states across the U.S. now have permission from the highest court in the land to further crack down on health care for trans Americans,” Pieklo explained.
The next month, as part of our TransMissives series, RNG published a letter from Daniel, a trans teen whose family had decided to leave the U.S. in hopes of finding a safer place to raise him. Between 2022 and the time Daniel’s story was published, more than 2,400 bills attempting to chip away at trans rights had been introduced across the United States. Many of them, like Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban, target children and adolescents.
Daniel is hardly the only student affected by the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies.
In October 2025, a month into the first new school year since President Donald Trump took office for a second term, RNG contributor Rebecca Barker explained how his new higher education “compact” would put trans and nonbinary college students at risk. “The heavy-handed document promises federal funding in exchange for ideological compliance,” Barker wrote, requiring schools to “adhere to strict, binary definitions of sex and gender.”
And on the Boom! Lawyered podcast, Pieklo and co-host Imani Gandy analyzed another Supreme Court ruling that erodes the rights of younger trans kids. With Mirabelli v. Bonta, they said after the March 2026 decision, the Supreme Court rewrote parental rights law at the expense of trans children.
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Warning letters and bounty hunter laws
In December 2025, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter that unleashed chaos on at least 12 companies that make and sell chest binders, or compression garments resembling sports bras. It warned them that their products could be seized and their sales halted if they continued to market binders as a treatment for gender dysphoria.
“We will not allow intimidation or targeting to deter us from that work,” one trans shop owner told reporter Hallie Lieberman for her February 2026 story on their scramble to comply.
Just a few weeks later, legal analyst Mia Brett documented a disquieting legal trend: Bathroom laws in Kansas and beyond were incentivizing people to police public bathrooms and sue trans people who use restrooms that align with their gender identities. The incentive: a financial kickback. This tactic is modeled on Texas’ “bounty hunter” anti-abortion laws, Brett wrote. Earlier in March, we republished a story from Morgan Chilson at the Kansas Reflector about how the Kansas bathroom law puts trans people at even greater risk of verbal and physical harassment.
Even amid all the bad news, we also found stories of trans resilience, normalcy, and joy. In August 2025, to conclude the TransMissives series, we published a letter by a young trans girl named Julia, who felt loved and supported by her family, teacher, and community.
“We all get to decide who we want to be,” she wrote, “and I just want to be me.”
This article was adapted from a Bluesky thread.
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