On Monday, the Montana Supreme Court issued a landmark 5-2 ruling declaring that "transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination," and that transgender people constitute a suspect class under the state's equal protection clause. The ruling in Kalarchik v. State of Montana blocks a definition-of-sex law and related state policies that stripped all legal recognition from transgender people and barred them from obtaining accurate birth certificates and driver's licenses. The decision rests on Montana's constitution, whose Equal Protection and Individual Dignity clause has been repeatedly interpreted to protect transgender people—and which the court made clear provides far greater protection than the federal constitution. Justices have now issued the clearest declaration ever that transgender people in the state will have enhanced protections of their rights, grounding the ruling in equal protection, sex discrimination, and privacy—principles with broad applicability in a state that has become a major battleground for anti-trans legislation and resistance to it.

The ruling stems from a challenge to three interlocking state policies: Senate Bill 458, a 2023 law that defined sex as strictly binary throughout the entire Montana Code; a 2022 rule from the Department of Public Health and Human Services that restricted birth certificates; and an unpublished 2024 Motor Vehicle Division policy that barred transgender people from updating their driver's licenses. Together, the policies eliminated all pathways for transgender Montanans to obtain accurate identification documents. SB 458 was particularly sweeping—it inserted a rigid binary definition of sex into Section 1-1-201 of the Montana Code Annotated, the state's general definitions statute, meaning the definition rippled through virtually every area of state law: insurance regulations, employment protections, drivers licenses, birth and death certificates, and equal pay provisions. As Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr described the law's impact, it impacts trans people “from the cradle to grave." In December 2024, Lewis and Clark County District Court Judge Mike Menahan blocked all three policies, finding that the plaintiffs had a "fundamental right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex under the Montana Constitution" and that the state had failed to articulate any compelling interest in enforcing them.

Now, a 5-2 majority of the Montana Supreme Court has affirmed that ruling and gone further. Justice Laurie McKinnon, writing for the majority, declared: "Government issued identification documents are necessary to access public life. When they do not accurately reflect a person's sexual identity, the transgender Montanan is prevented, based on their sex, from obtaining the same attributes of public life that a cisgender Montanan may obtain. Hence, the inability of transgender Montanans to receive government-issued identification documents accurately reflecting their gender identity is fundamentally about the nature of sex and suspect class discrimination under Article II, Section 4—a clause that enshrines individual dignity, equal protection, and nondiscrimination. Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination." (emphasis added)

The court also went a step further. The Montana court separately declared that transgender people constitute a suspect class under the state's equal protection clause. In legal terms, a suspect class is a group that has historically faced such severe discrimination that any law targeting them must meet the highest level of judicial scrutiny to survive—the same standard applied to laws that discriminate on the basis of race. The Montana court stated: "Being transgender is also a suspect class under the Equal Protection Clause of Article II, Section 4—'no person shall be denied equal protection of the law.' The central premise of our state's equal protection guarantee 'is that persons similarly situated with respect to a legitimate governmental purpose of the law must receive like treatment.'" The practical effect is sweeping: any Montana law that singles out transgender people will now face strict scrutiny, meaning the state must prove the law serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve it—a standard that laws almost never survive.

The court's reasoning following this determination is straightforward. Under Montana's policies, if a cisgender woman's birth certificate incorrectly lists her as male, she can have it corrected to say female. But a transgender woman whose birth certificate also lists her as male—and who also lives, presents, and is perceived as female—is denied that same correction. Both women want the same document: one that says "F." One gets it; the other does not. The only difference is the sex they were assigned at birth. That, the court held, is sex discrimination—because the state "tolerates certain traits in one sex that it condemns in another." The state argued its policies apply equally to everyone, but the court dismissed this, finding that "the State's position ignores that only transgender persons are discriminated against when they are not allowed to have identification documents that match their gender identity." Because sex is explicitly protected under Montana's constitution, that discrimination triggers strict scrutiny.

The ruling was not universally agreed upon. Justice Baker, though part of the court’s left-leaning majority, issued a separate concurrence that took a narrower path, grounding her reasoning in Montana’s Individual Dignity clause rather than the majority’s broader holding that transgender people are a suspect class. Baker wrote that “when a person is forced to carry and display a government identification document that does not match who they look like or how they present themselves, this dishonors their dignity.” However, she appeared open to leaving portions of the definition-of-sex law intact, writing that “whether that requires invalidating SB 458 in its entirety must await determination on the merits.”

The two dissenters were far more hostile toward transgender people. Justice Jim Rice repeatedly referred to the plaintiffs—both transgender women—using male pronouns and the phrase “biological male” throughout his dissent, and dismissed the term “cisgender” as “not only inaccurate but potentially offensive.” He devoted multiple pages to a hypothetical about a person who identifies as “trans-aged,” sourcing the concept from Evie Magazine—an alt-right publication that the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as promoting “male supremacist politics of the hard right” and that Media Bias/Fact Check rates as publishing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience—and from a blog post on Care-Net.org, an evangelical anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center network. Chief Justice Cory Swanson, joining Rice’s dissent in full and writing his own, accused the majority of issuing “a political decision dressed up in constitutional garb” and predicted that the ruling “will not endure, nor should it.”

The ruling is monumental for transgender Montanans. Because the decision rests entirely on the Montana Constitution, it is insulated from the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the principle of adequate and independent state grounds, the federal Supreme Court cannot review a state court's interpretation of its own constitution, so long as that constitution provides more protection than the federal one. Montana's does—and it is not close. Adopted in 1972, Montana's constitution is widely considered one of the most progressive in the nation. Its Article II, Section 4, titled "Individual Dignity," contains three separate protections with no federal equivalent: a dignity clause declaring that "the dignity of the human being is inviolable," an equal protection clause, and a standalone non-discrimination clause that explicitly lists sex as a protected category—something the U.S. Constitution does not do. Montana's constitution also enshrines a direct right to privacy that the state supreme court has already used to strike down the state's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth.

The majority in this case made the independence of its analysis explicit, writing: "Montana case law interpreting the Individual Dignity provisions directs our analysis, not federal precedent." The dissent cited Trump v. Orr and Skrmetti—both hostile federal rulings—but the majority rejected them outright. What this means in practice is that Montana's transgender residents now have a constitutional shield completely independent of the Supreme Court of the United State’s decisions.

The case now returns to District Court for a full trial on the merits. Meanwhile, Gov. Gianforte signed SB 437—a law nearly identical to the one just blocked—on March 24, just three weeks before this ruling. Attorney Rylee Sommers-Flanagan of Upper Seven Law has already filed a request to add SB 437 to the existing lawsuit, telling the Montana Free Press, "There is not a substantive difference between the laws." With the Montana Supreme Court now on record that transgender discrimination is sex discrimination and that transgender people are a suspect class, any future law targeting them in the state will face the highest level of constitutional scrutiny, and should help overturn all future laws targeting trans people should the court’s makeup remain similar.

Disclaimer: The author of this piece is lovingly married to Representative Zephyr of Montana.

On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether Children's Hospital Colorado can be forced to resume gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The hospital was one of roughly 40 across the country that capitulated to Trump administration threats and shuttered their trans youth care programs. However, the hospital's position has grown increasingly untenable, as hospitals in states like Minnesota and California have begun reversing course and as the Trump administration has suffered mounting losses in federal courts—including an Oregon ruling that vacated the very declaration the hospital cited as justification for halting care. Hearing arguments on Tuesday, several justices appeared skeptical of the hospital's rationale, questioning whether Colorado's civil rights protections for transgender people—among the strongest in the nation—can simply be overridden by federal threats that do not constitute law.

In December, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a declaration that gender-affirming care for transgender youth was "neither safe nor effective," warning that hospitals providing such care could be excluded from Medicare and Medicaid—a virtual death sentence for any hospital system. Crucially, Kennedy's declaration was illegal: Section 1801 of the Social Security Act explicitly states that "nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize any Federal officer or employee to exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine." Roughly 40 hospitals across the country capitulated, including Children's Hospital Colorado, which shuttered its trans youth care program in January. It is critical to note that many other hospitals continued to offer care throughout this period—and none had their Medicaid funding revoked, a fact that would prove significant in Tuesday's proceedings. In response to the closure, trans youth and their families sued Children's Hospital Colorado, arguing that no federal law compelled the hospital to stop—it was simply capitulating to Trump—and that Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, required the hospital to continue providing care equally to transgender and cisgender patients alike. Notably, the Kennedy Declaration was itself blocked in court in March.

The case first went to Denver District Court, where Judge Ericka F.H. Englert was sympathetic to the families on the merits—ruling that the plaintiffs would likely succeed in proving they had been discriminated against and that their children were suffering irreparable harm. Yet inexplicably, Judge Englert denied the families relief, concluding that the public interest weighed in the hospital's favor because forcing it to resume care could trigger federal retaliation. "Plaintiffs essentially ask the Court to call the bluff of the federal government," she wrote, "and order CHC to take action in violation of federal law." Scott Skinner-Thompson, a civil rights law professor at the University of Colorado Law School, told the Colorado Sun that it is "rare" to see a case where a trial court has found that plaintiffs are being discriminated against but then declined to issue an injunction to stop it. The families then appealed directly to the Colorado Supreme Court.

The hearing featured sharp exchanges over the nature of discrimination itself. Children's Hospital argued that it was not discriminating against transgender youth—and instead was discriminating on age and condition, mirroring the conservative Skrmetti ruling’s logic. "You can't infer any type of animus on the part of Children's Hospital," attorney Patrick O'Rourke told the justices. Civil rights advocates have noted that this reasoning is a thin veil for discrimination—akin to a hospital banning yarmulkes and claiming it is not discriminating against Jewish people, just enforcing a neutral dress code. Several justices appeared to see through the argument. "How is that not discrimination?" Justice Susan Blanco asked, with Justice Márquez noting that the hospital continues to prescribe the exact same medications to cisgender children. Justice Richard Gabriel agreed: "I guess I worry how that's not a pretextual argument to allow discrimination." The families' attorney, Paula Greisen, dismissed the hospital's reasoning as "semantics," arguing that all the patients—cisgender and transgender alike—"are all trying to align the timing of puberty," and that no federal law compels the hospital to discriminate. The Kennedy declaration has been blocked, she noted, and the hospital's remaining fears are "completely imaginary."

But the arguments extended beyond the question of discrimination—they went to the heart of whether state civil rights laws can survive federal intimidation. Greisen framed the case as existential for state sovereignty. “At the end of the day, if states don’t retain their sovereignty and the laws aren’t enforced, then it doesn’t matter how much our General Assembly stands up to the Trump administration or any administration and says, ‘We’re going to protect these groups,’” she told the justices. “If the court doesn’t enforce those laws, then all those laws become a house of cards.”

Several justices appeared to share that concern. Justice William W. Hood III questioned whether the hospital’s catastrophic predictions were even realistic, wondering aloud whether the “catastrophic nature of it makes it politically untenable”—suggesting the federal government would never actually follow through on shutting down a major children’s hospital. It is worth noting that no hospital that has continued to provide gender-affirming care has had its Medicaid funding revoked.

Justice Richard L. Gabriel went further, expressing alarm at the precedent the hospital’s argument would set. “I understand the position Children’s Hospital is put in here. My concern would be, pick a rogue administration down the road,” Gabriel said. “It would seem your argument is, they could take any number of absurd positions on saying whatever care could be unsafe. And that may be targeted at a particular identifiable group, and that identifiable group will always have no remedy because the government has all the cards and they control all the money. I’m concerned with that precedent.”

The justices were not universally supportive of the families' arguments, however, and some appeared to embrace caution in how they would rule. Justice Carlos A. Samour Jr. appeared the most hesitant, acknowledging sympathy for the families but expressing concern about the practical consequences. "I think we all are in favor of enforcing those laws," Samour said. "In this case, it gets really complicated, because the hospital is saying, 'Look, if we're required to provide this treatment, all these horrible, catastrophic things may very well happen.'" He asked whether there was any "middle ground" with the federal administration—such as allowing current patients to complete treatment while not accepting new ones—but the hospital's attorney said there was not. Even Gabriel, who had expressed deep concern about the precedent, acknowledged the difficulty of the court's position. "The trial court here found perfectly rationally that, 'The plaintiffs are asking me to call the federal government's bluff, and the injury if I lose on that would be dramatic,'" he said. "So how do we overturn that?"

The way the court rules could have enormous implications—not just for transgender youth in Colorado, but for how hospitals in supposedly safe states treat civil rights protections in the face of an administration that has weaponized federal funding as a cudgel against anti-discrimination laws. If the court accepts the hospital's argument that vague federal threats are sufficient to override state anti-discrimination law, the consequences extend far beyond gender-affirming care. Under that logic, any Republican administration need only issue stern threats—without passing a single law, without winning a single court case—and that alone would be enough to nullify state civil rights protections for any group it chooses to target. The laws themselves become meaningless, exactly the "house of cards" Greisen warned of. There is no timeline for when the Colorado Supreme Court will issue its ruling.

A DoorDash courier has gone viral after President Donald Trump tried, and failed, to use her as a prop for a downright bizarre anti-trans rant.

Sharon Simmons, a grandmother from Arkansas, was delivering a McDonald’s meal to the White House to celebrate a “No Tax on Tips” policy enacted by federal lawmakers. With “DoorDash Grandma” emblazoned on her bright red shirt, she handed off the meal—then tried to leave.

But President Donald Trump stopped her so he could talk more about the initiative as a part of his “Big Beautiful Bill.” And he kept her there as he off-roaded about her husband’s cancer, White House AI slop posts, falsehoods about 2020 “election fraud,” and open borders and transgender people.

“They want to have men playing in women’s sports,” Trump said, turning to Simmons. “Do you think that men should play in women’s sports?”

“I really don’t have an opinion on that,” she said.

“I’ll bet you do,” he said.

“No, no,” Simmons said with a gracious smile. “I’m here about—”

“Pizza?” Trump cut her off.

“...‘No Tax on Tips,’” Simmons said simultaneously.

You can see a clip of the viral moment below.

Make no mistake: DoorDash Grandma is not some bastion of progressive queer politics who is confronting the President on the White House Lawn. She’s not your average courier, either. She’s been spotlighted by the GOP on multiple occasions to promote the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and DoorDash openly orchestrated DoorDash Grandma “to commemorate the first anniversary of the No Tax on Tips policy.”

Trump’s controversial budget bill, while granting some amnesty on taxes to contract workers, like DoorDash drivers, has also been criticized as political theatre and bad tax policy. “‘No Tax on Tips’ is a symbolic tax break that is very limited and poorly targets the workers who need tax relief the most,” Corey Husak, Director of Tax Policy for the Center for American Progress, wrote last year.

Nonetheless, DoorDash Grandma resonated with Americans in this political moment. Simmons’s virality shows, among other things, that voters are hungry—literally hungry—for meaningful reform to things like food prices, health care and cost of living. Waging culture wars is not sustenance.

On Sunday, Hungarians flocked to the polls in record numbers to oust Prime Minister Viktor Orbán from office in a historic election, delivering a stunning defeat to a fiercely anti-LGBTQ+ regime that enacted some of the harshest laws against its LGBTQ+ population in Europe and was broadly viewed as autocratic. The defeat came despite Vice President JD Vance traveling to Budapest to decry trans people just days before the election to campaign for Orbán, and President Trump endorsing him on Truth Social. Instead, Péter Magyar's Tisza Party won 138 of 199 parliamentary seats in a landslide, securing a two-thirds supermajority with nearly 80% turnout, the highest in Hungary's recent history. The victory brought hope to many across the country, but especially to LGBTQ+ Hungarians, who saw it as a signal that the tide could be reversed on years of draconian laws targeting their community. That hope was advanced on Sunday night, when in front of tens of thousands of supporters gathered along the Danube River in Budapest, Magyar directly addressed the previous regime's treatment of LGBTQ+ people, declaring that he would pursue a government where "no one is persecuted because they love differently, or love in a different way than the majority."

"I long waited for this. I was 12 when this bullshit started. Now I feel so hopeful for the future. I know this is just the starting line. But finally we could step on the track," wrote Alice Grey, a transgender Hungarian woman, on Bluesky. Grey said Magyar's victory speech left her stunned—not because of a sweeping policy promise, but because of what it didn't contain: hatred. "He said that he will serve every Hungarian, listed some starting each with 'doesn't matter x' and said 'doesn't matter how they love,'" she wrote. "I was so shocked. In Hungary, a president acknowledged any LGBTQ+ related thing without hatred. This is so new for us." She added that the speech gave her hope that she might "finally get out of our trans care hell and finally properly begin my transition journey."

Magyar ran a campaign that some LGBTQ+ Hungarians criticized as too cautious, choosing to avoid LGBTQ+ issues almost entirely. Háttér Society, Hungary's leading LGBTQ+ rights organization, noted that "neither Magyar, nor his party have reached out to the organization," and their election guide stated bluntly that "the party's election program does not address LGBTQ+ issues." In a country where the government banned legal gender recognition for trans people, criminalized Pride marches with up to a year in prison for organizers, and is currently prosecuting Budapest's mayor Gergely Karácsony for allowing the 2025 Pride march to proceed, even Magyar's silence was a departure from the norm. But he did offer signals. He called the Pride ban a distraction from the suffering of ordinary Hungarians and said a Tisza government would protect the right of assembly. When asked about same-sex adoption, he said that in his personal opinion, a child is better off with a same-sex couple than in the child protection system.

However, upon winning the election, Magyar came out more fiercely. Speaking to tens of thousands along the Danube, he promised a country "where no one is stigmatized because they think differently than the majority. No one is stigmatized if they love someone else, and love differently than the majority." He decried the division of Hungarians against one another, declaring, "it is not allowed to differentiate between Hungarian and Hungarian, to divide, because that is a sin." He vowed to liberate the judiciary, and promised that those responsible for the previous regime's abuses would face consequences. "From now on, this will not be a country without consequences," he said. "Those who robbed the country must take responsibility. Those who incited hatred between Hungarian and Hungarian, they must take responsibility."

You can view the full speech here (Hungarian):

LGBTQ+ organizations in Hungary encouraged their communities to vote, even as they expressed frustration with the lack of specific commitments. On the eve of the election, Háttér Society posted a message to its followers encouraging them to vote. The post linked to the organization's election guide, which documented each party's stance on LGBTQ+ issues. The guide noted that while Tisza's official platform did not address LGBTQ+ issues, Magyar had repeatedly spoken of building a country where "it does not matter whom they love," had pledged to protect the right of assembly, and had personally stated that a child is better off with a same-sex couple than in the child protection system. By contrast, the guide documented Orbán's Fidesz party's extensive record of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, and noted that the far-right Mi Hazánk party openly characterized LGBTQ+ people as "deviant propaganda" and a "cultural Marxist, anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-family worldview."

American anti-LGBTQ+ and far-right Christian nationalist forces have long drawn inspiration from and cooperated with Orbán’s autocratic government. Since 2022, CPAC—the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major gathering of the American right—has held annual satellite events in Budapest, where Orbán delivered keynotes declaring that “the woke movement and gender ideology are exactly what Communism and Marxism used to be.” The Orbán-linked Danube Institute hosted American conservative researchers to study Hungary’s policies, and its executive director told a Hungarian publication that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law—which banned instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in schools—was inspired by the Orbán government. DeSantis’s own press secretary confirmed the connection, stating, “We were watching the Hungarians.” Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBTQ+ law, which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality to minors, preceded Florida’s law by nine months. Hungary’s 2020 ban on legal gender recognition for trans people likewise predated and may have influenced the wave of similar efforts in the United States happening now.

In the leadup to Sunday’s election, Vice President JD Vance traveled to Budapest to campaign for Orbán at a rally, telling the crowd, “We have got to get Viktor Orbán re-elected. Specifically, he said, “Across the left, there is a band of radicals… They reject mothers and motherhood, fathers and fatherhood in the name of liberation. They condemn children to mutilization and sterilization in the name of gender care, and they practice institutional murder in the name of quote end of life planning." President Trump endorsed him on Truth Social. Orbán lost anyway—and the playbook he exported to the American right lost with him.

See Vance’s speech decrying trans people in Budapest:

Hungary has been the site of some of the fiercest anti-LGBTQ+ laws in Europe in recent years, ranking among the worst in ILGA-Europe's most recent Rainbow Map. In 2020, Orbán's government banned legal gender recognition for trans and intersex people entirely, making it impossible to change legal documents. That same year, a constitutional amendment declared that "the mother is a woman, the father is a man" and effectively banned same-sex adoption. In 2021, parliament passed a sweeping law banning the "promotion" of homosexuality or gender change to anyone under 18 in schools, media, and advertising. In 2023, the Constitutional Court closed the door on trans recognition permanently, ruling that anyone who hadn't applied before the 2020 ban was locked out forever. And in March 2025, parliament criminalized Pride marches, with up to a year in prison for organizers and police facial recognition authorized to identify attendees. Despite the ban, up to 200,000 people attended Budapest Pride last June in one of the largest anti-government demonstrations in years.

It remains uncertain which, if any, of these laws Magyar's government will overturn. His campaign stayed silent on specifics. But with a two-thirds supermajority, Magyar has the constitutional power to reverse every anti-LGBTQ+ law Orbán enacted—from the trans recognition ban to the Pride criminalization to the constitutional amendments themselves. What is already clear is that the anti-LGBTQ+ panic that fueled Orbán's autocratic regime—and that was exported to state legislatures across the United States—has been repudiated by the Hungarian people themselves in this historic election. LGBTQ+ people will rest slightly easier knowing that regime is gone.

Try as they might, the Idaho state legislature can’t seem to silence Boise’s LGBTQ Pride.

Idaho Republicans have spent years crafting bills and passing laws trying to lower the rainbow flags flown in public schools, government-owned buildings, roads, and parks. The latest attempt got as far as compelling Boise Mayor Lauren McLean to remove City Hall’s Pride flag on March 31—the Trans Day of Visibility. The flag had billowed above the building as a symbol of acceptance and inclusion for over a decade.

Nevertheless, Boise persisted. With a flag ban in place covering just about any inch of state-owned properties, officials got crafty. Instead of Pride flags, they installed Pride flagpoles.

“The art additions to city hall demonstrate our unwavering commitment to the people that call Boise home and to the values that we uphold every day,” the city said in a statement to CBS 2 - Idaho News.

The saga over Idaho Pride flags arguably erupted during the 2024 legislative session, when the GOP introduced Senate Bill 1362, an “emergency” provision to limit “political” flags in schools. It characterized Pride flags as a bid to promote “ideology” about gender and sexuality. Thankfully, that proposal died in the House.

Then, in March 2025, Idaho House Republicans successfully rushed House Bill 96 into law. This policy restricted any flag displayed on government-owned property to a select, pre-approved few categories, including the United States flag, of course, as well as “the official flag of a governmental entity.”

It was widely understood that its primary target was Pride flags, even as bill supporters argued publicly that it was about government neutrality.

“The ultimate goal is for us to fly flags that unite and don’t divide,” said Republican State Senator Ben Toews, as per The Idaho Statesman.

Naturally, Boise then adopted the Pride flag as an official “government entity” symbol, making it fair game to continue flying over City Hall.

Conservatives were outraged. “That’s lawless, insubordinate, and intolerable,” said Representative Ted Hill, the Republican who sponsored several anti-Pride flag bills, according to Boise State Public Radio.

This year, Republicans went for a flag ban yet again with the passage of HB 561. This new provision further restricts permissible displays so that it could only include “entity” flags “established prior to January 1, 2023.” Furthermore, it explicitly expanded the restriction’s domain to any “land owned and maintained by the governmental entity, including buildings, adjoining land, parks, roads, and boulevards.”

That’s where the Boise flagpoles come in. If the city couldn’t fly the flag, they’d do the next best thing.

Now, gay and trans flag stripes are permanently wrapped around the metal poles outside Boise City Hall, and behind them, draped from the windows, is a new banner, too.

“City of Boise,” the sign reads, embellished with rainbow hues. “Creating a city for everyone.”

But the battle continues. In Utah, Pride flag bans have been repeatedly tightened to prevent locals from bypassing loopholes. Other forms of Pride displays have come under fire, too. The LGBTQ community has had to get bold and creative amidst state repression.

In Orlando, this looked like filling in rainbow crosswalks with chalk after the state stripped them of their colors. Also in Florida, a beloved bridge lighting ceremony went rogue, using flashlights to create a renegade rainbow in defiance of Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-LGBTQ crackdowns.

Meanwhile, in Hungary, totalitarian leader Viktor Orbán—who has cultivated close ties with American conservatives—ushered in a ban on gay Pride parades, which was resisted through “gray Pride” demonstrations.

This was in addition to the Hungarians who simply refused to comply with anti-LGBTQ censorship altogether, gathering at Budapest Pride by the thousands, rainbows and all.

Back in Boise, the small but courageous flagpole gesture was felt earnestly. One Idahoan who stopped to admire the new display expressed just how important it was to see the city fighting back.

“I feel loved,” he told local news. “I feel accepted by the people that matter. I feel hope.”

On Tuesday, Judge Chris Taylor defeated Judge Maria Lazar in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race by 20 points, the largest margin in 26 years by any justice. The race is significant because Lazar ran on a heavily anti-trans ad strategy, reminiscent of the strategy used by some Republicans in the 2024 election—running ads that demonized transgender people as threats to the "safety and dreams" of children. When conservatives attacked Taylor's pro-LGBTQ+ legislative record, including bills she authored supporting transgender rights, she did not disavow or distance herself from it. Despite the ads, Taylor won by a historic margin, following two other Wisconsin Supreme Court races in recent years where anti-trans ad strategy was a major part of the losing campaign.

Lazar ran on a heavy anti-trans strategy. One ad opened with a mother saying, "It's just not fair. My daughter worked so hard and loves sports, but now I'm worried about her competing against boys because of activists like Chris Taylor. It breaks my heart to see her safety and dreams dashed by activist politicians." Lazar herself posted on twitter that Taylor would "legislate from the bench to knock down voter ID, allow abortion up to birth, and allow boys in girls' sports." The Federalist ran articles targeting Taylor's pro-transgender legislative record, including bills she authored for a transgender rights task force. Despite all of this, Lazar lost by a historic 20-point margin.

See an example of the ads here:

Instead, Chris Taylor cruised to victory. She won 60-40—a 20-point margin that represents the largest margin of victory in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race since 2000. Her win expands the liberal majority to 5-2, the largest liberal majority on the court since at least the 1970s. Taylor carried more than 20 counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2024, and virtually every county in the state swung toward Democrats compared to the presidential race. Perhaps most remarkably, Taylor flipped Ozaukee County—part of the notorious "WOW counties" (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) that have been the bedrock of Republican strength in southeastern Wisconsin for decades. In Dane County, Taylor hit 84%, meaning Lazar received just 16%—the worst performance by a conservative candidate in the county's history.

LGBTQ+ organizations praised the results. Fair Wisconsin posted a simple message to their Facebook page: "Thank you for voting for equality, Wisconsin!" The Movement Victory Project, a coalition partner of Fair Wisconsin, praised the victory and thanked the organization for "providing regular voting information and education, including a guide to voting while trans." The ACLU likewise praised the result, stating, "Tonight Wisconsinites proved that no matter what's going on at the federal level, we can have the greatest impact in our own state and communities."

Taylor's win is significant for LGBTQ+ rights in the state. Wisconsin Republicans have repeatedly tried to pass anti-transgender legislation, though Gov. Tony Evers has vetoed every bill that has reached his desk—including, just last week, five anti-trans bills he vetoed on Trans Day of Visibility. But Evers will not be governor forever; he is not seeking reelection in 2026. Meanwhile, the Trump administration's pressure campaign has already reached Wisconsin: in January, both Children's Wisconsin and UW Health—two of the state's largest pediatric hospitals—paused gender-affirming care for minors, despite having no legal obligation to do so, after the administration threatened to strip Medicare and Medicaid funding from providers. Congressman Mark Pocan urged both hospitals to resume care, calling the pause premature. Colleges across the country have also capitulated to Trump's demands to ban transgender athletes from women's sports. With Evers' governorship ending and federal pressure mounting, a 5-2 liberal Supreme Court majority may become the most important backstop transgender Wisconsinites have—and Taylor's pro-LGBTQ+ record gives advocates reason to believe she will be a reliable voice on that court.

The victory is just the latest in a repudiation of anti-trans politics that has become a defining feature of the 2025 and 2026 elections. In November 2025, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor's race by 13 points despite more than 57 percent of Republican ad spending going toward anti-transgender messaging—and Democrats swept to leads in 65 House of Delegates contests, one of the largest state legislative gains in recent years. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governor's race decisively despite a similar barrage of anti-trans ads. In Wisconsin itself, the pattern has now repeated itself: In 2025, Elon Musk poured tens of millions into the race backing Brad Schimel, whose campaign ran ads framing transgender rights as a "radical agenda"—Susan Crawford won by 10. And now in 2026, Lazar ran her own anti-trans ads and lost by 20. The trend is unmistakable: anti-trans politics is not winning elections.

In the wake of the 2024 election, Democratic strategists at organizations like Third Way and the Searchlight Institute urged candidates to throw transgender people under the bus—to "moderate" on trans issues, to treat us as a political liability. Some prominent Democrats, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have taken that advice. But the Democrats who are actually winning elections—Spanberger, Sherrill, Crawford, and now Taylor—have refused to do so. They have won by historic margins, while candidates running against transgender people have lost. The lesson could not be clearer: support for transgender people is not the political liability that some have promised. What is a liability is running a campaign built on scapegoating a minority group while voters are worried about the economy, their health care, and the future of their democracy.

On Monday, Mississippi enrolled an anti-trans bill that will ban driver's license gender marker changes for transgender people across the state. The bill, which now awaits Republican Gov. Tate Reeves' signature, requires that all Mississippi driver's licenses reflect the holder's sex assigned at birth and explicitly states that court orders recognizing a gender change "shall have no effect" on license issuance. It is the latest in a wave of extreme anti-transgender identification document bans in recent months, following Kansas's decision in February to invalidate transgender people's driver's licenses overnight with no grace period—a story we at EITM broke. Though the Mississippi bill does not retroactively invalidate existing licenses the way Kansas did, any transgender Mississippian whose license comes up for renewal will be forced to carry identification that does not match their identity, should the governor sign it.

The bill, SB2322, is extremely broad. Alongside a requirement that all new, renewal, or duplicate driver's licenses reflect sex assigned at birth, SB 2322 also invalidates out-of-state driver's licenses issued to individuals who it asserts could not prove lawful presence in the United States—meaning that some licenses that are legal in other states are no longer recognized in Mississippi. Officials who encounter such licenses, such as during police stops, are required to cooperate with ICE. The ACLU of Mississippi, speaking in opposition to the bill, notes that the provisions "disproportionately impact both LGBTQIA+ individuals and immigrant communities by limiting access to accurate identification and expanding pathways into enforcement." In practice, the bill merges two of the current political moment's most targeted populations into a single piece of legislation.

The bill will have direct negative impacts on transgender Mississippians. In a state with strict voter ID laws, forcing a mismatch between a person’s appearance and their identification documents carries consequences. Trans people could be forcibly outed during a traffic stop, turned away at a bar, blocked at the polls, or subjected to scrutiny in any situation where a license must be produced. Notably, this is dangerous in a state where anti-LGBTQ+ animosity can be extremely high. According to the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey, which had over 92,000 participants, roughly a quarter of transgender people whose identification documents do not match their gender identity reported experiencing verbal harassment, assault, or denial of services when showing their IDs.

The bill is the latest in a growing wave of anti-transgender identification document laws. In February, Kansas went further than any state before it, invalidating transgender people's driver's licenses overnight and sending letters demanding their immediate surrender—leaving many scrambling and unable to get to work, pick up their children, and navigate daily life with suddenly invalid IDs. Though Mississippi's bill does not contain those instant revocation provisions, the effect will be the same over time: as licenses come up for renewal, transgender Mississippians will be forced to carry documents that out them. According to the Movement Advancement Project, seven states already do not allow transgender people to update the gender marker on their driver's license. If Gov. Reeves signs SB 2322, Mississippi will become the eighth.

"We cannot ignore the reality that this provision targets a vulnerable group of people who already face disproportionate levels of discrimination, misunderstanding and, in many cases, outright hostility. Rather than offering protection, this law adds to that burden. Rather than making their lives safer, it makes them more exposed. That is not the role of government, and it is not the purpose of good legislation," said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. "Scripture teaches us in Micah 6:8 that we are called to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly. That is not just a personal calling, but also should be a standard for how we govern. Laws rooted in justice protect rather than target. Laws grounded in mercy recognize the dignity of every person. Laws shaped by humility reflect a careful use of power, not an overreach of it. Senate Bill 2322, particularly this provision, falls short of that standard."

The bill now awaits Gov. Reeves' signature. Reeves has signed every major anti-transgender bill to reach his desk, including the state's sports ban, youth care ban, and bathroom ban, and is expected to sign SB 2322 as well. If signed, the law would take effect July 1, 2026. Transgender Mississippians who believe their rights have been violated can contact the ACLU of Mississippi for legal assistance.

Some Minnesota families caught in the crosshairs of Trump’s war on trans kids can once again breathe a little easier, at least for now. Children’s Minnesota, a major regional hospital system, is reinstating the care it had paused on February 27 for transgender youth.

“The decision follows a federal court ruling that vacated a federal declaration attempting to restrict gender-affirming care,” a statement from the hospital, shared with Erin in the Morning, said.

“We are contacting patient families that were affected by the temporary pause in certain services. Offering science- and research-based health care to transgender and gender diverse youth is part of Children’s Minnesota’s vision of being every family’s essential partner in raising healthier children.”

Of the Gender Health program’s 700 active patients, less than 5% were directly and immediately impacted, the hospital said. In other words, the federal government’s crackdown targeted a program that was serving only a few dozen minors with these specific treatments.

The care pause only ever impacted puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. Children’s Minnesota never performed gender-affirming surgeries specific to trans patients under 18 and psychotherapeutic interventions were relatively unaffected.

“This pause was difficult and hard news for all of our patients,” the statement continued. “The temporary pause was a decision we did not want to make. It was a decision we had to make due to conditions at the time.”

On Dec. 18, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services issued a declaration that dubbed gender-affirming care for trans minors as medically unsound, and could therefore be restricted. However, the March ruling from Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai found that Kennedy does not possess the legal or scientific authority to render an entire field of health care “not medicine.” Therefore, the Dec. 18 HHS declaration, which excluded providers of such care from participating in federal healthcare programs, was deemed unlawful.

Over 20 states filed a federal lawsuit in December, including Minnesota, against the Trump regime in response to the attacks on trans people’s health care.

Then, in April, the BMJ reported:

The coalition argued that the HHS declaration unlawfully sought to pressure providers by threatening their participation in federal health programmes including Medicare and Medicaid. Accepting this argument, Kasubhai said, “There’s a theme of break it and see what others will do” in the way that the HHS attempted to change national health policy on gender affirming care, using a public statement without allowing the necessary public consultation.

“That’s not a system or method committed to the rule of law,” Kasubhai added.

Now, Judge Kasubhai must decide “whether the federal government should be barred from using the declaration’s reasoning in any future action against hospitals, according to legal analysts,” Becker’s Hospital Review, an industry publication, reported on April 1. In other words, it’s weighing whether the declaration can be cited or used as evidence in a court of law in the future.

“That question, which could determine how much leverage the administration retains over healthcare organizations going forward, remains unresolved.”

Recently, the Department of Justice also sued the state of Minnesota over its trans-inclusive bathroom and sports policies in schools.

“We have been living in a world in Minnesota that is inclusive of LGBTQ people for a long time, and these issues have never been prevalent—it’s not been a problem until we had a federal government that decided that we had to eradicate these people,” said Rep. Leigh Finke, the first openly transgender member of the Minnesota Legislature and a founding member of its Queer Caucus, in an interview with Erin in the Morning earlier this month.

Pam Bondi, who had been leading the charge at the DOJ since Trump’s return to office, was fired from her position as the Attorney General on April 2. It’s not immediately clear who will take her place—or how they will maneuver the upcoming legal battles over trans rights coming down the pike.

In the latest episode of their podcast A Touch More, all-star athletes Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird denounced the International Olympic Committee’s new rule requiring sex testing for athletes competing in the women’s category.

The anti-trans policy will subject athletes competing in the women’s division—and only women’s, not men’s—to invasive sex testing to determine whether they have an SRY gene. Why this is where the International Olympic Committee chose to draw the gender line is arguably arbitrary.

No major medical organization endorses this litmus test as a reliable marker of athletic skill or “biological sex.” Even the scientist who discovered the SRY gene has slammed this practice in sports, saying “science does not support” this “overly simplistic” approach. Rather, it’s an arbitrary line in the sand used to cram unscientific ideas about gender and sex into manmade, binary boundaries.

Nonetheless, if a woman tests positive for the gene, she could be forced to compete in the “male” category. This has had dire consequences the last few times it was deployed against women’s athletes. From 1992 to 1999, cisgender women were forced into testing and found out, on the world stage, that they had intersex conditions they never knew about. The spectacle led to ostracization, disqualification, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished.

“What we’re doing is subjecting everybody, all women and all people who are identifying as women, to this really invasive testing that only to me just says like, oh, so we’re just trying to whittle it down to a certain type of woman,” Rapinoe said.

Rapinoe is one of the most high-profile athletes in the country, a soccer player with three Olympic competitions under her belt and a decorated career in the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT). Bird, meanwhile, is among the most successful athletes in history—the retired WNBA legend spent her 20-season professional career as a point guard for the Seattle Storm, and is a record-breaking Olympian in her own right. The athletic power couple has been engaged since 2020. Together, they’ve long been outspoken advocates for the LGBTQ community.

Rapinoe connected the anti-trans vitriol in sports to the right wing’s broader attacks on queer and trans people, calling the push for sex testing “hateful.”

“They sort of like, lost the battle on gay marriage,” Rapinoe said. “So, it’s just like, we’re going to have this whole campaign for all these years to just hate trans people, which is such a small percentage of the population.”

Countless women, cisgender and transgender alike, have faced harassment and persecution because of the anti-trans athlete witch hunt.

“It’s just a total acquiescence to the Trump Administration,” Rapinoe said. “It’s just horrible, and I’m just sickened by it.”

The IOC rule is part of a broader pattern. In the United States, sports bans have served as a Trojan Horse for more sweeping anti-trans policies. The DOJ’s recent lawsuit over “women’s sports,” for example, also demands that transgender students be banned from bathrooms and locker rooms.

“Can we please stop obsessing over trans people and, I don’t know, maybe focus our time, energy, and resources into real problems women’s sports face?” Bird chimed in. She rejected the idea that sex testing, as the IOC claims, “protects women,” instead calling it a “fear-mongering” political ploy meant to generate support from conservative voters.

“That’s all this is,” Bird said. “If you crack this door open, it gets blown open. You’re now policing women’s bodies across the board.”

A new study circulating on social media falsely claims that gender-affirming care for youth and adults under 23 does not improve mental health outcomes—and may have even worsened them. The study, published in the low-impact journal Acta Paediatrica, comes from Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a Finnish psychiatrist with extensive ties to at least one anti-LGBTQ+ hate group and a history of anti-trans political advocacy. The study uses Finnish registries and psychiatric visit data to support these conclusions. However, a closer examination reveals the study to be fatally flawed: it does not actually measure what it claims to measure, its headline finding is a massive artifact of surveillance bias, the clinics practices were abusive, and it operates within a system where its findings were essentially baked in from the start—regardless of what the actual mental health impacts of gender-affirming care might be.

The study looks at 2,083 people who walked into one of Finland's two gender identity clinics between 1996 and 2019, before turning 23. These patients were split into those who ultimately received gender-affirming care and those who did not. The study sets its point of comparison—what it calls the "index date"—at the date of a patient's first appointment at the clinic, not the date any treatment began. It then looks at whether each person had any visit to a specialist psychiatrist before and after that date, which it labels "specialist-level psychiatric treatment." Its headline finding: among trans girls and women who received gender-affirming care, "psychiatric treatment" went from 9.8% before to a staggering 60.7% after. The numbers sound devastating—except the study commits several fatal errors. Its central finding is not supported by its own data. The outcome variable conflates merely visiting a psychiatrist with actual psychiatric deterioration, something the study had the data to disentangle but chose not to. Most damningly, Finland's own medical journal documented that trans people were monitored every 3-6 months "in close cooperation with the adolescent psychiatry unit"—visits that register in the very same database the study uses as its outcome measure. While the study claims to exclude gender identity team appointments, it cannot exclude what those appointments produce—any downstream referral to a separate specialist for evaluation, even one that clears the patient entirely, registers in the study's outcome measure.

A closer examination shows that the study’s conclusions are entirely unsupported by its own data. This is part of a pattern from Kaltiala, who published a similarly flawed study in 2024 that used proxy variables and buried its own positive findings to claim gender-affirming care does not reduce suicide—when its data actually showed the opposite. That the current study landed in Acta Paediatrica, a journal with an impact factor of just 2.1—far below top-tier pediatrics journals like JAMA Pediatrics or Pediatrics—suggests it may not have survived scrutiny at more rigorous outlets. This fact check will address the study’s most severe methodological shortcomings, to counter the misleading narrative already spreading across social media and anti-trans policy circles.

The Study Measures Psychiatric Appointments That Are Virtually Guaranteed, A Case Of Massive “Surveillance Bias”

The study measured a single binary variable to determine if gender-affirming care impacts transgender youth negatively: did this person have any contact with specialist-level psychiatric services, yes or no? If a person had even a single contact with a specialist-level psychiatric service, they were recorded as needing psychiatric care. Notably, the study calls this variable “need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment”—but the registry it draws from, the Care Register for Health Care, records visits, not treatments, and the study itself notes this limitation:” A limitation of this study is that more detailed information on patients' reasons for using the psychiatric services could not be analysed.”

What this means in practice is that a single specialist referral generated by a routine monitoring appointment registers identically in this dataset to a psychiatric hospitalization. An external psychiatric evaluation prompted by a flag at a quarterly check-in—even one that clears the patient entirely—counts the same as an emergency crisis intervention. The study excludes the gender identity team's own appointments, but the web of downstream referrals those appointments generate is fully counted.

This is because Finland's gender identity services for minors are not housed in a general medical setting—they are located within the departments of adolescent psychiatry at both Tampere and Helsinki University Hospitals. The assessments are conducted by psychiatric teams: an adolescent psychiatrist, a psychiatric nurse, a social worker, and a psychologist. In other words, the gender care pathway in Finland IS a psychiatric pathway and deeply enmeshed with the psychiatric system. Patients were monitored every 3-6 months during hormone treatment, and at each check-in, clinicians actively screened for psychiatric concerns. Any flag—however minor—could generate a referral to separate specialist psychiatric services outside the gender identity team. Those referrals are not excluded from the study's outcome variable, even if the specialist evaluation found no disorder at all.

Notably, most transgender youth in the program will be subject to psychiatric appointments, both before, during, and after the “index date.” Anything found during these appointments will require continued care and evaluation. This is a textbook case of surveillance bias—a well-known problem in epidemiology where a group under clinical observation appears sicker than a comparison group simply because they are being watched more closely. Trans youth in Finland’s gender care system are, by design, in constant contact with psychiatric services.

To understand why this matters, consider an analogy. Imagine a study that measured whether cancer patients had "contact with oncology services" before and after being referred to a cancer center, and then compared them to randomly selected healthy people. You would obviously find that cancer patients have more oncology contact than healthy people, both before and after referral. You would find that cancer patients who received treatment (chemotherapy, surgery) had increased oncology contact after treatment—because treatment requires monitoring, follow-up scans, medication adjustments, and post-surgical care. Would you conclude from this that cancer treatment "doesn't work" or "makes cancer worse"? Of course not. But that is exactly the logic this study applies to gender-affirming care.

To put the full picture together: a trans teenager walks into a Finnish gender clinic for the first time. That date becomes the study's "index date." The study waits two years before it starts counting psychiatric visits—but as we have established, the diagnostic process alone took one and a half to two years, and often longer. Before they can even begin treatment, any co-occurring psychiatric conditions must be stabilized, adding months or years. After diagnosis, additional psychotherapy check-ins are required before hormones can start. For many patients, the two-year mark arrives while they are still in the middle of the assessment—or have only just begun hormones. And once hormones do start, the Finnish Medical Journal confirmed that patients are monitored every three to six months in "close cooperation with the adolescent psychiatry unit." When the study checks whether a patient had "any psychiatric contact" after the two-year mark, the answer is virtually guaranteed to be yes. Quarterly monitoring check-ins with a team known for aggressive screening would inevitably generate downstream referrals to external specialists—referrals that are not excluded from the study's outcome variable. Even a referral that results in the patient being cleared of any psychiatric issue counts identically to a psychiatric hospitalization in this binary measure.

Immortal Time Bias: The “Before And After” Is Not “Before And After Treatment”

Another major flaw is the study’s choice of “index date”—the point in time around which the entire before-and-after comparison is built. The study sets this date at a patient’s first appointment at the gender identity clinic. This is not when treatment began. In Finland’s highly restrictive system, the assessment process and psychiatric care can and does stretch over multiple years. Patient accounts from Kaltiala’s own clinic describe years-long diagnostic processes before any treatment decision is made.

The study’s own methods section reveals that the authors had the tools to fix this. It states that hormonal treatment was identified through the Social Insurance Institution’s records of prescription medication purchases. If the authors used these records to determine who received hormones—which is how they defined their treated and untreated groups—they necessarily had access to when those prescriptions were first filled. They could have anchored the before-and-after comparison to the actual start of treatment rather than the clinic door. They chose not to.

This would be a serious problem on its own. But it becomes far worse when combined with a well-known statistical error called immortal time bias. In simple terms, immortal time bias occurs when a study classifies someone as “treated” for a period of time during which they had not yet received treatment. The study categorizes patients as GR+ or GR- based on whether they ever received gender-affirming care during the follow-up period—but it does not account for when that care actually started. A patient whose first clinic appointment was in 2012 but who did not begin hormones until 2016 is coded as GR+ for the entire period, including the four years before any treatment occurred.

During those four years, this patient is navigating Finland’s lengthy assessment, undergoing required psychotherapy, and being monitored—all of which can easily generate specialist psychiatric visits that register in the same database the study uses as its outcome measure. Those pre-treatment visits get attributed to the “treated” group, even though they occurred before treatment. And because the study uses a binary outcome—any visit, yes or no—a single required psychotherapy appointment during those pre-treatment years is enough to flip the outcome to “yes” and be counted as evidence that gender-affirming care led to “psychiatric treatment needs.” The binary measure and the immortal time bias compound each other: the longer a patient waits for treatment inside the system, the more guaranteed it becomes that they will accumulate at least one psychiatric visit that gets misattributed to the effects of care they had not yet received.

Kaltiala’s Abusive Clinic May Have Directly Led To Increased Psychiatric Visits

There is another important dimension to the psychiatric contact increase that goes beyond surveillance bias: the likelihood that Kaltiala’s clinics and the assessment process itself are generating psychological distress that would require psychiatric care.

Kaltiala is the chief psychiatrist in the department of adolescent psychiatry at Tampere University Hospital and has run one of Finland’s only two gender clinics for minors since its creation in 2011. Despite having little to no prior research portfolio in gender medicine when she was tasked with establishing the clinic, she has overseen virtually every aspect of adolescent gender care at Tampere for the past 15 years.

Multiple former patients have described the experience at her clinic as abusive. Patient accounts collected by Finnish LGBTQ+ publication Kehrääjä and reported by this publication paint a disturbing picture. A 13-year-old trans girl, identified as “Milla,” was asked by a male doctor in a room with three unfamiliar adults to describe what she thought about her naked body while looking in a mirror. When she began to cry, the staff was reportedly confused by her reaction. The same patient was pressured to discuss her erections and urination with strangers. Another patient was asked to “describe to me how you masturbate”—a question rooted in the discredited theory that transgender identity is a sexual fetish. Multiple families reported that their children were systematically called by birth names and referred to by their sex assigned at birth throughout the process, even after legal name changes and even when the child had been living in their gender for years. One mother told Kehrääjä that her daughter was treated as a “cisgender boy” by the clinic from start to finish.

A trans boy identified as “Mikko” was denied a diagnosis after years in the system because his hobbies were deemed “too girlish” and that he would be “too short” for a man and warned at every appointment that the process “could be terminated at any time.” One family described the entire approach as a search for reasons the child could not possibly be transgender: “It feels like the whole process is about searching for various reasons why the child is transgender. The option that transgender identity could be an innate, unchangeable trait is considered only as a last resort.” When one family obtained a legal diagnosis and prescription for puberty blockers from a private doctor, the clinic reported them to child protective services and filed a criminal complaint. No legal consequences resulted, but the clinic terminated the patient’s care. These are the clinics that generated the data in this study—and the psychological harm caused by these practices would itself register as exactly the kind of specialist psychiatric contact the study measures as its outcome variable.

The Bottom Line

Though this study has made waves on social media, there is a reason it did not land in a premier scientific journal. Kaltiala is not a detached observer of transgender care—she is one of the most prominent anti-trans activists in the medical world. She has received honoraria from an organization designated as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, served on the advisory board of the Cass Review, testified as a primary witness in favor of Ron DeSantis’ ban on transgender care in Florida, facilitated secret meetings between DeSantis appointees and British health officials, and presides over clinics where patients have reported abusive practices including invasive sexual questioning of minors. This is the second time in two years that Kaltiala’s team has published a study engineered to reach a predetermined conclusion and promoted through the same pipeline—from SEGM to Ben Ryan to Matthew Yglesias—within a day of publication.

The data in this study does not say what the authors claim it says. They used a proxy variable that measures clinic visits rather than mental health. They relied on data saturated with surveillance bias from a system that requires the very psychiatric contacts it then counts as evidence of deterioration. They anchored their timeline to the clinic door rather than to treatment, despite having the data to do otherwise. And they did all of this in a system where the result was structurally guaranteed before a single data point was collected. The study’s fate will not be determined by its scientific merit—which is minimal—but by whether the political infrastructure that surrounds it succeeds in laundering it into policy.

Update 4/7/26:

Dr. Kaltiala has now responded to our criticisms of her study through Gender Clinic News, an anti-trans blog whose author describes transgender healthcare as "gender ideology" and refers to advocates of gender-affirming care as "gender ideologues.” Her response is notable less for what it addresses than for what it avoids entirely. Of the major methodological flaws identified in this fact check—surveillance bias, the misanchored index date, immortal time bias, the binary outcome measure, and the abusive clinic practices—she engages with almost none of them.

She does not address surveillance bias at all. She does not address the fact that her study pegged its before-and-after comparison to the date (+2 years) a patient first walked into the clinic—not to when treatment actually began, and how this creates an immortal time bias. She does not explain why, despite having access to Social Insurance Institution records showing when each patient first filled a hormone prescription, she chose not to anchor the comparison to treatment. She does not address the fact that for many patients, the two-year gap after the index date expires while they are still mid-assessment. She does not address how the binary outcome measure—any visit, yes or no—means a single downstream referral from a routine monitoring check-in is enough to be counted as evidence of “psychiatric treatment needs.” She does not address the abusive clinic practices documented by former patients at her own facility, or the patient accounts collected by Kehrääjä describing invasive sexual prodding of minors, systematic deadnaming, reporting of trans youth to CPS, and abuse. These are fundamental design choices and contextual realities that predetermined the study’s outcome, and her response is silent on all of them.

To the one substantive rebuttal she does make: she claims that Finland’s specialist psychiatric services are reserved for those with “severe disorders” and that patients would not reach specialist-level care without genuine need. But this misses the point of the surveillance bias critique entirely. The study claims to exclude appointments with the gender identity assessment team itself—but it cannot exclude what those appointments produce. The Finnish Medical Journal documented that hormone therapy patients were monitored every 3-6 months “in close cooperation with the adolescent psychiatry unit.” At each of these regular check-ins, clinicians are actively screening for psychiatric concerns. If anything is flagged, and notably this team had a hair trigger for flagging concerns, the patient is referred to separate specialist psychiatric services for evaluation and treatment. Those downstream referrals are not excluded from the study's outcome variable. If a referral is made for any concern at all, the patient may continue to require visits long after, even for conditions entirely unrelated to gender dysphoria, such as ADHD or unrelated trauma. Damningly, even if the specialist determines there are no issues and clears the patient entirely, the visit is still logged, the binary still flips to "yes," and the study counts it as evidence of "psychiatric treatment needs" caused by gender-affirming care.

This is textbook surveillance bias: when you screen a population every three months for psychiatric issues, you will find and refer more people than in a population that is never screened. The general population controls in this study had no equivalent system watching them. The “dramatic increase” is not evidence of deterioration—it is what happens when you take a group selected for having almost no prior psychiatric contact and place them inside a system that screens them every three months and refers them onward routinely.

Dr. Kaltiala’s own study concedes the point that defeats her rebuttal. Her study states: “A limitation of this study is that more detailed information on patients’ reasons for using the psychiatric services could not be analysed.” Her response to Gender Clinic News repeats this: the data “included diagnoses and in-patient periods but not treatment nor information about a patient’s problems.” She is acknowledging, in her own words, that she cannot distinguish a visit driven by genuine psychiatric crisis from one generated by the monitoring system built into her own clinics. She cannot tell whether a specialist referral reflects a severe disorder or a routine flag stemming from a quarterly check-in, or even a specialist assessment that evaluated and cleared the patient of any psychiatric issues entirely—all register identically in the database, and all count the same in her binary measure. She cannot tell whether a patient’s psychiatric contact was caused by gender-affirming care, by the assessment process, by the abusive practices documented at her clinic, or by a pre-existing condition that would have been caught in any population subjected to this level of screening. And yet she draws a causal conclusion anyway. That is not a limitation. It is the entire reason her study is fatally flawed and cannot draw the conclusions she and others are drawing from it.

Wave after wave of anti-LGBT bills swept through Georgia this legislative cycle, but according to one state civil rights organization, every single one of them failed.

“After a late night at the Capitol to finish out the 2026 legislative session, we could not be more excited to share that WE DID IT!” announced Georgia Equality on Bluesky. “We successfully defeated ALL of the nearly 15 pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation!”

Georgia Equality tracked 2,500 Peach State residents who contacted their legislators and nearly 400 who trekked to the Capitol to fight for LGBTQ rights over the last few weeks.

“This session, we stopped every bill targeting LGBTQ Georgians, even in spite of underhanded political maneuvers,” said Jeff Graham, the group’s executive director, in a statement on April 3.

“Thousands of Georgians from over 60 counties came together to successfully defeat every last one. Despite state leadership fixating on restricting LGBTQ+ rights as their core priority over the past years, we made it clear that scapegoating LGBTQ+ Georgians is not a winning political strategy.”

There was HB 54, which began as a bill on home health care workers, only to be hijacked by Republicans and twisted into an attempted ban on puberty blockers to treat transgender youth.

There was the Riley Gaines Act, named for an anti-trans activist whose political career was launched after tying for fifth place in a college swim meet with a trans woman; that failed bill would have forced trans students out of the changing rooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.

There was SB 74, which could have criminalized librarians who provided LGBTQ books to minors.

According to the local news blog Rough Draft Atlanta, other anti-trans measures that tanked included a forced outing bill for queer students, a drag ban, and a bill to create an exemption for non-affirming parents and caretakers to abuse trans youth.

“Victory is a great feeling,” added an organizer at Georgia Equality, Noel Heatherland. “Thank you to everyone who worked with us to protect LGBTQ+ people during this session.”

Graham added that this was a sign that “Georgians want more than culture war distractions.”

“We deserve solutions addressing healthcare access, cost of living, and more affordable housing,” Graham said. “This result is a credit to every Georgian who worked tirelessly to defend our LGBTQ+ loved ones, neighbors, and friends. We believe that the tide is turning not just here in Georgia, but across the country.”

The Georgia Constitution prohibits the legislature from meeting for more than 40 legislative days each year, so the governing body will not resume for a regular session until 2027. Gov. Brian Kemp has 40 days to sign or veto legislation passed during this session. The Governor may also call emergency special sessions—a move that has been used by some conservative governors to anti-trans ends.

This week, Idaho's governor signed into law what many are calling the most extreme anti-trans law in the United States—a bathroom ban that carries up to a year in jail for a first offense and up to five years for a second. The law criminalizes any transgender person who "knowingly and willfully" enters a bathroom, locker room, or changing room that does not align with their sex assigned at birth—penalties harsher than Idaho's own punishments for indecent exposure or driving under the influence. Incarceration under the law could also mean the removal of hormone therapy for transgender people held in jail or prison. Public outcry against the law has been swift, with human rights organizations decrying it. Now, the day after signing the law on Trans Day of Visibility, demonstrators staged their own response: a sit-in at Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little's office, demanding to speak with him. When the governor refused to meet with them and they refused to leave, nine were arrested.

For more than three hours, over 40 demonstrators—primarily faith leaders and prominent LGBTQ+ local advocates—sat in the entry to Gov. Brad Little's office demanding a meeting. The group was led by the Rev. Sara LaWall, minister of the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and the parent of a transgender daughter, and Nikson Mathews, a transgender activist who served as a substitute state senator last year. Before entering, LaWall read a prayer: "We pray for protection, for dignity, for life. Guard them from harm, from fear, from laws that would erase them." Protesters sang for hours, held trans pride flags, and wrote notes to the governor. Little refused the meeting. A staffer told them the office closed at 5 p.m. When the nine refused to leave, Idaho State Police arrested them at 5:30 p.m. on misdemeanor trespass charges and booked them into the Ada County Jail. All nine—ranging in age from 34 to 84—were released later that night.

"I think every trans person I know is having this conversation of, do we stay and fight?We know who we are, and we just keep carrying that forward into the hallway and outside of that building and in all the spaces that we go into,” Said Mathews after the protest.

Sit-ins against unjust laws have a long history in the United States, from the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 that helped desegregate the American South to the sit-ins of the disability rights movement that led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now, transgender people and their allies are adopting the same tactics. In March 2025, Marcy Rheintgen, a transgender college student, declared "I am here to break the law" before entering a women's restroom at the Florida State Capitol and being arrested. In Texas, four transgender women were detained at the state capitol and issued criminal trespass warnings after the state's bathroom ban took effect in December. And just this week, as EITM reported, Samantha Boucher, founder of Trans Liberty, walked into a women's restroom at the Kansas Statehouse on Trans Day of Visibility in a deliberate act of civil disobedience.

The Idaho sit-in was staged in protest of HB 752, which Gov. Little signed into law on Trans Day of Visibility. As EITM has reported, the law is the most extreme bathroom ban in the nation. It criminalizes any transgender person who "knowingly and willfully" enters a bathroom, locker room, or changing room that does not align with their sex assigned at birth. A first offense is a misdemeanor carrying up to a year in jail. A second offense within five years is a felony carrying up to five years in prison. And under Idaho's persistent violator statute, a transgender person convicted of a fourth bathroom offense—their third felony—could face a mandatory minimum of five years and up to life in prison. Unlike bathroom bans in most other states, the Idaho bathroom ban also applies to private businesses. Little signed the bill on the same day he signed a flag ban law that forced the city of Boise to lower its Pride flag from city hall.

The law is already forcing some transgender Idahoans to leave the state. Scar Rulien, a transgender Idaho resident, told KTVB: "I don't want to leave Idaho, but I know many people who would have to leave Idaho." State Sen. Ron Taylor, a Democrat from Hailey, said constituents told him they would move out of state because the law would throw their transgender children in jail. "Maybe that's what some of us want, is to chase a population that's marginalized out of Idaho," Taylor said on the Senate floor. "But that's not Idaho. Idaho was founded by a population that was marginalized."

A GoFundMe organized by LaWall has raised over $27,000 to cover bail, bond, and legal fees for those arrested. "This legislative session has been defined by a relentless wave of attacks on LGBTQ+ Idahoans. Lawmakers have limited public testimony, fast-tracked harmful legislation, and ignored the voices of the very people they were elected to serve. So today a group of Idahoans made themselves impossible to ignore,” the statement read, before asking for help with the legal fees for those involved.

The law takes effect July 1, 2026. Advocates have signaled they anticipate a legal challenge to HB 752 in the coming months. The ACLU of Idaho has called the law "dangerous and unprecedented" and, affected transgender Idahoans who believe their rights have been violated should contact the organization.

Samantha Boucher openly defied the state laws of Kansas when, in the presence of the Governor and the police, she walked into the bathroom in an act of civil disobedience.

Boucher is the founder and executive director of Trans Liberty and a transgender woman. The bathroom was in the Kansas statehouse. The morning was March 31st: the Transgender Day of Visibility.

The police showed her the way. Governor Laura Kelly, who Boucher encountered along the way, accepted a gracious thanks from Boucher. Kelly had tried to veto the bathroom ban bill that Boucher was now defying, but she was overridden by a heavily conservative state legislature.

“I think this would be extremely dangerous for a Kansan to do, but ... I’m more than happy to put myself at that risk if it means that somebody else doesn’t have to, because eventually someone would try this,” Boucher told the Topeka Capital-Journal. “I’m really interested to see what the attorney general chooses to do here.”

Boucher’s modest protest transpired as the state crackdowns on trans people escalated: banning them from using bathrooms in public buildings that don’t match their sex assigned at birth, instituting a “bounty” to incentivize snitching on trans people who use the “wrong” restroom and institutions that don’t sufficiently sex-check people at the bathroom door, and most notably, revoking transgender people’s driver’s licenses if they don’t match their sex assigned at birth. Those caught with the “wrong” gender on their driver’s license could face criminal charges, making it the most extreme anti-trans ID law in the country.

None of this deterred Boucher. “I commend her for calling attention to state-sanctioned discrimination and for her bravery in challenging those who support such discrimination to put their votes into action,” Rep. Abi Boatman of Kansas’ 86th district in Wichita, told Erin in the Morning.

Boatman is one of a handful of transgender state lawmakers in the country; she is not legally allowed to use the women’s restroom in her own place of work at the Capitol, and she cannot drive to work with an ID that accurately depicts her gender.

Boucher left yesterday a free woman, but Kansas authorities are investigating the matter.

Others are not so lucky. Transgender and cisgender people alike have been caught up in the anti-trans panic—people have been harassed and filmed in the bathroom, accosted by police or security guards, physically assaulted, and arrested after using the restroom, even in states with no such “bathroom ban” on the books.

Some of these instances have been planned protests; others were unsuspecting patrons and private citizens simply using the restroom. That’s because these laws rely on piecemeal enforcement, vigilante bathroom police, self-censorship, and above all, fear.

The political landscape is especially dangerous for Black and brown trans people, who face disproportionate levels of violence and police brutality.

As Boucher approached the restrooms on the second floor, she encountered Governor Laura Kelly, who was attending an unrelated event. Boucher told the Governor what she was about to do.

“In regard to SB 244, I will use the restroom 3 times, triggering a misdemeanor,” Boucher said. “I appreciate your veto.”

Kelly commended her—and apologized. “I am very sorry that you and others have been put in this situation,” Kelly said.

According to the law, Boucher could face criminal charges as well as a $1,000 civil penalty.

Boucher was the first openly trans federal campaign manager, as per her social media. In 2019, she oversaw Democratic candidate Kimberly Graham’s Senate campaign in Iowa ahead of the June primaries. She is the founder and executive director of Trans Liberty, a trans equality PAC.

“What I hope to have accomplished here, and in whatever I become embroiled in as a result, is making sure that the nation doesn’t forget that this is happening here,” Boucher said as per local press reports. “This is unprecedented, and it cannot be allowed to stand.”

During the Trump administration’s time in power, transgender students have lost the ability to fight for their Title IX protections against schools that discriminate against them. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has greenlit the targeting of LGBTQ+ students repeatedly this term. Maryland, though, appears poised to push back with a new bill that is rapidly advancing through the state legislature. HB 649, which has already passed the House of Delegates 100-35, would significantly expand protections for transgender students across the state, giving them a private right of action to sue schools that discriminate against them in "any program or activity"—a phrase borrowed directly from Title IX that would explicitly protect participation in sports, admissions, and access to school facilities and programs statewide. The bill was heard in a Senate committee yesterday.

The bill states that "an educational institution may not exclude an individual from participation in, deny a person the benefits of, or subject an individual to discrimination within, any program or activity of the educational institution on the basis of race, color, national origin, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, or marital status" (emphasis added). The language is significant and expansive: the bill defines "educational institution" to include both public and nonpublic prekindergarten programs, elementary schools, secondary schools, institutions of postsecondary education, institutions of higher education, and any other educational program leading to a certificate, diploma, or degree—covering virtually every school in the state from pre-K through college.

The bill was brought at the request of Maryland's own Commission on Civil Rights. In its testimony, the Commission laid out the urgency in stark terms: the federal Office for Civil Rights, which has historically been the primary enforcement mechanism for students facing discrimination, has been gutted under the Trump administration. OCR complaints from Maryland residents surged to 130 in 2024—but after January 2025, the office effectively stopped processing them. Furthermore, when the administration does take action, it is against transgender students, not in favor of their rights. The ACLU of Maryland, which also testified in favor of the bill, noted that when the current president took office, many OCR complaints were dismissed without investigation. "With the dismantling of USDE and OCR, Maryland must fill the gap to ensure that the civil rights of all Maryland students are protected and upheld," the ACLU wrote.

The bill is notable for two reasons. The first is its use of the phrase "any program or activity" in its protection of transgender students. Maryland's existing nondiscrimination law, the 2022 Inclusive Schools Act, prohibits schools from "discriminating against” students based on gender identity—but does not explicitly guarantee the right to participate in all school programs and activities. The current vague language can leave room for schools to argue that barring a trans student from a sports team or denying access to facilities does not constitute discrimination. Only a handful of states have closed this gap. California's landmark 2013 School Success and Opportunity Act explicitly guarantees transgender students the right to "participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity." Connecticut similarly requires "equal opportunity to participate in school activities, programs, and courses of study" regardless of gender identity. Maryland's HB 649, by adopting the Title IX formula—"exclude from participation in, deny the benefits of, or subject to discrimination within any program or activity"—would place the state among this small group.

Secondarily, the bill creates a private right of action. Under Maryland's current framework, a student alleging discrimination must depend on government agencies acting in their favor. HB 649 changes that. A transgender student experiencing discrimination in bathrooms, sports, dormitories, or any other school program would be able to sue the school directly in state court, without waiting for the state superintendent or the attorney general to act on their behalf. The National Women's Law Center Action Fund, which testified in support of the bill, called this pathway "critical for student survivors of sexual assault and LGBTQI+ students who may face greater hurdles in obtaining justice on federal civil rights claims." Any school that capitulates to Trump administration demands to roll back transgender protections may now face lawsuits directly from the students it harms, should this bill pass.

The bill has the support of Maryland's LGBTQ+ Caucus, which submitted a letter of support calling it a necessary step to close enforcement gaps in civil rights law. "For LGBTQ+ students, actionable nondiscrimination enforcement supports a safer school climate, better academic outcomes, and recognition and respect for gender diversity and sexual orientation as integral parts of students' identities," the caucus wrote. "Ensuring that LGBTQ+ students and educators are protected under state civil rights law helps educational environments become more inclusive, safe, and equitable for all."

The bill passed the House 100-35 on March 23 and has been referred to the Senate Education, Energy, and the Environment Committee, where it was heard yesterday. The Senate must act before the legislative session ends on April 13. If passed, the bill is likely to be signed by Gov. Wes Moore, who has signed the Trans Shield Act, the Trans Health Equity Act expanding Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, and declared Maryland a sanctuary state for transgender people.

Major media outlets are reporting that Trump’s Department of Justice is suing the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League over trans-inclusive sports policies. They are only partially correct.

What they leave out, as they often do, is that the lawsuit goes far beyond sports. Instead, it is a political Trojan Horse—a vessel to carry out legally mandated trans segregation in bathrooms and locker rooms, colloquially known as a “trans bathroom ban,” and to redefine “sex” in the eyes of the law. Moreover, it targets the Minnesota Human Rights Act, arguing that the law “discriminates on the basis of sex against female students” in violation of Title IX.

“For intimate spaces, such as multi-person locker rooms and bathrooms, the biological differences between males and females are relevant and make the sexes dissimilarly situated,” the complaint that is supposedly about athletic fairness says. Minnesota’s equal rights policy, therefore, “conflicts with and eliminates the biological basis that justifies intentionally separating athletics and intimate spaces by sex,” the DOJ concludes.

The lawsuit further deploys all the usual Trumpian tricks: vague language that could apply to students, faculty or anyone who enters a school; the false assertion that executive orders inherently supersede state law; and a convoluted definition of “sex” derived purely from right-wing extremist ideology. In this case, the complaint utilizes the “sex” definition from Trump’s Executive Order 14168, which would separate people based on their “biological classification as either male or female [...] at conception.” But people cannot be assigned sex at conception; at that point, they are a clump of cells without any visible or detectable sex traits whatsoever.

However, basic human biology has never curbed the Trump regime before and it’s unlikely to do so now. The DOJ outright denies the existence of transgender people as legitimate. In the filing, trans women are called “trans-identifying boys” or “trans-identifying males.” It does not seem to even mention the existence of transgender boys and men.

“We have been living in a world in Minnesota that is inclusive of LGBTQ people for a long time, and these issues have never been prevalent—it’s not been a problem until we had a federal government that decided that we had to eradicate these people,” said Rep. Leigh Finke, the first openly transgender member of the Minnesota Legislature and a founding member of its Queer Caucus, in an interview with Erin in the Morning.

Data tells us these policies are dangerous. They result in forced outing for kids whose classmates may not know they are trans. They stoke violence and bullying in bathrooms by encouraging students and faculty alike to interrogate children’s sex organs if the child doesn’t align with what they think a “girl” looks like. And they promote harmful, sometimes deadly myths painting trans kids as predators in school bathrooms or athletes weaponizing their transness to get a leg up in sports.

“Things are getting harder. It’s looking uglier. The fight is getting dirtier,” Finke said. “But the Queer Caucus and the people who’ve been doing this work in Minnesota really have embedded trans dignity into the state’s mechanisms.”

The fact Republicans lead with the “sports” framing is no accident—it is a calculated political ploy. “The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues,” Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project, told CNN in 2022.

Indeed, the examples of supposed Title IX violations cited in the lawsuit include two instances of school sports teams that included trans athletes and at least one incident where a student simply did not want to be in a bathroom with someone they thought might be trans. No sports or competition appear to be involved, and it’s unclear why that student couldn’t simply use a single-stall bathroom or changing room if they didn’t want to be around a trans person.

The lawsuit also calls for an ongoing “monitoring and enforcement system” to weed out trans students from sports teams or bathrooms that align with their gender identity—by what means, however, it does not say. It only serves to manufacture a moral panic over the trans children that the feds say “have invaded” these spaces. It further chastizes Minnesota for its “refusal to comply” with Trump’s anti-trans demands.

Finke added the Minnesota government is fighting back. Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison have been allies to trans rights.

“In April of last year, I sued the Trump administration to stop them from targeting trans kids who just want to play on their school team,” Ellison said in a recent statement. “This new suit is just a sad attempt to get attention over something that’s already been in litigation for months. I will continue to stand up to the Trump administration and do everything in my power to stop them from bullying vulnerable children in Minnesota.”

This is the third state the Trump regime has sued over trans-inclusive policies, following legal actions targeting Maine and California threatening to cut school funding—namely programs that provide lunch money to hungry school children. Legal battles are ongoing. Minnesota is also part of a coalition of states suing federal officials over discriminatory anti-trans policies.

On Transgender Day of Visibility, a Romanian appellate court ordered the government to recognize a transgender man's gender identity on state documents—the first known court enforcement of a landmark 2024 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union. That ruling requires all member states to recognize legal gender changes obtained elsewhere in the bloc. The Bucharest Tribunal's decision is final and cannot be appealed. While the ruling directly applies only to transgender people who obtained gender recognition documents in another EU country, it sets a significant precedent in a nation that ranks dead last among all 27 EU member states on LGBTQ+ rights, according to ILGA-Europe's 2025 Rainbow Map.

The case centers on Arian Mirzarafie-Ahi, a transgender man with dual British and Romanian citizenship who was born in Romania and moved to the United Kingdom in 2008. Arian began his transition in the UK in 2016 and obtained a gender recognition certificate in 2020, while the UK was still treated as an EU member state during the Brexit transition period. Romania's own gender recognition procedure was not a viable option—the European Court of Human Rights found in 2021 that the country had no "clear and foreseeable" framework for gender recognition and had forced transgender people into an "impossible dilemma" by requiring surgery that was either unwanted or unavailable domestically. ACCEPT Romania estimates fewer than 50 people have successfully changed their civil status documents in the country in the last 20 years.

When Arian attempted to register his UK gender change with Romanian authorities in 2021, they refused. He sued. The Romanian court sent the legal question to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for a binding interpretation, and in October 2024, the CJEU ruled that Romania’s refusal violated EU law—holding that “gender, like a first name, is a fundamental element of personal identity” and that forcing a citizen to carry conflicting identities across member states was an illegal barrier to free movement.

Even after the CJEU's ruling, Romania resisted. When the case returned to domestic courts, three government agencies—the Cluj Personal Records Directorate, the Civil Status Service, and the General Directorate for Personal Records—appealed a lower court's order to comply. The Bucharest Tribunal rejected all three appeals on March 31, making the order final: Romania must recognize gender changes from other EU member nations.

"The legal process we accompanied Arian through over the past several years has, at last, reached a conclusion that does him justice. More than a personal victory, the ruling confirmed by the Bucharest Tribunal is a major step toward respecting the rights of all transgender people in Romania," said lawyer Iustina Ionescu in a press release by ACCEPT Romania. "Romanians who have obtained a final gender recognition decision in another member state will no longer need to go through Romania's arduous procedure. We call on the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Justice to adopt a clear, fast, and accessible procedure for changing documents for all Romanian transgender citizens—regardless of whether they have lived in other EU member states—as the European Court of Human Rights has required since 2021 in X and Y v. Romania." (Translated from Romanian.)

The ruling has significance well beyond Romania. Because the underlying CJEU decision is binding on all 27 EU member states, the Romanian court's enforcement serves as a practical test case for how the principle will be applied across the bloc. ILGA-Europe's Senior Strategic Litigation Advisor Marie-Hélène Ludwig called the decision "a victory for the many trans people in the EU who are still refused identity documents matching their gender identity and are forced to live with different identities when crossing borders," adding that since "Romania has resisted implementing the CJEU ruling in the Coman case for eight years, it is particularly important to see a Romanian court giving practical effects to a CJEU ruling." The organization said it is now monitoring implementation in other EU countries. Three member states—Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia—have effectively banned legal gender recognition entirely through laws, court decisions, or constitutional amendments, all of which now run contrary to the CJEU's evolving jurisprudence.

The ruling does have significant limitations. It applies only to transgender people who obtained legal gender recognition in another EU member state—it does not help trans Romanians who have never left the country and remain trapped in Romania's domestic procedure, which the European Court of Human Rights condemned in 2021 but which remains unchanged. As the Reuters noted in its analysis of the underlying CJEU decision, "as the litigation in this case was focused on freedom of movement rights, it means the process for Romanian citizens seeking to change legal gender remains unchanged." Ionescu's statement directly addressed this gap, calling on the Romanian government to create a procedure for all transgender citizens "regardless of whether they have lived in other EU member states." ACCEPT has already begun distributing template legal forms for other trans people with cross-border documents to file their own requests.

Transgender Day of Visibility was a mixed bag for many transgender people. The day opened with horrifying news from the Supreme Court, which ruled that transgender people could be legally subject to coercive conversion therapy if their parents and counselor want to practice it on them in Colorado. In Wisconsin, however, the news was more hopeful. Despite a Republican-controlled legislature—with an 18-15 majority in the state Senate and a 54-45 majority in the state Assembly—Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has on multiple occasions pledged to veto any anti-LGBTQ+ bill that crosses his desk. Now, on Trans Day of Visibility, he delivered on that promise again, issuing five vetoes against anti-trans bills in a private ceremony at the state Capitol surrounded by LGBTQ+ kids and families. "My promise has always been that I will veto any bill that makes Wisconsin a less safe, less inclusive, and less welcoming place for LGBTQ people and kids," Evers said. "It has been my honor to keep that promise over the course of two terms as governor."

Two of the bills, AB 100 and AB 102, would have instituted anti-trans sports bans—AB 100 targeting K-12 schools and AB 102 targeting the University of Wisconsin and technical college systems. Both would have classified all athletic teams by sex as determined at birth and barred transgender girls from competing on teams that match their gender identity. The bans could apply broadly to interscholastic, intramural, and club sports, covering everything from traditional athletics to activities like darts, disc golf, and even potentially chess, as has been interpreted in some locales. In his veto messages, Evers was scathing: "I object to codifying discrimination into state statute and the Wisconsin State Legislature's ongoing efforts to perpetuate hateful and discriminatory rhetoric and policies targeting LGBTQ Wisconsinites, including our transgender and gender nonconforming kids." He added: "While the federal government and other states across this country may give way to anti-LGBTQ hate, here in Wisconsin, we will continue to decline to do the same."

Another bill, AB 103, would have required school boards to adopt policies banning school staff from referring to any minor student by a name or pronouns that do not align with their "biological sex" without written authorization from a parent or guardian. The bill would have also required schools to notify all parents and legal guardians when a student requests a name or pronoun change and empowered administrators to deny the request unless every parent or guardian supports it—effectively giving any single parent veto power over a trans student's identity at school. For transgender youth in unsupportive households, the bill would have functioned as a forced outing mandate, requiring schools to disclose a student's transgender status to parents who may respond with rejection, abuse, or removal from the home. Evers vetoed the bill with a similar message, reiterating that "LGBTQ kids, including transgender and gender nonconforming kids, deserve our love, respect, and support just like any other kid."

The remaining two bills targeted doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors. AB 104 would have banned health care providers from performing, referring for, or even “causing the engagement” in gender-affirming medical interventions for anyone under 18—and would have required the Board of Nursing, the Medical Examining Board, and the Physician Assistant Affiliated Credentialing Board to investigate any allegation of a violation and revoke the provider's license if substantiated.

SB 405 took a different approach, creating a civil cause of action allowing minors who received gender-affirming care to sue their providers for any "physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological injury" until the age of 33—a bill Democratic state Sen. Mark Spreitzer called a "blatant effort to threaten health care professionals with privileged litigation in the hopes that it will create a chilling effect." In his veto messages, Evers wrote that he objects to "restricting medical professionals like physicians from providing evidence-based and medically appropriate care to their patients, restricting parents from making decisions with physicians to ensure their kids receive the healthcare they need, and preventing patients from receiving that basic, life-saving care. Healthcare providers should be trusted to provide medically appropriate and accurate information, treatment, and care for their patients without the unnecessary political interference of politicians."

This is not the first time Evers has vetoed anti-trans and anti-queer legislation. In December 2023, Evers vetoed a Republican-backed ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and used his partial veto authority to protect Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care in the state budget. In 2024, he vetoed a bill which would have banned transgender students from competing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. Throughout both rounds, Evers made his position unambiguous. "Republicans' anti-LGBTQ bills targeting trans kids will never become law as long as I'm governor," he wrote on social media in March 2024. "I'll keep my promise to veto any bill making Wisconsin less safe, less inclusive, and less welcoming for LGBTQ people and kids—including this one. And I'll be damn proud to do it."

Fair Wisconsin, a major LGBTQ+ civil rights and advocacy organization in the state, thanked Evers in a statement: "Thank you, Governor Evers, for supporting trans kids and standing for LGBTQ+ rights. You have built your professional life on doing what is best for kids, and you made good on that commitment by vetoing five bills; with these vetoes, you protected health care for trans kids and made sure they know they belong and are safe in our schools and welcome on our teams. These bills were always about more than health care, or the makeup of a sports team, or the use of pronouns in a classroom – they were about excluding trans people from public life, and we cannot allow that, especially when our trans community is being attacked by so many levels of government. But today, you made your support of Wisconsin’s trans community visible and meaningful. Our trans kids and their families are facing so much hate right now, and you have consistently chosen to lead with love. Thank you.”

The vetoes are almost certainly final. Wisconsin requires a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers to override a gubernatorial veto. Republicans hold an 18-15 majority in the Senate and a 54-45 majority in the Assembly—well short of the 22 and 66 votes needed, respectively.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a sweeping ruling in favor of conversion therapy, finding that bans on the practice likely violate free speech and remanding the case to lower courts in a way that virtually guarantees such bans will no longer survive legal challenge. The ruling, which holds that speech-based professional conduct is protected by the First Amendment, could open a Pandora's box of challenges to professional regulations across medicine and mental health. It is likely to invalidate over 23 state laws banning conversion therapy, potentially reinstituting the practice nationwide. The decision comes on Trans Day of Visibility, following five other anti-LGBTQ+ rulings mostly focused on transgender people in the last year alone—including the Skrmetti ruling upholding bans on trans youth healthcare, the Mirabelli ruling on forced outing of trans students, the trans military ban, the passport ruling, and Mahmoud v. Taylor—and is likely to be weaponized to empower counselors to practice conversion therapy on transgender kids as well as other LGBTQ+ kids in the near future.

The ruling was issued under an 8-1 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, with only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, both members of the court's liberal wing, joined the majority but filed their own concurrence signaling that a more carefully written law might survive constitutional challenge. The case, Chiles v. Salazar, was brought by Kaley Chiles, a licensed Christian counselor in Colorado represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom—the same conservative legal powerhouse behind 303 Creative v. Elenis, which established a First Amendment right for businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples and which has supported and helped draft anti-trans laws nationwide.

Chiles challenged Colorado's Minor Conversion Therapy Law, passed in 2019, which prohibits licensed mental health professionals from engaging in any practice or treatment that attempts to change a minor's sexual orientation or gender identity. The law was designed to protect LGBTQ+ children from a practice that every major medical organization in the country has condemned as harmful and ineffective. Now, with the ruling in hand, parents soon could force their minor children into conversion therapy sessions aimed at changing their sexual orientation or gender identity—sessions that research has shown more than double the risk of suicide attempts among LGBTQ+ youth.

"Her speech does not become 'conduct' just because a government says so or because it may be described as a 'treatment' or 'therapeutic modality.' The First Amendment is no word game, and 'the exercise of constitutional rights' cannot be circumscribed 'by mere labels,'" wrote Gorsuch for the majority, without considering the implications of expanding free speech protections to professional conduct that is speech-based. Under this logic, any medical treatment delivered through words rather than instruments could now carry First Amendment protection—a framework that could shield a doctor who encourages a patient to commit suicide, a dietician who tells an anorexic patient to eat less, or a therapist who deliberately steers a vulnerable client away from life-saving treatment. It could also extend well beyond medicine: a financial advisor who talks an elderly client into a bad investment is exercising speech-based professional conduct, as is a lawyer who gives harmful legal advice.

Justice Jackson, the sole dissenter, responded in scathing terms, reading her dissent from the bench—a step justices reserve for when they believe the majority has made a grave error. “Ultimately, because the majority plays with fire in this case, I fear that the people of this country will get burned,” she wrote. “Before now, licensed medical professionals had to adhere to standards when treating patients: They could neither do nor say whatever they want. Largely due to such State regulation, Americans have been privileged to enjoy a long and successful tradition of high-quality medical care. Today, the Court turns its back on that tradition. And, to be completely frank, no one knows what will happen now. This decision might make speech-only therapies and other medical treatments involving practitioner speech effectively unregulatable—not to be reached via licensing standards, medical-malpractice liability, or any other means of state control. Who knows? Certainly not the majority. It appears to have made this momentous decision without adequately grappling with the potential long-term and disastrous implications of this ruling. The fallout could be catastrophic.”

Jackson continued: “The Court could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers. A state license used to mean something to the patients who entrust their care to licensed professionals—i.e., that the person is certified to be one who provides treatments that are consistent with the standard of care. That stops today. We are on a slippery slope now: For the first time, the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment to bless a risk of therapeutic harm to children by limiting the State’s ability to regulate medical providers who treat patients with speech. What’s next? In the worst-case scenario, our medical system unravels as various licensed healthcare professionals—talk therapists, psychiatrists, and presumably anyone else who claims to utilize speech when administering treatments to patients—start broadly wielding their newfound constitutional right to provide substandard medical care.” She concluded: “It is baffling that we could now be standing on the edge of a precipitous drop in the quality of healthcare services in America. Somehow, Justices from eras past have always understood that ‘there is no right to practice medicine which is not subordinate to the police power of the States.’ We do harm to both the Nation’s medical system and our First Amendment jurisprudence by ignoring that wisdom today.”

The practice the court has now shielded under the First Amendment has been condemned by virtually every major medical and mental health organization in the country. The American Psychological Association adopted a formal resolution opposing the practice in 2021. The American Psychiatric Association has opposed it since 1997, as have the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Counseling Association, and more than a dozen other professional bodies. The Trevor Project's research has found that LGBTQ+ youth subjected to conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts. Survivors describe lasting psychological damage including depression, PTSD, anxiety, self-hatred, and suicidal ideation. The United Nations has deemed conversion therapy a form of torture and recommended it be banned worldwide.

Now, states will have a much more difficult time regulating the practice, although some creative methods may still exist. American civil rights attorney and clinical instructor at Harvard, Alejandra Caraballo, tells Erin in the Morning that states could be more creative in banning conversion therapy moving forward using private rights of action, which the court has ruled may be insulated from this kind of constitutional review in other cases. "While the Supreme Court decision limits the abilities of states to regulate conversion therapy through professional standards, they did not limit the ability for states to protect LGBTQ youth from these abusive practices through tort or malpractice law. States should quickly move to provide survivors of conversion therapy with legal recourse through private rights of action that make engaging in this type of harmful practice financially impossible," says Caraballo.

The case now returns to the Tenth Circuit, where Colorado's law will be evaluated under strict scrutiny—the most demanding constitutional standard, which requires the state to prove the law is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. Few laws survive that test, and conversion therapy bans are unlikely to moving forward. But the impact extends far beyond Colorado: more than 23 states and Washington, D.C., have similar conversion therapy bans on the books, and each is now vulnerable to challenge under the framework the court established today. The Alliance Defending Freedom has already signaled its intent to challenge bans in other states. For LGBTQ+ youth across the country, the message from this court is clear: the First Amendment protects the right of a licensed counselor to coercively change who they are inside or who they might love.

On Thursday, the International Olympic Committee announced that it would ban transgender women and many cisgender women athletes from competing in women's events and institute mandatory genetic screening of all female athletes. The decision is significant—the Olympics has allowed transgender women to compete since 2004, yet none has ever won a medal, and only a single transgender woman has ever competed: weightlifter Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand, who failed to place at the 2021 Tokyo Games. The ban applies to all sports, including those where no male performance advantage exists, and will require every woman to undergo a genetic test to participate. It will also exclude many cisgender women who produce elevated testosterone due to genetic or medical conditions, such as two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya. And it is not the first time the Olympics has subjected women to mass sex testing—the last time it did, from 1992 to 1999, the results were disastrous, with cisgender women discovering they had intersex conditions they never knew about, leading to public humiliation, career destruction, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished.

Under the new policy, every woman seeking to compete in a female event at the Olympics or any IOC competition must undergo a one-time SRY gene screening—a cheek swab or blood test that detects the presence of a gene on the Y chromosome associated with male sex development. The test is similar to the one the IOC abolished 27 years ago after it produced disastrous human consequences. Because the screening identifies the presence of XY genetics, it will target not only transgender women but also intersex people—including cisgender women who carry a genetic condition that some argue makes them "male" despite having been born with a vagina and uterus, raised as girls, and having lived their entire lives as women. In at least 15 documented cases, women with 46,XY karyotypes—the same genetics this test screens for—have successfully carried pregnancies to term and given birth, including women with XY karyotypes that naturally produce testosterone. Under the IOC's new framework, a woman who has been pregnant and delivered a child could be classified as male and barred from competition for failing this test.

Genetic sex testing was introduced at the Olympics in 1992, but it existed for only a short time. In the two Summer Games it covered—Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta in 1996—over 20 female athletes who were assigned female at birth, had lived their entire lives as women, and had female anatomy were told they were genetically "male" due to conditions they had never known about. The consequences were disastrous. Dr. Myron Genel, a Yale physician who was a prominent critic of the program, reported that the testing was "highly discriminatory" and caused "emotional trauma and social stigmatization" for women with intersex conditions who had been screened out of competition. For athletes from countries where being labeled male could carry severe social or physical consequences, the disclosure was not merely humiliating—it was dangerous. Indian swimmer Pratima Gaonkar died by suicide after her failed sex verification test became public and she was subjected to blackmail attempts; Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan attempted suicide after being stripped of her Asian Games silver medal. The testing was abolished in 1999.

The ban also applies to sports where a male genetic advantage is dubious or nonexistent. In rifle shooting, ESPN reported that women are "as good as, if not fractionally better than, men" in 10m air rifle, and yet these athletes will still have to prove their femininity with a genetic test. In sailing, the competition was mixed for nearly a century at the Olympics, from 1900 to 1988. In archery, men and women shoot the same 70-meter Olympic distance and the world records are extremely close. In December 2025, women's Olympic champion An San exactly matched the men's indoor qualification round record of 599 in Taipei. And outside the Olympics, transgender bans have spread even further—to darts, pool, disc golf, competitive dancing, and even chess.

The scientific evidence, meanwhile, does not support the blanket ban the IOC has imposed. A 2026 meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine—the most comprehensive to date, drawing on 52 studies and nearly 6,500 participants—found that while transgender women on hormone therapy for one to three years retained higher absolute lean body mass than cisgender women, there were no statistically significant differences in upper-body strength, lower-body strength, or aerobic capacity. The researchers concluded that "the convergence of transgender women's functional performance with cisgender women, particularly in strength and aerobic capacity, challenges assumptions about inherent athletic advantages" and that the current evidence "does not justify blanket bans." A separate review in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that after two years of hormone therapy, no advantage was observed for physical performance measured by running time, and that muscle strength corrected for lean mass, hemoglobin, and cardiovascular capacity were no different from cisgender women. No study has demonstrated that transgender women on hormone therapy for more than two years retain a measurable performance advantage in any specific sport.

Some intersex athletes who would be impacted by the decision are already speaking out. Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, was assigned female at birth in South Africa and has naturally elevated testosterone levels due to a difference in sex development. On Sunday, she expressed her disappointment with IOC President Kirsty Coventry, a fellow African woman and former Olympic swimmer. "Personally, for her as a leader, she's an African, I'm sure she understands how, you know, we as Africans, we are coming from, as a global South, you know, you cannot control genetics," Semenya said at a press conference in Cape Town. "For me personally, for her being a woman coming from Africa, knowing how, you know, African women or women in the global South are affected by that, of course it causes harm.”

“Reintroducing sex testing brings the IOC back to policy that it had discontinued exactly thirty years ago. Back then, they rightfully concluded that sex testing was scientifically inconclusive and caused considerable harm to athletes. Then, in 2021, they approved a Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination to best support trans athletes and athletes with sex variations. Now, they are retreating from their own decisions and ignoring the recommendations of various UN bodies, the World Medical Association, and athletes worldwide. But the evidence is clear: sex testing exposes women and girls to privacy violations, public humiliation, and abuse. And it is profoundly discriminatory, too. No one is asking men and boys to undergo these tests. Women and girls shouldn’t either,” said Gurchaten Sandhu, ILGA World Director of Programmes.

The policy takes effect at the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games and is not retroactive. Affected athletes are expected to bring challenges before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, as Caster Semenya has done with previous eligibility rules. Over 100 civil society organizations, including the Sport & Rights Alliance, ILGA World, and Humans of Sport, have called on the IOC to reverse the decision.

On Friday, the Idaho Senate passed the most extreme anti-transgender bathroom ban in the United States: a law that applies to both public buildings and private businesses and carries severe criminal penalties. A first offense would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail; a second offense within five years would be a felony carrying up to five years in state prison. But the penalties do not stop there. Under Idaho's persistent violator statute, a transgender person convicted of a fourth bathroom offense—their third felony—could face a mandatory minimum of five years and up to life in prison, immediately making Idaho the harshest state in the nation for criminalizing transgender people. Those who find themselves behind bars may then be subjected to additional brutality at the hands of a prison system that has been systematically denying transgender people their medication and placing trans women in male facilities. The bill passed 28-7, with one Republican voting against it, and it now heads to the Governor’s desk.

The bill, HB 752, states that "any person who knowingly and willfully enters a restroom or changing room in a government-owned building or a place of public accommodation designated for use by the opposite biological sex of such person shall be guilty of a misdemeanor" punishable by up to one year in prison. A second offense within five years would be a felony carrying up to five years in state prison, and under Idaho's persistent violator statute, a fourth offense—the third felony—would carry a mandatory minimum of five years and a maximum of life. Notably, these provisions apply to private businesses, and the bill explicitly allows prior convictions under "a similar statute in another state, or any similar local ordinance" to count toward the escalation threshold—meaning a transgender person previously sanctioned under another state's bathroom ban could face felony charges on their first offense in Idaho.

The bill drew sharp criticism from a diverse range of opponents, unifying voices that typically do not share the same stance. ACLU Idaho focused on the extreme privacy violations and excessive penalties the bill would create, as well as the danger to transgender and cisgender people alike from weaponizing law enforcement against anyone who defies gender expectations. The Idaho Fraternal Order of Police also opposed the bill, with President Bryan Lovell warning that "in many circumstances, there is no clear or reasonable way for officers to make that determination without engaging in questioning or investigative actions that could be viewed as invasive and inappropriate." The Idaho Sheriffs' Association joined the opposition as well. Despite pleas from police, Bill sponsor Rep. Cornel Rasor refused to add a duty-to-depart amendment—a provision that exists in Florida's criminal bathroom ban and allows a person to avoid charges by leaving when asked—meaning a transgender person in Idaho could be arrested on the spot simply for being present.

If Governor Brad Little signs the bill into law, Idaho would become the fourth state with a major bathroom ban targeting transgender people through arrest or significant criminal or civil penalties. In Florida, where the offense is a misdemeanor carrying up to 60 days in jail, Marcy Rheintgen was arrested in March 2025 for washing her hands in a women's restroom at the state capitol. In Texas, where the bathroom ban took effect in December, four transgender women were detained at the state capitol and issued criminal trespass warnings banning them from the building for a year. And in Kansas, the state created a bounty hunter system allowing private citizens to sue transgender people encountered in a bathroom for $1,000. Idaho's bill goes further than all of them—the criminal offense is triggered by merely being present in the restroom, it applies to private businesses, and the penalties dwarf those in states that have already earned "do not travel" warnings on the Erin in the Morning trans legal risk assessment map.

Anti-transgender bathroom bans and policies, even informal ones, routinely draw in people they were never meant to target. In Idaho's own Senate hearing on HB 752, Tara Townsell of Nampa testified that she has been repeatedly removed from women's restrooms and forced to show ID because of her short hair—and was once denied entry to a maternity ward at a Boise hospital despite being nine months pregnant. In Congress, Reps. Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace confronted a cisgender woman in a Capitol restroom, mistakenly believing she was a transgender member of Congress. In Arizona, a Black woman with a “masculine” appearance was confronted by police officers inside a Walmart restroom who tried to remove her; she said she has not used a public restroom since. The laws also create impossible situations for transgender men. In Ohio, Noah Ruiz, a 20-year-old trans man, was beaten by three men after using the women's restroom at a campground—the very bathroom the property owner had told him to use. He was then arrested for disorderly conduct while his attackers initially faced no charges.

On the other hand, anti-transgender bathroom bans in other states have led to remarkably few actual arrests or reports of crimes, suggesting that the general public has little appetite for policing who uses which restroom. Shannon Minter, vice president of legal for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told the Texas Tribune that such laws are "largely as a practical matter, unenforceable" and "almost never enforced," adding that they are "simply designed to intimidate and scare transgender people." As a result, many transgender people in those states have vowed to continue using the restroom that matches their identity. "I understand that that is breaking a law, however, I will not bend the knee on that one," Simon Shepherd, a transgender man in North Texas, told the Tribune when the state's ban took effect. But Idaho's extreme penalties may change that calculus. When a second offense carries up to five years in prison, it becomes a concrete threat that many may find too difficult to challenge.

The bill now heads to Governor Brad Little's desk. Little, a Republican, has not indicated whether he will sign or veto the measure, though he has signed every major anti-transgender bill to reach his desk during his tenure. The bill contains an emergency clause and would take effect on July 1, 2026. Advocates have signaled privately they anticipate legal challenges should the law take effect.