In liberal democracies, advocacy groups are often free to criticize what they see as groups opposing the rights of those they advocate for. In the United States, for instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center designates groups opposing the rights of minorities as “hate groups,” an effective moniker that helps organizations and people avoid association with such movements. One of the most effective organizations at opposing hate and violence worldwide is Amnesty International, which has stood up to dictators and death squads to report accurately and advocate for globally marginalized people. Now, though, Amnesty appears to have met its greatest threat—not a government or a military junta, but the anti-trans activist and writer J.K. Rowling, and the anti-trans “gender-critical” movement she finances, who has successfully forced the organization as of this morning to issue an apology for calling anti-trans groups “anti-rights.”

On July 8, Amnesty International UK released a report titled “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK.” The report mapped 117 organizations working to restrict the rights of, among others, transgender and queer people in the United Kingdom, and documented the financial infrastructure behind them, including far-right Christian nationalist organizations, U.S.-based legal powerhouses like Alliance Defending Freedom, and conversion therapy promoters. Many “gender critical” groups were also listed—a moniker used in the United Kingdom to describe trans-exclusionary activists who have driven much of the extreme downturn in civil rights for trans people in the country—including Sex Matters, a policy group that helped bring the Supreme Court case redefining “woman” under the Equality Act as excluding trans women, and Beira’s Place, a sexual assault support center founded and funded by billionaire J.K. Rowling that explicitly excludes transgender women from its services and was established after Rowling objected to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre’s inclusive policies.

The response was immediate. Anti-transgender activists, financed by Rowling, flooded Amnesty International UK with legal threat letters demanding the report be withdrawn. Rowling herself posted on twitter: “Should any of the women’s organisations targeted by AmnestyUK’s recent ‘anti-rights’ blacklist wish to take legal action, applications can be made to the JK Rowling Women’s Fund.” That fund is a private legal war chest she launched in May 2025, backed by an immense personal fortune, with no public board and no outside oversight. The threats were serious due to UK policies allowing the mega-wealthy to sue people who criticize them into submission. Unlike the United States, where anti-SLAPP laws allow defendants to get these suits dismissed early, the UK has no comprehensive protections for those using their freedom of speech to criticize abuses. Likewise under UK defamation law, the burden of proof falls on the defendant. The report came down within 48 hours. For three weeks, the question was whether Amnesty would stand behind its own research or capitulate entirely. This morning, we got the answer: a full, groveling apology from the organization that has weathered the Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia, and the Bush administration’s defense of Guantánamo Bay—but could not weather J.K. Rowling.

In its apology, Amnesty completely capitulated, saying the document “should never have been published” and calling its publication “an error.” It specifically disavowed the labeling of anti-trans “gender critical” organizations as “anti-rights,” stating: “In particular, we apologise to Beira’s Place and other groups, which we categorised as gender critical organisations, which we should not have collectively labelled as anti-rights.” The apology identified no factual errors in the report. It did not retract any specific finding. It did not name a single inaccuracy. It simply surrendered the entire document. You can read the full apology here:

Rowling celebrated. She posted on twitter: “Your apology for labelling women-only rape support centre Beira’s Place ‘anti-rights’ is a nice birthday present, AmnestyUK. Cheers. And congratulations to all the other women’s and LGB organisations Amnesty acknowledges having wrongly smeared as ‘anti-rights’.” She then turned to Genevieve Gluck, co-founder of Reduxx, an anti-trans website the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as “nothing but rabid transphobia” and compared to white nationalist crime-listing sites for its obsessive cataloging of alleged trans offenders—a site whose co-founder has appeared on the Daily Wire to claim that pornography is turning men transgender. Gluck expressed disappointment at not making the Amnesty list herself, posting: “To be honest, I was a little disappointed to not have gotten even an honorable mention.” Rowling replied warmly: “I like to think you were on the long list, Genevieve. 😘”

This is not the first time Rowling has used the threat of litigation to silence critics in the United Kingdom. In 2022, she threatened legal action against a social media user who called her a Nazi, forcing a public apology. In 2024, her lawyers compelled journalist Rivkah Brown—whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors—to publicly retract a tweet calling Rowling a Holocaust denier after Rowling dismissed the Nazis’ well-documented targeting of transgender people; her lawyers even required Brown to edit the apology’s phrasing. However, Rowling’s reach does not extend to the United States, where the First Amendment and anti-SLAPP legislation protect news publishers from accurately reporting on her promotion of anti-rights policies.

The capitulation of Amnesty International signals a bleak new era for transgender people in the United Kingdom. The country that once ranked first in Europe for LGBTQ+ rights now sits 22nd on the ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map, after 11 consecutive years of decline. Under the Labour government, the rollbacks have only accelerated: bathroom bans, school guidance erasing trans students, a trans youth care bans, and more. Now, major institutions cannot even criticize the groups responsible for this. Meanwhile, transgender people in the United Kingdom are watching groups cow in submission to these threats and are left wondering if there is anyone left they can turn to for help.

The WNBA has long been considered “the most LGBT-inclusive professional sports league,” as per The Advocate; it was the first professional sports league to launch a Pride Month campaign. But Celeste Keaton, co-owner of the Seattle Storm, has been fined and sidelined—at least for now—because of a heated confrontation with a paid anti-trans advocate sitting courtside at a game.

Ahnaleigh Wilson, a Washington teenager, is an activist in the anti-trans movement’s political crusade against athletes. She and another young woman, who has not been publicly named, donned t-shirts from XX-XY Athletics—a sportswear company founded for the explicit purpose of advancing the assault on trans rights. It sponsors Wilson, a high school runner, and its “charitable” arm awarded her $5,000 for publicly outing and deriding another student athlete who was reportedly transgender.

Wilson and her counterpart also carried signs praising WNBA player Sophie Cunningham “for speaking up for girls,” as Wilson’s poster read. Cunningham, a guard for the Indiana Fever, also recently won words of support from the White House because she denounced equal rights for trans people in sports and called trans women “biological males.”

Political tensions were boiling ahead of Tuesday’s Storm-Fever face-off. Outside the Seattle stadium, opposing protests formed. Wilson joined a few dozen people sporting pro-Cunningham signs, XX-XY merchandise, and advertisements for the conservative organization Let’s Go Washington. The group is spearheading efforts to install a statewide ban on trans girls in women’s sports.

Afterwards, Wilson and the other young woman made their way to courtside seats, clutching their Sophie Cunningham posters with the social media handle of XX-XY scrawled by hand along the side.

Wilson told a far-right podcaster after the game that they “weren’t trying to be political.” Still, they were seemingly primed to grab the attention of viewers at home. Their propaganda also caught the eye of Keaton.

As per Wilson’s telling, Keaton approached the young women and said: “Jesus loves everyone.”

“I was like, ‘Oh, I know. I’m religious,’” Wilson said. “And [Keaton is] like, ‘I hope Jesus can forgive you for what sin you’ve done,’ something like that.”

The exchange allegedly escalated. According to Wilson and her seatmate—who, again, wore shirts prominently advertising an anti-trans organization—Keaton called them “fucking insane” and said they’d “better stop pulling this shit.”

Keaton has not publicly commented on her side of the story, but the Storm’s majority owner, Ginny Gilder, apologized on Keaton’s behalf. “We are aware one of our co-owners made comments to two fans in attendance at last night’s game,” Gilder told Front Office Sports in a statement. “We apologize that this happened. Everyone who attends a Storm game deserves to feel welcome, and we remain committed to creating an inclusive environment where every fan is treated with respect.”

Apparently, however, this excludes trans people and allies who don’t want to be subjected to dehumanizing rhetoric on the court; the WNBA fined Keaton an undisclosed amount and suspended her from five home games.

Cunningham and the Fever, for their part, said they were not aware of the rally or the signage stunt ahead of the game, and that no Fever player coordinated with the protestors in any way.

But Cunningham’s reputation precedes her. Despite her fanfare about wanting to “protect” women in sports, she was perhaps best known before this for a vicious physical attack on another woman athlete. Cunningham put the Connecticut Sun’s Jacy Sheldon in a headlock and “yanked Sheldon down by her neck,” resulting in a flagrant foul and causing Cunningham to be ejected from the game. The incident sparked a dedicated fanbase for Cunningham.

“I guess when you take a girl’s head off, people love that stuff,” she told ESPN.

Amy Acton, Ohio Democratic Candidate for Governor, has seen her relationship with the state’s LGBTQ+ community go from bad to catastrophic. Weeks after Acton endorsed a transgender sports ban and called transgender girls “boys,” the fallout has been intense: the Ohio Democratic Party forced its own Progressive and Pride caucuses to delete their criticism and a meeting the campaign promised would begin repairing the damage instead further inflamed tensions. Inside sources who have gone public now say the “listening session” was a debacle. Acton did not show up, her campaign manager barred Arienne Childrey—Vice Chair of the party’s Pride Caucus, a transgender candidate for the Ohio House, and Ohio’s first openly trans city council member—from even entering the Zoom call. When another advocate demanded to know why Childrey was barred, she was ejected. The Chair of the Progressive Caucus, Kim McCarthy, was locked in the waiting room during the entire “listening session.” And in the end, the campaign ultimately refused to apologize for calling trans girls “boys,” refused to retract Acton’s support for a transgender sports ban, and ended the meeting with no plans for what come next.

"I approached this meeting with high hopes—despite the fact that Acton would not be present—for a meaningful, productive conversation about the pain caused to the trans community by her recent comments and a commitment to repair the damage. That was not this meeting,” said Childrey in the aftermath of the meeting. "Our voices were actively suppressed. Myself and a number of other LGBTQ+ leaders were refused entry into a meeting we had been invited to attend. One trans advocate—Ciara Keeton—was booted from the meeting entirely just for pointing out the campaign's refusal to allow trans leaders into the room. When we were digitally locked out, it took the Chair of the Pride Caucus calling my personal phone and putting me on live speakerphone inside the room just for my voice to be heard."

According to notes obtained from a source who attended the meeting, the session opened with a blow: Dwayne Steward of Equality Ohio, reading what appeared to be a prepared statement, announced the organization was rescinding Acton’s “A” rating on its LGBTQ+ candidate scorecard. “This is not about punishment, but partnership,” Steward said. “Harm has been done. Attacking trans people isn’t just wrong, it is a losing strategy.” From there, the meeting devolved. Multiple attendees demanded to know why Childrey had been barred from an event about the LGBTQ+ community. Campaign manager Philip Stein responded only that the meeting was “mostly a space we want to listen to the folks that we picked here.” When pressed on why the event had been titled a “conversation” rather than a one-way listening session, Stein conceded that running this kind of meeting was “not his area of expertise” and that he could “only apologize for the way that the event was titled.”

From there, the meeting only worsened. Attendee after attendee demanded that Acton apologize for calling trans girls “boys,” chastised the campaign for convening a meeting with activists and then not sending the candidate, and pressed for concrete commitments. One leader did not mince words: “She is either a candidate who does not care enough to be here, or has a staff who told her it wasn’t important enough to be here.” another called Acton’s absence “borderline disrespectful” and turned on the party leadership: “Why isn’t ODP here? Kathleen Clyde should have been here. This is not how we get Ohio back.” Kyle Herman, Chair of the Pride Caucus, summarized the room’s frustration: “I am disappointed at how this was handled. I hoped to get clarification that could let us say, ‘See, Acton cares.’ This wasn’t it. It is very disappointing to have people disincluded from the call, especially people from the trans community.” When asked at the close of the meeting what the next steps were, Stein offered only: “This was first, that is what we have determined, and we will be figuring that out.” He did not commit to a retraction of Acton’s words or any specific action.

In the aftermath of the meeting, multiple attendees went public with their accounts Erick Detweiler, Vice Chairman of Rules and Bylaws of the Progressive Caucus stated: “I was shocked. I could not have prepared myself for the sheer contempt the campaign staff demonstrated toward Pride and Progressive Caucus leaders and the hundreds of grassroots constituents we represent. When they kicked the Pride Caucus Vice Chairwoman from the meeting without a chance to speak, it was as shocking as watching a friend be physically assaulted in front of me. When they retaliated against our trans rights advocate for the crime of demanding an explanation, I was forced to abandon hope of rationalizing the original act and recognized it for what it was: intentional targeted suppression of minorities; a preview into a future Acton administration. Drunk with power, unbeholden to the people, believing behind closed doors it is safe to shed its sheepskin.”

Detweiler continued: “They have, in a fit of transphobic sadism, forced a no-win scenario for their Democratic constituents and every Democratic nominee in Ohio: If this campaign loses, we will suffer under a Ramaswamy administration; but if we reward this campaign with victory, corporate Democrats at every level of government across the nation will think themselves justified in replicating this unconscionable campaign philosophy.”

The political math of Acton's position doesn't add up. Republicans aren't going to reward her for baseline levels of transphobia—Ramaswamy will run ads against her on any number of transgender issues regardless. What Acton’s anti-trans turn does is depress turnout among Ohio’s LGBTQ+ voters and allies in a race separated by less than a single percentage point. And the campaign's response to that reality has been, at every turn, to punish the people telling her so. The demand of LGBTQ+ Ohioans still stands unanswered. Until it is met, Acton has given Ohio's LGBTQ+ community every reason to believe she would govern exactly the way her campaign has conducted itself—with the people she claims to represent locked in the waiting room.

A Missouri library refused to back down from hosting an LGBTQ children’s book event, even as the state threatened to cut its funding or potentially levy criminal charges.

Last week, Missouri’s Attorney General and its Secretary of State, both Republicans, launched a full-fledged attack on the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia. According to conservatives, the library’s planned Rainbow Story Time event—a children’s event meant for LGBTQ families and their allies—was nothing less than an “attempt to mold and manipulate innocent young minds with radical liberal ideology,” reads a public letter from Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ office.

He called Rainbowsaurus, a book featuring same-sex parents chasing a rainbow dinosaur, and Big Wig, which is about gender non-conforming kids playing dress-up, “a form of sexual grooming [that] is unconscionable, if not criminal.”

But the letter was more than your typical conservative pearl-clutching. It was a threat. The AG’s office sent a letter citing criminal penalties against those who are “furnishing any material pornographic to minors.”

Meanwhile, Hoskins wrote: “Please be advised if this inappropriate endeavor for children takes place, I will do everything in my power to block every dollar of state and federal funding one can from future events at the Daniel Boone Library System.”

Nevertheless, the children read.

“We never wavered from holding Rainbow Story Time as planned,” said Mitzi St. John, a library spokesperson, to Erin in the Morning. “We weren’t doing anything illegal.”

Yesterday, Hoskins joined Republican State Senator Rick Brattin for a press conference on the matter, announcing they would be attempting to launch an investigation into the library. Brattin does not represent the area that the Daniel Boone Regional Library serves, but he is running for Congress, and Missouri primaries are next week. The seat he’s seeking also does not cover the community DBRL serves.

“They need something to stay in the headlines,” said Rep. Wick Thomas, a Democrat and former librarian, in a speech to reporters. The state’s only nonbinary legislator drove two hours when they heard about Hoskins’ press conference to host a counter-event of their own. “This is all they’ve got.”

These kinds of manufactured moral panics have become a common playbook by the right. In fact, Project 2025 explicitly calls for classifying “transgender ideology” as pornographic so that it can repress trans expression—and then some. The far-right blueprint says that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

Though it sounds extreme, many of Project 2025’s proposals have already come to fruition. Across the country, state and federal lawmakers have made it virtually illegal for trans and gender nonconforming people to simply exist in public—banning them from bathrooms, sports, the military, and, of course, library shelves.

During Hoskins’ event, they repeatedly—and without citing sources—argued the majority of Missourians opposed the Rainbow Story Time. But if there was community concern or opposition, Mary Lamberton—a grandmother, Columbia resident, and retired public school secretary—didn’t see much of it. There were maybe one or two protestors who came the day of the event and stood outside, she told Erin in the Morning.

Inside the library, roughly 150 people crammed in. Overflow crowds spilled out from the reading room and into the commons. It was a “positive atmosphere,” she said. She attended Rainbow Story Time as an ally; her niece is transgender.

Even in the face of funding cuts to her community library, for Lamberton, capitulation was not an option. “Immediately backing down, as a strategy, that will not get us ahead,” she told Erin in the Morning.

Meanwhile, at yesterday’s Republican presser, Brattin and Hoskins compared same-sex parents to parents who show their children pornography. When pressed, Brattin also conceded he hadn’t read the books in question, because he didn’t want to “spend money” on it, but that he had “Googled it,” which was enough to tell it was pornographic.

Immediately after that press conference wrapped up, Rep. Wick Thomas—a nonbinary legislator who had also attended Rainbow Story Time—held their own press conference, deciding at the last minute to drive over two hours to be in Jefferson City that day. As a former librarian, they told the press gaggle they felt compelled to be a counterweight to Hoskins and Brattin’s twenty-minute anti-trans tirade. In Thomas’ hands as they spoke were copies of Rainbowsaurus and Big Wig, borrowed from the local library.

They spoke to Erin in the Morning for an interview shortly thereafter. “This isn’t isolated to Missouri,” Thomas said. “It doesn’t end here if we don’t stop it here.”

Conservatives’ Rainbow Story Time spectacle is merely part of a broader effort to censor LGBTQ content and suppress the existence of LGBTQ people, they said. “That is a very dangerous slope into authoritarianism.”

Colbey Stosberg, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office—which had issued the initial public letter about Rainbow Story Time—rejected characterizations that this constituted discrimination against LGBTQ people and families.

“We’re not intending to discriminate based off of what sexual orientation is being furnished to minors. It’s any and all sexually explicit content,” he said in an interview with a local TV station. “That’s the way the law reads, and we’re enforcing it.”

“If anybody can find any library that’s furnishing, you know, heterosexual explicit content towards minors, call our office, please,” he said.

Many Missourians aren’t buying it.

“Public libraries exist to educate, foster curiosity, and serve their communities,” the statewide LGBTQ advocacy group PROMO told Erin in the Morning in a statement.

“Librarians, not politicians, are best equipped to determine what programming reflects those needs.”

As the 2026 elections approach, transgender people across the country are watching one fight in particular: a wave of anti-trans ballot measures heading directly to voters this November. Five states—Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Washington—are set to put measures before the electorate that would target transgender people in sports, medical care, and in Arizona’s case, bathrooms and locker rooms in schools, with funding tracked by a groundbreaking new Ballotpedia investigation. A sixth measure in Maine was invalidated. It is the first time in American history that voters will decide on anti-transgender measures at the ballot box—a strategic shift that advocacy groups have compared to the anti-gay-marriage amendments that swept state ballots in 2004. For transgender people who have sought refuge in blue states to escape the bans spreading through Republican-controlled legislatures, these measures represent a new and more direct threat: the possibility that their neighbors, not distant lawmakers, will vote to strip their rights.

One of the central fights will be in Washington, where a ballot initiative funded by conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood would institute a K-12 sports ban—and require every girl who wants to play to have her sex verified by a doctor first. The measure’s language is explicit: to be eligible, a student must provide a statement from her health care provider “that verifies the student’s biological sex, relying only on one or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.” That requirement applies not to transgender students specifically but to every girl in the state who wants to play any sport with a sex-separate classification—from basketball and soccer to cheerleading, bowling, and golf. The initiative is bankrolled by Heywood’s Let’s Go Washington PAC, which has raised $7 million. The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, which has allowed transgender students to compete in line with their gender identity since 2007, is aware of roughly 10 out transgender student-athletes among the more than 200,000 who compete statewide. Opposition is being led by the No Hate in WA State coalition, which has raised roughly $1.6 million, according to reporting at Ballotpedia.

“In their witch hunt for a few trans kids in the entire state who play school sports, I-638’s backers will drive thousands of girls out of sports because their parents cannot afford the necessary testing or refuse to submit their daughters to genital inspections,” said Megan Rapinoe in an op-ed against the Washington initiative. “That’s a feature, not a bug, of these laws. Preventing girls from playing sports is the whole point. Spaces that leave girls and women feeling empowered are the spaces they want to constrict—and then eliminate.”

Another fight drawing national attention is in Colorado, a blue state with some of the strongest transgender protections in the country. Two initiatives will appear on the November ballot: one banning all gender-affirming surgery for anyone under 18—a category that includes not only genital surgeries opponents fixate on (and vastly do not happen for trans youth) but also chest masculinization surgery for older transgender teenagers—and another banning transgender students from playing on sports teams matching their gender identity from kindergarten through college. Both are backed by Protect Kids Colorado, led by anti-LGBTQ activist Erin Lee. The opposition campaign, Families Not Politics, is led by One Colorado and includes Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. “One could expose students to invasive inspections just to play sports, while the other would place politicians between families and their doctors in deeply personal health care decisions,” said Nadine Bridges, One Colorado’s executive director, in a statement to Colorado Newsline.

Though Arizona is not a blue state, it bears close watching for the same reason. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has vetoed anti-trans legislation for years—Proposition 318 is now their vehicle to bypass her. The measure would extend Arizona’s existing ban on transgender girls in girls’ sports to private schools and club sports, and add a new restriction barring transgender students from using restrooms, locker rooms, and showers matching their gender identity. The ACLU of Arizona condemned the measure: “Trans youth deserve the same opportunities, experiences, rights, and protections as every other student,” said Katelynn Contreras, the organization’s policy strategist. There appears to be no broad-based campaign against this measure, according to reporting at Ballotpedia.

Two red states round out the list. In Missouri, Republican lawmakers bundled a ban on all gender-affirming care for minors with a repeal of the abortion rights amendment voters approved less than two years ago. The Stop the Ban Missouri coalition has raised $5.2 million to fight it, including $2.5 million from the ACLU Foundation, against proponents’ $1.6 million, per Ballotpedia. In Nebraska, the Fairness for Girls campaign submitted 211,000 signatures for a constitutional amendment permanently banning transgender students from girls’ sports, funded almost entirely by a single dark-money group whose donors are undisclosed, per Ballotpedia. Meanwhile, a sixth state narrowly avoided the ballot: in Maine, a sports and bathroom ban bankrolled by Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein was struck down after the state Supreme Judicial Court affirmed that more than 12,000 signatures had been improperly and some potentially fraudulently collected.

These five measures will mark the first time voters directly decide whether to strip rights from transgender people in the modern era—a playbook last deployed during the gay marriage fight and seeing new life in today’s anti-trans panic. Right-wing donors have poured millions into making these discriminatory measures happen, while opposition campaigns are outspent in nearly every state. If these measures succeed in blue states like Colorado and Washington, the map of where transgender people can safely live and raise families shrinks again, unless significant opposition from allied organizations can stand up to the onslaught.

Bossier Parish’s Police Jury—the equivalent of a county executive board, but with different naming conventions—voted on July 15 to advance a criminal ban on trans people using restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms on municipally owned land. This would impact government properties like libraries, parks, and courthouses.

“The Bossier Parish ordinance sets three penalty levels for violations,” the Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate reports. “A first offense can carry a fine up to $250, a second offense can carry a fine up to $500 and up to 30 days imprisonment, and a third or subsequent offense can carry a fine of up to $500 and imprisonment for up to six months.”

It also turns any municipal employee into a sort of mandatory reporter, who must police which people enter a gendered bathroom.

“Any employee observing a violation shall request that the individual leave the facility designated for the opposite biological sex,” the ordinance reads, as per The Advocate. Exceptions are made for maintenance crews or caretakers assisting a person with a disability. It also would not apply to schools, private businesses, or facilities owned by the federal or state government, as they are overseen by other entities.

Meeting minutes are not yet posted, so Erin in the Morning could not independently verify this phrasing, but The Advocate further reports the policy adopts its definitions of biological sex from the 2024 Women’s Safety and Protection Act, which declares that sex is based on the sex gametes (sperm or ova) a person “has, had, will have or would have, but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident.”

How a bathroom spectator can reliably verify personal medical information remains unclear; Police Juror Jimmy Cochran told Erin in the Morning “biological sex” could be substantiated with one’s birth certificate, but this document is not generally carried around. And if someone is wrongfully arrested for the bathroom they enter, because someone wrongfully guessed their sex assigned at birth? “That’s what they got the court system for,” Cochran said.

Louisiana does not have a statewide bathroom ban for government buildings. Still, Bossier Parish isn’t the only locale to go above and beyond a state law to restrict the bathroom usage of transgender people. In 2024, the City Council of Odessa, Texas, passed an ordinance granting private citizens the right to sue anyone they believed to be a transgender person in the “wrong” bathroom. The policy never went into effect due to a technical error.

Members of the Bossier Parish Police Jury told Erin in the Morning that the ordinance was crafted in concert with, or even at the behest of, Sheriff Julian Whittington.

“There was nothing on the books for him to do as law enforcement, so that’s why he asked us to do it,” Glenn Benton said in an interview. “All the sheriff is trying to do is protect young ladies from predators that want to dress up and go into the female locker room or dressing room.”

It is a dangerous myth that trans women are using women’s restrooms to commit sex crimes. There have, however, been numerous instances of law enforcement intervention gone awry in states with and without bathroom bans on the books, even in instances where individuals used the bathroom aligning with their sex assigned at birth.

Transgender women have been targeted by law enforcement over bathroom usage in states like Florida and Texas. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, law enforcement apprehended a transgender man because he used the women’s restroom at a bar. In Boston, hotel security accosted a cisgender woman using a bathroom because they falsely assumed she was assigned male at birth, and a cisgender woman in Arizona had male police officers sicced on her for using a Walmart women’s room. She resorted to showing police part of her breasts to convince them she did, in fact, belong there.

Whittington’s office could not provide comment in time for publication of this piece.

“This is more of the same from our local governments, which is just a repeat of violence perpetrated by ignorant bigots within the community, reinforced by local law enforcement and then codified into rules by our local legislators,” said Bobby Woodruff, an organizer with the Shreveport-Bossier chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. They told Erin in the Morning the group is mobilizing on the issue to push back against local instances of violence against members of the transgender community.

The final vote for Bossier Parish’s transgender bathroom policy is slated for Aug. 5.

Florida has been ground zero for book bans in the United States. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, a series of laws opened the door to challenges targeting LGBTQ+ content, racial justice titles, and any book a single resident deems objectionable—making the state the national leader in school library removals. Now one of its most conservative school districts is considering the logical next step many activists have warned about: eliminating school libraries altogether. Clay County School District, a conservative school district which serves over 40,000 students south of Jacksonville, has removed more books than nearly any district in the state. Now, the fate of school libraries themselves appear to hang in the balance.

“Perhaps at some point we revisit this discussion too, just around what do we do with the senior high libraries. The circulation rates are less than in most schools—less than one checkout a day,” said Rodger Dailey, the district’s chief academic officer, at a recent school board workshop. “The options on the table are kind of nuclear options like close the library, take all the fiction books out, just leave the non-fiction—things that, to people who aren’t abreast of this, would be shocking to them.”

You can watch the full exchange here:

Dailey’s remarks opened a sprawling, nearly thirty-minute discussion among board members and district administrators about the toll of Florida’s book-challenge laws on the district. Under HB 1069, signed by DeSantis in 2023, any county resident can challenge a book by filling out a single form, and the school is required to remove it from shelves within five days. Putting it back requires a formal hearing. In Clay County, one man exploited that asymmetry to file more than 400 challenges, resulting in 287 books removed in a single school year—titles that included The Handmaid’s Tale, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Color Purple. The weight of that process was audible in the room. “I’d love to know what the off-ramp is because I’ve been on this crazy highway for 5 years. And if we can find an off-ramp, I’ll be the first to jump on it,” said Dailey.

To be clear, the board members and administrators in the meeting were not opposed to removing books—they are frustrated by the inefficiency of it. Their discussion centered not on whether to ban books but on how to do it faster. One member, Beth Clark, asked why the district cannot sue publishers for “providing pornography to our children,” telling the board she is exploring AI tools to screen titles. Dailey proposed banning entire authors rather than reviewing title by title: “This author has had three, four, or five books removed. Maybe we just say that author, we’ve had too many problems to look for the one good book that author has.” And when asked what might replace the library space, Dailey suggested replacing them with school stores or research centers and computer labs: “I think research makes sense. School stores make sense.”

The research on what school libraries do for students is not ambiguous. A Center for American Progress review of over 60 studies spanning five decades concluded that students with access to well-resourced school libraries with certified librarians consistently perform better academically, and that the benefits are strongest for the most vulnerable populations: students of color, low-income students, and students with disabilities. Research has also shown that access to books can offset the impact of poverty on reading achievement—and that losses of school librarians are associated with declines in scores. “Libraries are a place of self-selection and volunteer reading,” said Stephana Ferrell from the Florida Freedom to Read Project in a statement to Jacksonville Today in response to the discussion on removing libraries. “If you don’t like a book, you don’t have to read it, and I think we’ve lost sight of that.”

Clay County’s debate is a local example of a much broader fight over the future of school libraries in Florida. One of the laws that enabled this—HB 1069—was ruled partly unconstitutional in August 2025 by federal Judge Carlos Mendoza, who found that it “mandates the removal of books that contain even a single reference to the prohibited subject matter, regardless of the holistic value of the book.” The ruling is currently on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, and the law remains in effect while the case proceeds. Meanwhile, local officials continue to deal with the consequences of repeated harassment by any citizen who wishes to force schools to remove books they find objectionable.

If you’re transgender, you can die for our country—but you cannot receive life-saving health care, access it for your transgender family members, or expect your family to be treated equally in schools run by the armed forces, should a new provision in the House NDAA become law.

This appears to be the politic of Democratic Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, of Texas; Donald G. Davis, of North Carolina; Shomari Figures and Terri A. Sewell, of Alabama. These lawmakers voted in favor of two proposals by South Carolina’s Nancy Mace, to amend the pending National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). If passed in the Senate, Amendment 255 would gut gender-affirming care for uniformed service members, retirees, and their family members around the world. Amendment 256 would in turn ban transgender girls from women’s sports in K-12 schools run by the military.

That same night, however, the very same Democrats that sided with Mace voted against the proposed codification of Trump’s anti-trans military ban. In other words—they think transgender people should be able to enlist, but not enjoy the very freedoms they are supposedly fighting for.

The so-called trans military ban is already in place through federal policymaking and Trump’s Executive Order 14138. But it’s not as permanent as a formal law on the books would make it. That amendment, brought by Colorado’s notoriously anti-trans Representative Lauren Boebert, failed.

“We’re never going to give up the fight to protect our nation’s transgender servicemembers,” the Congressional Equality Caucus proudly declared after the ban was defeated, unequivocally calling it “good news.”

And it’s true that staving off a discriminatory policy targeting trans people on the basis of their gender identity is a victory. The amendment claimed trans people are fundamentally at odds with the “readiness and discipline” needed from a member of the armed forces. Four Republicans—Reps. Brian K. Fitzpatrick (PA-1) and Michael Lawler (NY-17), plus legislators from U.S. territories such as Kimberlyn King-Hinds (Northern Mariana Islands) and James C. Moylan (Guam)—even crossed party lines to quash the amendment.

But all of them, plus that small cadre of Democrats, turned their backs on trans people when it came time to protect their right to be free from discrimination in health care and in schools. This may be in lockstep with the Republican Party Line, but Democrats who defected drew ire over their vote.

“It’s not just an attack on transgender kids,” said Kara Corcoran, the executive director of SPARTA Pride, an advocacy group for transgender military communities. “It’s an attack on evidence-based care across military treatment facilities, and throughout the Department of Defense, not only here in America, but overseas.”

The first Mace amendment would prohibit TRICARE from covering “gender affirming medical treatment” for transgender people, including servicemembers, retirees, and dependents like children or a spouse. The second Mace amendment would require all on-base K-12 schools operated by the military to ban trans girls from girls’ sports teams.

Last year, many of these same Democratic defectors—such as Cuellar, Davis, Figures, and Gonzalez—voted in favor of athletics bans or gender-affirming health care restrictions for trans servicemembers, veterans, and their families. Cuellar and Davis even lent their support to what amounted to a Pride flag ban at military facilities, as Erin in the Morning has previously reported. Sewell marks the addition of a new name to this list. And while some of the defectors live in highly contested districts, Sewell’s district is safely blue.

Still, Corcoran and others are hopeful that these amendments will face the same fate as their many, many predecessors of anti-trans NDAA amendments or riders passed in the House. Anti-trans provisions snuck into spending, budget, and authorization bills have also been shot down. In a worst case scenario, Senate Democrats can also opt to filibuster.

“I’m hopeful that the Senate will kill it,” Corcoran told Erin in the Morning. “They know there are far more important things to focus on, and they are seeing through the scapegoat tactics that certain politicians are using to gain power and influence through the use of fear.”

In a landmark two-year review, the Health Council of the Netherlands—the country’s highest scientific advisory body—has delivered its verdict on gender affirming care for transgener youth. The council’s conclusions were universally positive for gender-affirming care: it endorsed the treatments as careful, lawful, and effective, framed quick access as a matter of the right to health, warned that “doing nothing” is harmful, cast aside the Cass Review as not applicable to Dutch care, reported zero cases of regret among trans youth patients, and called the reduction of the country’s years-long wait times “morally urgent.” In doing so, the Netherlands becomes the latest in a series of European countries to reaffirm and strengthen care for transgender youth, refuting a right-wing talking point in the United States that Europe is “pulling back.”

The review was commissioned in May 2024 in the wake of the Cass Review. The Health Council’s committee ran systematic literature searches and consulted outside clinical experts chosen for their differing perspectives on the care—a list that included Hilary Cass herself. The panel was chaired by Olaf Dekkers, a Leiden University Medical Center professor of internal medicine whose academic specialty is research methodology, and seated professors of health law and medical ethics alongside practicing physicians and psychiatrists. From that foundation, the committee dismantled the argument at the center of the American campaign against this care—that the evidence is too weak to justify treatment—answering that the evidence quality for trans youth care is in line with the norm across pediatric medicine, and that doing nothing carries documented harms of its own, pointing specifically to harms produced by America’s own care bans.

The committee concluded that the care is lawful and careful, and that it works as intended, stating in its summary: "The committee concludes that somatic treatment for young people with gender dysphoria fits within the health law framework. It further finds that scientific research shows the intended physical effects are achieved, that there are indications of some improvement in mental outcomes, and that the number of cases of regret is low. In the committee's view, the current data on unintended physical and mental effects are not cause for concern."

The advisory also rejected the framing that treating transgender youth is a risky intervention while not treating them is a neutral default. Delaying care, the review found, carries its own harms: youth develop unwanted and often irreversible physical changes—some of which can only be undone later with surgery—while mental health suffers in the meantime, and some young people locked out of careful care turn to unregulated hormones on their own. The committee's answer, in a passage aimed directly at that framing, calls the reduction of wait times a moral imperative: "Non-treatment is therefore not a neutral option. In the public debate, treating is often presented as intervening, while waiting is treated as self-evident. From the perspective of autonomy it becomes clear that delaying or withholding care also has consequences for young people's lives and their developmental possibilities—and that those consequences are morally relevant. From that perspective, shortening the waiting times is morally urgent."

They also examined rates of stopping treatment and of regret—and found both to be rare to nonexistent, stating: "Dutch research shows that 0% to 3.5% of people with gender dysphoria stop hormone treatment that they began as minors. No cases of regret were found in the studies." The international picture matches: across five systematic reviews, between 0% and 8% of youth stop hormone treatment, with regret rates described as low. Among the Dutch youth who did stop puberty blockers, the most common reason recorded was that their gender dysphoria had resolved—an outcome the Dutch model counts as the system working, since blockers exist precisely to give young people time to explore. The committee also cautioned that stopping and regret should not, on their own, be read as a verdict on the care itself, noting that many forms of regret trace not to the treatment but to discrimination and social hostility toward the people who received it.

The review also documented benefits of treatment across several mental health outcomes: depression, suicidality, self-harm, and emotional wellbeing. "Dutch trans youth report on average worse mental health before treatment with GnRH agonists than their cisgender peers," the review states, using the clinical term for puberty blockers. "After starting GnRH agonists, they report better mental health compared with the situation before treatment. This applies to emotional problems, depressive symptoms, suicidality and self-harm." For gender-affirming hormones, the committee found: "The limited research does show a significant improvement in general functioning and wellbeing after treatment." The committee then pointed out what delays cost transgender youth. A youth overwhelmed by distress about their own body or struggling with depression and social withdrawal, it wrote, has fewer chances "to form an identity, develop talents, and make plans for the future"—and untreated gender dysphoria therefore damages "the right to an open future."

The review directly engaged the argument that "evidence-based medicine" and the GRADE rating system prove the evidence for trans youth care is too weak to act on. The GRADE tier that critics often cite measures study design, the committee explained, and in pediatric medicine, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are largely off the table: "Ethical thresholds for conducting randomized controlled trials are much higher for children than for adults," the review notes—and in this field specifically, young people refuse to join a no-treatment control group, and blinding is impossible when treatment visibly changes the body. "A lack of RCTs has the consequence that the level of evidence will necessarily be assessed as (very) low." That places trans youth care on the same evidence tier as much of children's medicine: "For many questions in pediatric medicine, the evidence is low and will likely remain low," the committee writes, which is why evidence-based medicine, properly practiced, weighs research alongside clinical expertise and the patient's own individualized treatment goals.

The review's recommendations mark the latest step in an unmistakable movement across Europe: the expansion of transgender healthcare. For years, American coverage fixated on restrictions in the United Kingdom to claim the continent was turning back. That claim was always false, as more countries affirm the importance of such care. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland issued joint guidelines recommending the care, while France's pediatric endocrinologists published their first national consensus endorsing it. And now the country that pioneered gender-affirming care for trans youth has reviewed the care and found yet again that it gives those youth the greatest chance to thrive.

The Baltimore Ferals will not be tamed.

The Maryland Division 3 rugby team—and its opponents—made headlines this week for speaking out in defiance of trans-exclusionary attacks from the Trump Administration.

“I’m ready to keep playing rugby until they drag me off the field,” Ferals forward Christa Robinson told Kyle Goon of The Banner. “You can pry this ball out of my cold, dead hands.”

In February, after years of fighting the rising tide of global transphobia, USA Rugby bowed to federal pressures, adopting a policy to indicate that only those “assigned female at birth” could play on women’s teams. That hasn’t stopped the Ferals—a team playing under the Baltimore Flamingos Club, which specifically welcomes LGBTQ rugby players—from playing the game they love with the teammates they refuse to sideline.

They aren’t the only D3 rugby team with trans players—the Banner article notes that they faced another trans-inclusive team, too—but the new rules stipulate complaints about trans athletes can only come from an opposing team. As The Banner reports: “The Capital Union teams decided not to tell on one another, rendering the ban functionally meaningless in regionwide games.”

However, the Ferals are taking it one step even further. They refuse to keep quiet and hope nobody notices; instead, they are outwardly taking up space, making noise, and calling out discriminatory policies from USA Rugby and the Trump regime.

“Trans women are women and belong in women’s sports,” a post by the Flamingos read, issued shortly after Trump’s anti-trans Executive Order 14201 earlier this year.

“We are proud that so many of our opponents have shown us that they share these values and we hope that clubs around the nation continue to recruit and uplift trans players, especially in the face of transphobic policies.”

And of the Trump regime?

“They Can’t Stop Us.”

So while anti-trans groups offer cash rewards and viral fame to athletes who refuse to compete against trans opponents, it is clear that rugby teams across the country are going the other way—welcoming trans women, trans men, and nonbinary players wherever they feel most comfortable. If USA Rugby won’t fight for trans players, these teams say, they simply won’t comply. And they’re not being quiet about it—they are openly defying the demands.

“We’re not asking for permission to be here,” Val Pizzo, a trans man and former Flamingos president, told The Banner. “We’re playing.”

Now, teams from across the globe are preparing for August’s Bingham Cup and Amanda Mark Cup, the world’s foremost rugby tournament for LGBTQ rugby leagues and players, which will take place in Australia this year.

Pizzo helped organize the first all-trans competition within the tournament series. “We’re not going to forfeit matches,” Pizzo said. “We’re gonna show up as we are. We’re gonna shoulder that burden for our players.”

There were some fears by rugby players and officials alike that there would be backlash from within the league itself—that even if other Flamingos or Ferals accepted trans teammates, their opponents might take umbrage with trans athletes on the field. But the exact opposite happened. There was an outpouring of support from women’s rugby teams across the board, with players donning trans flags at games in protest.

Rugby in the U.S. is uniquely queer and trans friendly. “While most trans-exclusionary policies in sports face opposition, advocates say that no sport has seen the immediate, collective cry of resistance that US women’s rugby has in the aftermath of its ban,” The Guardian reports. Even when World Rugby first began adopting anti-trans policies in 2020—the first international sports federation to do so—USA Rugby resisted.

But World Rugby wouldn’t budge, and not long after Trump’s return to office, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee followed suit. USA Rugby finally implemented its own ban on trans women in the women’s category in March. Otherwise, the organization faced the threat of decertification, which would seemingly render it powerless as a sports governing body, and further allow the government to “replace USA Rugby with a governing body of its own design,” The Banner reports.

But that hasn’t stopped rugby players across the country from continuing to compete—and continuing to fight. Your Scrumhalf Connection, a women’s rugby news blog, called for a nationwide campaign for all women’s teams to rebrand as “open” or mixed-gender teams, rendering a restrictive women’s category functionally useless—there can’t be a competition in a category with no teams. The resulting campaign, Rugby for All, is continuing to work behind the scenes, The Guardian reported. The group is “building a collective bargaining movement across the sport.”

“As International Rugby Athletes, we love the game and have dedicated years of our lives to it, including doing the work that leaves rugby better than we found it,” the Rugby For All campaign mission statement reads. “We are deeply committed to equity and access for all girls and women, including trans girls and women. This is why we firmly oppose World Rugby’s reversal of inclusive policies that have allowed transgender women to train and compete in women’s rugby for decades.”

Countless other rugby teams are also speaking out against the ban, including the Golden Badgers of Golden, Colorado—a Division 1 team, meaning it competes at the most elite level. The Badgers posted in May that trans players “will always be welcome and protected on our team.”

Earlier this week, Ohio's Democratic nominee for governor, Amy Acton, made headlines as one of her party's most prominent political candidates to stake out an anti-trans stance, calling transgender girls "boys" and declaring that she would enforce Ohio's sports ban, which she cast as a matter of "fairness" and "kids' health and safety." The rebuke from her own party was severe. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus, an official advisory group of the state party, issued a blistering page-long statement declaring that its members were now less willing to doorknock for her—before the post puzzlingly vanished shortly thereafter, prompting days of questions about why criticism of Acton's anti-trans stance had been scrubbed. Now, after prodding by Erin In The Morning, the caucus has revealed the answer: the Ohio Democratic Party itself demanded the criticism be removed, effectively barring those within the party from publicly critiquing a major candidate's transphobia.

The intra-party firestorm began shortly after the Supreme Court's ruling in West Virginia v. B.P.J., in which the Court held that Title IX does not protect transgender athletes and that the law's protections extend only to "biological sex"—breaking with years of lower court precedent. Asked for her reaction by the Toledo Blade, Acton stunned voters in her own party by calling transgender girls boys and vowing to enforce Ohio's ban, endorsing its premise outright: "I do not support boys playing in girls sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor I will enforce and uphold the law," Acton said. "As a doctor, public servant, and a mom, I will always stand up for fairness and protect kids' health and safety."

Criticism was swift and severe—and perhaps the most prominent rebuke came from inside her own party infrastructure. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus released a page-long statement declaring that its members would be less likely to knock doors for a candidate who had thrown trans kids under the bus in a state with some of the most severe anti-trans laws in the country. "ZERO Ohioans have become better able to buy groceries by keeping child sport players away from their favorite sport," the caucus wrote. "Our hearts break for those kids. Those who disagree with that will never vote—let alone doorknock—for Amy Acton." Its members were less willing to volunteer, the caucus said, "not out of malice, but out of the bad feeling in our chests." And it noted standing issues with the candidate not inviting LGBTQ+ voices into her campaign room: "Any one of us could have warned her of that natural consequence if any one of us had been in the room with her."

That post was quickly taken down, with no explanation. After several sources reached out to Erin In The Morning with inside information, we sent the caucus a request for comment. We never received an email back—but shortly after, the caucus posted publicly on Facebook, revealing exactly what had happened: the Ohio Democratic Party had demanded the criticism be removed. The caucus protested, appealed, but then relented. The criticism never went back up. Whatever the rule's official purpose, its effect in practice was unmistakable: the “progressive” arm of the Ohio Democratic Party is not permitted to publicly call out its own nominee's transphobia.

“A lot of people have been asking why we removed our statement addressing Amy Acton’s comments regarding transgender athletes. As a new caucus, we are still learning the ropes when it comes to being an internal part of the ODP. While operating outside of the party, we were afforded a bit more freedom with respect to our communications with the public. By posting a statement without going through the official approval process we inadvertently broke the rules we agreed to when we were recognized as an internal caucus,” stated the Progressive Caucus.

“We don’t necessarily agree with this policy and we are still negotiating how we can best comply with the party’s regulations while continuing to advocate for our members. However, despite our protests, ODP insisted that the post be removed and we follow procedure…. After deleting the original statement, we promptly asked about submitting the post for approval through the proper channels so that it could be reposted. At this point, ODP staff informed us that a meeting with Acton was on the table. After thorough discussion, caucus leadership determined this offer aligned with our goal to bring our message directly to her.”

You can see the full post here:

The news threatens to rock the party further, because the scandal is no longer just about the candidate. Acton called transgender girls "boys" and endorsed a sports ban; the party responded by disciplining the people who objected. The Ohio Democratic Party has now applied more pressure on its progressive caucus to quiet its criticism of anti-trans politics than it has applied on its own nominee to stop embracing them. One arm of the party endorsed discrimination and faced no visible consequence. Another arm objected and was forced into silence.

This is a moment worth marking for those who follow anti-transgender politics. Most state Democratic parties, even in deep-red states, have avoided endorsing trans sports bans. When Congress voted on a national ban early last year, just two Democrats supported it—members in swing districts held the line, and when the ban reached the Senate, not a single Democrat broke ranks. But there have been cracks. Gavin Newsom opened his podcast by telling Charlie Kirk that trans athletes in girls' sports are "deeply unfair." And in May, eight House Democrats crossed the aisle to pass a national forced outing bill—the largest Democratic defection on any standalone anti-trans bill of the modern panic.

The consequences of this shift could be severe. Some warn that a Ramaswamy victory would be worse for transgender Ohioans. But others see a deeper danger: an Acton victory built on anti-trans capitulation would teach Democrats everywhere a horrific lesson. It would spread the idea, through a party that has so far remained a relatively stalwart opposition, that embracing transphobia is what winning requires. That result could be more disastrous for transgender people than any individual right-wing victory. As long as trans people have an opposition party standing in unity against anti-trans policies, every ban, every restriction, every law remains reversible. But if enough Democrats come to see transphobia as acceptable—necessary, even—then trans rights could be eroded for a generation, with no mechanism left to reverse the losses, similar to what is currently happening with Labour in the UK. That is why, to those who understand the stakes, comments like Acton's likely read as a cancer on the party. And a candidate willing to throw transgender people under the bus to win has seemingly told every other minority exactly what their protection is worth when the polling gets tight.

In Ohio, this debate is no longer theoretical, but now is part of the political landscape, with a nominee who calls trans girls "boys," and a party apparatus that decided the real problem was the people who objected. The ODP got what it demanded. The post is gone. But the party has confused deleting dissent with resolving it. The caucus members who wrote "not out of malice, but out of the bad feeling in our chests" will not see that feeling go away just because a post was deleted.

Update: The Vice Chair of the Ohio Democratic Party Pride Caucus has also posted a statement, where at the very end, she clearly calls out the Ohio Democratic Party and says "I'm posting this strictly in my capacity as a trans advocate" and telling ODP to "save yourself a phone call, because I will not be taking this down"

In light of recent anti-trans athlete rulings from the Supreme Court, a senior member of the Heritage Foundation is imagining a future that looks a lot like the past: one where a key provision of Title IX, a foundational law preserving gender equality, is gutted; one where women in sports and in academia are sidelined in deference to men; one where trans people don’t exist at all.

Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity is authored by Boise State University professor Dr. Scott Yenor. Relying on sexist stereotypes, it calls for the government to let some schools dismantle competitive women’s athletics, which is already comparatively underresourced, and let women funnel into more “feminine” physical activities, like yoga, hiking clubs, and team cheerleading (not to be confused with Stunt, the competitive cheerleading-adjacent sport that gained full NCAA championship status just this year). Such activities don’t come with the scholarships and opportunities that elite sports do.

Experts have been sounding the alarm about this threat since the inception of Project 2025, the far-right’s political playbook spearheaded by the dark money of the Heritage Foundation. The same regressive notions about sex, gender, and biological essentialism weaponized against trans women athletes are being deployed against cisgender women, too.

Yenor is a senior research fellow at Heritage. In his spare time, he is a member of a secretive Christian nationalist group that’s paid homage to the Afrikaner nationalist movement—white supremacists of apartheid-era South Africa, The Guardian reports.

At the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, Yenor said in no uncertain terms that women ought to be relegated to the home and be subordinate to men. “Yenor detailed what he sees as the ‘evils’ of feminism, labeled ‘independent women’ as ‘medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome’ and decried colleges and universities as ‘the citadels of our gynecocracy,’” The Associated Press reports.

As per the AP, he continued, “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers [...] not finding every reason for young women to delay motherhood until they are established in a career or sufficiently independent.”

Efforts to recruit more women into fields like engineering, medicine and law should be replaced with efforts to recruit more men, Yenor said. “If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that’s not a failure. It’s kind of a cause for celebration.”

With these comments in mind, Yenor’s report—already dripping with contempt for women’s rights—takes on an even more ominous tone. He describes Title IX as “a powerful engine of feminist social engineering,” arguing that (cisgender) women’s ambition, competitive drive, career aspirations, and independence are an affront to “the destiny written in her sex or biology.” What women really need, in his telling, is preparation for homemaking and child-rearing.

“The current Title IX regime as applied to sports (and elsewhere) is part of a sustained social engineering effort that is designed to produce a new sort of woman—one that is more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented toward the goods of family and motherhood,” Yenor writes, denouncing the “nature-denying extremism” and “coercion of America’s Title IX enforcement regime.” He laments the potential of competitive sports to cause “menstrual disruption” in student athletes and praises more “moderate” activities because it “assists fertility” of cisgender girls.

“This is only the most recent evidence that legal theories that rely on anti-trans talking points are carefully crafted to undermine civil rights protections generally,” Zane McNeill, a legal fellow at Lawyers for Good Government, told Erin in the Morning. “Although some of its arguments may seem far-fetched, the theories espoused by the Heritage Foundation have a tendency to show up in federal policy. For instance, the Heritage Foundation was one of the main organizations behind the conservative policy blueprint, Project 2025, which has now been more than 50 percent implemented by the Trump administration.”

The crux of Yenor’s report focused on one aspect of Title IX in particular: “proportionality mandates,” as he puts it. It’s a prong of a Title IX test of legal compliance that stipulates opportunities for women athletes should be proportionate to the number of women on campus. For example, if 60% of students on campus are women, then roughly 60% of that school’s potential roster for competitive athletics should be women, too. In other words, it’s not a required quota; it’s a push for equal opportunity and equal funding. And it’s not even universally binding, as the proportionality test is just one metric that can be used to evaluate a school’s Title IX compliance. It is, however, the most common.

Yenor’s proposal would undo decades of progress and take a more hands-off approach to women’s rights in sports. It would pave the way for sex stereotypes to manifest to preserve his proclaimed “humane social order.” If it materializes, Yenor’s plan could let schools replace elite women’s sports and competitions—including the prestige, potential income, and scholarships that come with them—with yoga classes and exercise clubs. In Yenor’s mind, women simply don’t possess the same desire for competition and contact sports as their male peers.

Further, the Yenor plan would carve out exceptions to Title IX data collection when it comes to “major revenue producing male sports”—most notably football, which journalist Katelyn Burns notes takes up a hugely disproportionate amount of competitive spots for men’s college teams.

The fact that there are fewer opportunities for elite women athletes is simply something to let be, Yenor argues; it is largely natural.

But experts, including those who wrote and passed this law decades ago, know that’s just not true. “The drafters recognized that the low participation of women in sports at the time of Title IX enactment was not because there was no interest. It was because they weren’t given opportunity,” said Shiwali Patel, the Senior Director of Education Justice at the National Women’s Law Center.

“Once you give them that opportunity, the interest develops, because then they can see what it’s like to play sports, develop those skills, and be in those spaces,” Patel told Erin in the Morning. “It’s mutually reinforcing in that way—the more you create that opportunity, the more interest you’ll see.”

Meanwhile, in Yenor’s eyes, while women’s supposed athletic inferiority is biological “destiny” not to be tampered with, gender disparities that disfavor boys necessitate outside intervention: Men are falling behind women when it comes to college enrollment and academic achievement, and Yenor blames, in part, gender equality laws. He argues that women’s athletic success is taking away resources that could be given to men’s teams, thereby stifling men’s access to college education.

“Reducing real male athletic opportunities at the very moment young men are falling behind in higher education has created many harms downstream,” he writes. “Restoring a healthier balance involves protecting and even expanding men’s sports while allowing natural variation in program offerings. Such a balanced approach could help to draw more young men to college. Addressing the growing boy crisis in education is not incidental to the health of our institutions or our families; it is central to the recovery of a flourishing citizenry.”

Dr. Anima Adjepong, the Department Head of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, put it simply: “It’s incredibly sexist,” they said.

Even some Democrats have adopted this harmful rhetoric. Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate for the 2026 elections, Amy Acton, became the latest on the left to turn on trans children, referring to transgender girls as “boys playing in girls’ sports” and saying she disagreed with it on the grounds of “kids’ health and safety.” She joins the ranks of Congressman Seth Moulton from Massachusetts, Congressman Tom Suozzi of New York, and California Governor Gavin Newsom on that front.

“The attack on trans women in sports was only a step and a broader attack on women,” Adjepong told Erin in the Morning. “It’s important to always remember that when we’re pushing back.”

You can read the full report from Yenor here.

A growing uproar is consuming the Ohio Democratic Party after Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, locked in a dead heat with Vivek Ramaswamy, took her turn at anti-transgender politics. In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling that Title IX does not protect transgender people—a sweeping victory for the conservatives who have spent years engineering it—Acton was asked for her thoughts by a local newspaper, the Toledo Blade. She could have offered boilerplate responses or defended transgender kids. Instead, Acton embraced the ban, casting it as a matter of safety and vowing to enforce Ohio's "settled law." The fallout was swift: Democratic equality groups posted, then quietly deleted, criticisms of their own nominee, an intra-party rupture that now threatens the race itself—a pointless own-goal by a Democrat who apparently bought the idea that attacking her own most vulnerable constituents is how you win an election.

“I do not support boys playing in girls sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor I will enforce and uphold the law,” Dr. Acton said in a response to the Toledo Blade after the Supreme Court decision. “As a doctor, public servant, and a mom, I will always stand up for fairness and protect kids’ health and safety… While my opponent tries to divide us, I’m laser-focused on issues that matter most to Ohioans: lowering costs, cracking down on corruption, and cutting taxes for working families.”

Acton's response was quickly seen for its anti-trans sentiment. Ohio is home to some of the most extreme anti-trans laws in the United States, pushed by the same organizations whose attorneys defended trans sports bans at the Supreme Court. In 2024, the Republican supermajority overrode Governor Mike DeWine's veto to enact House Bill 68, which simultaneously banned gender-affirming care for trans youth and barred trans kids from school sports from kindergarten through college. Months later, legislators slipped a bathroom ban into an unrelated college-credit bill. The resulting law forces trans students out of bathrooms matching their gender identity at every school in the state—including private colleges like Antioch, where more than 80 percent of students identify as LGBTQ+. Trans Ohioans now risk their education, their healthcare, and their safety simply by existing in public.

The statement drew swift condemnation from Democrats across the state. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus, an official advisory arm of the state party, issued a blistering rebuke: "ZERO Ohioans have become better able to buy groceries by keeping child sport players away from their favorite sport. Our hearts break for those kids. Those who disagree with that will never vote—let alone doorknock—for Amy Acton." The caucus warned that its members were less willing to volunteer for her campaign "not out of malice, but out of the bad feeling in our chests.” The party's Pride Caucus answered Acton's framing directly: "There are no boys in girls' sports. Trans girls are girls." Maria Bruno, executive director of Ohioans Against Extremism, called it "frustrating to see an otherwise strong candidate take the bait by trying to triangulate a response rather than just being frank: can we please just leave trans kids alone and get back to talking about how we can make life more affordable for Ohioans?" And in The Buckeye Flame, writer NV Gay put it plainly: "On the last day of Pride month, the transgender community of Ohio was betrayed—all for the sake of winning an election." But the condemnation itself became a controversy. The Progressive Caucus’s post vanished from the group's Facebook page. The caucus has not responded to questions about why—leaving Ohio Democrats to wonder who, exactly, wanted the warning unsaid.

The candidate's statement is all the more puzzling given recent elections. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger had every opportunity to throw transgender people under the bus with similar statements and never took the bait—even as Republicans poured millions into anti-trans attack ads, with more than half of all GOP ad spending in the race devoted to the issue. Spanberger won by more than 15 points and Democrats flipped 13 House of Delegates seats, transforming a razor-thin 51–49 majority into a commanding 64–36 majority. New Jersey told the same story: Mikie Sherrill faced a similar anti-trans barrage and won by nearly 14 points, outrunning Governor Phil Murphy's 2021 margin in all 21 counties. And in 2023, Andy Beshear vetoed both a trans sports ban and a sweeping ban on gender-affirming care in Kentucky—a state Trump carried by 26 points—then won reelection by 5. The evidence is not ambiguous. Democrats who refuse to abandon trans people have a good track record. Acton chose the one strategy with no record of success.

The law Acton has promised to enforce reaches far beyond the marquee sports conservatives fixate on. While bans like Ohio's are sold through images of swimming and volleyball, House Bill 68 prohibits athletic associations from making case-by-case judgments about competitive fairness and instead imposes a blanket ban on transgender participation from kindergarten through college—replacing the Ohio High School Athletic Association's individualized policy, which functioned without incident for eight years and saw a grand total of 19 transgender girls compete among roughly 400,000 student athletes. This sweeping approach means transgender Ohioans can be excluded from activities such as darts, billiards, dancing, disc golf, fishing, and other sports where claims of unfair advantage are tenuous at best. Even chess—recognized as a sport by multiple universities—could fall under the ban's scope, echoing a recent move by FIDE, the international chess organization, to bar transgender women from women's chess competitions. Notably, each of these sports has seen targeted attacks from Republicans in recent years. This is what "settled law" looks like in practice: a teenager barred from throwing darts with their classmates or from playing chess with other girls.

What Acton's statement will cost her is not yet measurable. What is measurable is the race: the polling average separates her from Ramaswamy by less than a single point. In an election that close, transgender people are not a rounding error. They are one to two percent of the population—more when nonbinary people are counted—and every one of them has partners, parents, siblings, and friends: a web of people who love them and vote like it. If Acton loses this one by a point, it will not be because she stood up for transgender kids. More likely, it will be because she didn't.

Billionaire TERF influencer J.K. Rowling has announced that she will cover the legal costs of anti-trans groups named in a report by Amnesty International (UK), which called them “anti-rights.”

The report was retracted shortly after publication and replaced with a statement from the organization saying the report was uploaded “without going through the established internal review processes” and that its “language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK, which is why it was promptly removed.”

But the withdrawal and public acknowledgement was not enough to sate the organizations that have fought tooth and nail to exclude and/or antagonize the transgender community in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is notoriously more perilous for free speech than the United States. For our neighbors across the pond, the burden of proof lies with the defendant to prove the statement is true; here in the United States, the burden of proof lies with the aggrieved to prove that a statement is categorically false, and published knowingly or at least recklessly regardless. The US also benefits from “anti-SLAPP” laws to prevent such frivolous lawsuits waged by wealthy individuals or powerful corporations against those who criticize them.

So Rowling capitalized on the spectacle to, in essence, help dozens of groups in what appears to be an attempt to sue Amnesty into oblivion.

The saga began earlier this month, when Amnesty International (UK) released a report titled “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.” It released a similar report last year, but this year, it added a new category for what appears to be the anti-rights movement’s most rapidly growing sector: “Gender critical” groups, or groups that are antithetical to transgender rights and inclusion.

Rowling rushed to tweet about the situation.

She lauded “LGB” groups—another anti-trans buzzword, which, as the name suggests, describes groups that wish to erase transgender people from the queer liberation movement—like the Gay Men’s Network, an organization that has pushed for anti-trans policies. That group posted a public letter indicating it might sue Amnesty International for defamation. The Network demanded a retraction of the report and then claimed that Amnesty is guilty of “trying to control gay and lesbian free speech.”

In the day or so that followed, Rowling retweeted around a dozen similar letters. The posted letters include groups like Genspect, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that threatened Amnesty International with legal action, as well as groups like LGB Alliance and Sex Matters.

Amnesty International (UK) did not formally reply to a request for comment for this piece.

Gender critical activists, often financed by Rowling, rely on legal “guerilla warfare” said one U.K.-based trans rights organizer, who could only speak to Erin in the Morning if granted anonymity. The tactic is familiar: Wear down non-profits and individuals who dare speak out against anti-trans and anti-rights groups. They don’t have to win a lawsuit; they can just file again, and again, and again, draining valuable time and resources.

“They have sued organizations into the ground,” the advocate said.

Some context for just a handful of these groups so up in arms about being labeled as hateful: Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy for Sex Matters, gave a speech at a Genspect conference (both are groups on the anti-rights list) about how “beauty” is “inimical to trans bullshit.

She also boasted about manufacturing a moral and medical panic about how, although only a “small” segment of trans kids are prescribed puberty blockers, it has been a strategic “rhetorical device” to erode the rights of transgender people more broadly.

Depending on who you ask, TERFs are considered either a self-branded liberal faction of gender critical ideology, or a different term for what is essentially the same movement. TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” a term to describe self-proclaimed “feminists” who oppose giving transgender women and cisgender women equal rights.

Many of these TERF or “gender critical” groups have close ties to far-right Christian groups. DonorsTrust, the conservative donor behemoth and primary financier of initiatives like Project 2025, also forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups like the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and Thoughtful Therapists, both of whom made the “anti-rights” list because, as Amnesty International (UK) among many others have put it, they promote “conversion practices.”

One major point of contention was the inclusion of Rowling’s own organization, Beira’s Place. It does not primarily seem to function as any sort of advocacy organization. Rather, it’s a women’s shelter for those fleeing domestic violence, but it also has an explicit anti-trans policy, banning transgender women from accessing its services.

However, as the report explained, none of these groups exist in a vacuum. “These entities must be understood as an ecosystem sharing values, goals, strategy and tactics and, for some of them, formal collaboration,” it reads.

Amnesty isn’t the first or last institution or expert to call out gender critical ideology for being anti-rights. UN Women has published materials saying as much.

Meanwhile, University of Sheffield sociologist Dr. Sally Hines has called this framework “deeply conservative.” In the Journal for Gender Studies, she writes that “despite its origins within a branch of radical feminism, [gender-critical ideology] has a profoundly misogynist agenda that stands opposed to the rights of women.” It is a “key force within a current conservative pushback against the rights of women and minoritized sexual groups.”

Gender critical activists continue to use the language of oppression to characterize their plight. Many say “TERF” is a slur. Others believe criticizing a group because of its arguably regressive politics is grounds for a lawsuit.

Despite the fact that the report was pulled down, Erin in the Morning was able to retrieve a copy reposted by an anti-trans news outlet. You can read a full version of that archived version below.

Report A Growing Threat The Anti Rights Movement In The Uk July 2026

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Short summary of updates: The legislative season of 2026 in state legislatures has led to continued degradation of transgender rights across the United States. Meanwhile, nationwide, federal policies continue to lead to enormous legal difficulties for transgender people. In the latest update, Idaho becomes the fourth-ever “Do Not Travel” state for transgender people, and may be the harshest of all such states, where bathroom usage can lead to 5-year prison sentences. Meanwhile, South Carolina expanded its bathroom ban to universities, causing its risk to rise to “Worst Laws Passed.” For youth, the map remains relatively unchanged, with Idaho likewise elevating to “Do Not Travel.”

About The Map

I have tracked anti-transgender legislation for 5 years. Every day, I’ve gotten messages from worried people wondering how they are supposed to assess their risk of staying in their home state. The messages range from parents of trans youth wondering if their children will be taken from them to trans teachers wondering if their jobs will be safe in coming years. Sometimes people just want to know if there is a safer state they can move to nearby.

I created the legal risk map specifically to help answer that question. Now more than ever, it is a question that needs answering for so many transgender people facing forced medical detransition, arrests for using the bathroom, bans on the use of our names, pronouns, and identification documents, and many other curtailments of our rights to exist in public life.

Methodology

The methodology used is primarily qualitative, with a scoring-rubric element for the worst bills. Part of the methodology is my own expert assessment of laws, of which I am well equipped to do. I have read thousands bills targeting transgender people in the last few years. I have watched hundreds of hours of hearings on anti-trans legislation and am fully aware of all of the players nationally as well as where they are making their pushes against trans rights. I have followed the vote count and regularly talk to activists on the ground in each state. I am looking at how similar states are moving in their legislative cycles. Lastly, I watch for statements by governors and bill drafts to see if the Republican party in various states seems to be pushing anti-trans legislation heavily - you can see many examples of such legislation in this newsletter.

In terms of actual laws, I keep a rubric of the various types of laws that target transgender people. For transgender youth, the most concerning laws are those that prohibit gender-affirming care and mandate medical detransition. Additionally, bathroom bans, laws that rigidly define sex as binary, and restrictions on social transition are other key factors that negatively impact a state’s ranking. For transgender adults, the primary legislative concerns include adult gender affirming care bans, bathroom bans, prohibitions on drag specifically aimed at trans people and pride events, restrictions on changing birth certificates and drivers licenses, and laws that end legal recognition for trans people entirely. These factors play a significant role in how I assess and rank a state’s legislative risk.

The Adult Trans Legal Risk Assessment Map

Moves in this update: Idaho (Worst Laws → Do Not Travel), South Carolina (High Risk → Worst Laws)

• Summary of updates: Idaho has moved into the highest risk level on this map, “Do Not Travel.” This is not an move ever taken lightly. However, with the passage of Idaho’s felony bathroom ban with up to 5 year prison sentences, the state firmly belongs in this category. Though a lawsuit has partially blocked the law, the law remains in effect anywhere a gender neutral or family restroom exists, meaning transgender people must search for a gender-neutral restroom or else they might risk a felony in Idaho. In South Carolina, the bathroom ban there has been expanded to colleges and universities, raising the risk level in the state.

Nationwide Risk: Worst Policies In Effect. The wave of executive orders targeting transgender Americans has reshaped the national landscape in chilling fashion. These directives have forced nonprofits to scrub the word “transgender” from their websites, stripped transgender history from the Stonewall National Monument, withdrawn federal funding from schools and hospitals that recognize or research transgender people, and imposed new barriers to obtaining passports and legal documents. The result is a sweeping, nationwide rollback of rights and recognition for transgender adults. For international visitors, the risk is even more severe: citing the sharp escalation in legal and bureaucratic targeting, several countries have issued travel advisories. Following suit, I’ve designated the United States a “Do Not Travel” zone for non-essential travel for transgender people without a full understanding of the legal environment, due to the heightened risk of visa revocation, denial of entry, or detention.

Here are the categories and where each state falls:

• Do Not Travel (FL, ID, KS, TX): Four states have earned “Do Not Travel” advisories: Idaho, Florida, Kansas, and Texas. Kansas bathroom ban allows for everyday citizens to seek out transgender people in bathrooms and sue them for large sums of money, creating a bounty hunter system in the state. Meanwhile, Idaho’s ban can result in 5-year prison sentences. Florida has a law that allows for the arrest of transgender people for using bathrooms according to their gender identity and another policy targets transgender people’s drivers licenses. Florida has also put into effect a policy that says trans people “misrepresenting” their gender on their drivers license could be guilty of fraud and has begun erasing Pride crosswalks across the state. Local LGBTQ+ orgs as well as HRC have issued travel advisories for the state. This analysis likewise concurs with such a rating. In Texas, the state is not only ignoring court ordered drivers license changes for trans adults, but it is also creating a database of people attempting to make such changes. A new statewide bathroom ban that has already resulted in detainment makes the state the Do Not Travel on this list.

• The Worst States (AL, AR, IA, IN, LA, MS, OH, OK, ND, SC, SD, TN, UT, WV, WY): These states have passed deeply troubling legislation targeting transgender adults in extremely harmful new ways. Utah has a bathroom ban for transgender adults. Alabama has also passed a Don’t Say Gay bill that includes a bathroom ban on college campuses. Many states, including Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, and others listed in this category have gone so far as to legislatively erase transgender people, effectively removing any legal rights associated with their gender identities. Other states, such as North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, prohibit any changes to birth certificates, forcing trans people to out themselves when showing their documents. These states also could start targeting adult gender affirming care - Florida has already done so, banning 80% of such care.

• High-Risk States (GA, MO, NE, NH, MT): All of these states have passed anti-trans laws, but they haven’t reached the same level of severity as the worst states. Missouri for example, prohibits gender-affirming care for incarcerated adults as well as transgender youth and have seen new laws proposed this cycle going even further. Nebraska’s governor has issued an executive order ending legal recognition of trans people. Additionally, some of these states have laws that permit the refusal of medical care to LGBTQ+ individuals on religious grounds. Although each of these states has laws targeting transgender adults, none have done so to the extent of the worst states. Montana is a special case on this list, in that it has passed laws that would normally place it among the worst states, but those laws have repeatedly been blocked in court.

• Moderate-Risk States (AK, KY, NC): These states have either passed one or two laws aimed at transgender adults or have enacted multiple laws targeting transgender youth, or are advancing negative laws quickly. For states focusing on trans youth, history shows they are more likely to introduce anti-trans legislation for adults in subsequent years. Most of these states are under Republican control, either through supermajorities in the legislature or Republican governorships. Many have enacted “Don’t Say Gay” provisions, which frequently result in the banning of transgender teachers. Additionally, many have passed religious refusal rights bills. However, most of these states have either not yet ventured into anti-trans adult legislation or have only passed milder forms of such laws.

• Low-Risk States (AZ, DE, ME, MI, NV, PA, VA, WI, DC): These states have largely refrained from targeting transgender adults, although they haven’t taken extraordinary steps to protect adult transgender rights either. For example, Arizona and Virginia have enacted anti-trans policies affecting youth but, due to state-specific factors, appear unlikely to extend such policies to adults. Conversely, Michigan, and Nevada have enacted fairly robust non-discrimination policies but fall short in ensuring healthcare equity and providing protections for incarcerated transgender individuals. Maine has increased in risk due to capitulation to Trump over sports bans in the University of Maine system. While these states generally offer a safer environment for transgender adults, they stop short of going the extra mile to make their jurisdictions unequivocally safe places to reside. In the case of the District of Columbia, it may fall under attack from Congress and executive actions, meaning it can no longer be considered “most protective.” This most recently was manifested with the DC House bathroom ban.

• Most Protective States (CA, CO, CT, HI, IL, MA, MD, MN, NJ, NM, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA): These states have gone above and beyond in safeguarding the rights and well-being of transgender individuals, making them highly desirable places to live for those in search of security. States like Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington have enacted comprehensive health insurance laws that cover facial hair removal and an expanded range of medical procedures. Each of these states offers refugee protections for individuals fleeing more repressive states with anti-trans laws. Care is not only supported but also enjoys legal reinforcement from the state, ensuring accessibility as long as such treatments remain lawful at the national level. These states are the most likely to counteract federal anti-trans regulations.

The Youth Trans Legal Risk Assessment Map

Moves in this update: Idaho (Worst Laws → Do Not Travel)

• Summary of updates: This map quite closely resembles the last map published with respect to youth. No state in the United States can be considered low-risk for transgender youth, due to federal policies and mass capitulation to Trump’s threats with respect to sports and healthcare bans. Meanwhile, a recent Title IX SCOTUS decision raises the risk of anti-trans policies in blue states in the coming months. As such, the country remains between Moderate Risk and Do Not Travel depending on the state.

Nationwide Risk: Worst Laws Passed. A wave of executive orders has targeted transgender youth in sweeping and extreme ways. Nonprofits have halted services for trans youth, healthcare providers face federal bans via executive orders, and teachers have been warned they could be investigated for “practicing medicine without a license” simply for using a trans student’s chosen name. The cumulative effect is a chilling rollback of basic recognition and care—one that signals even more punitive measures may be on the horizon.

This piece is being published in partnership with The Nation.

The Supreme Court upheld anti-trans athlete laws in the recent Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ decisions, declaring that Title IX, the bedrock of gender-based protections in public schools, does not extend to transgender student athletes. On its surface, the rulings are narrower than the decision many activists and scholars had feared. They target school sports in Idaho and West Virginia but sidestep broader questions about trans rights under the 14th Amendment, questions probably best left unanswered by a right-wing bench.

But the consequences of the rulings will go beyond those two states and beyond sports. The court’s decisions are part of a global campaign to legislate, litigate, and segregate trans people out of public life. This was made clear during oral arguments back in January; attorneys and justices alike scrutinized the bodies of trans girls, debating the size and shape of their organs, muscles, and bones. Yet the banality of the scene—procedural buzzwords, shuffling papers, cordial back-and-forths couched with honorifics—almost obfuscated the violence of it all.

Alan Hurst, then Idaho’s solicitor general, said transgender girls posed “a real threat” to safety and fairness in women’s athletics. “We cite Your Honors to the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s report that says 600 women have lost 890 medals in 29 different sports,” he said, arguing that (presumed) cisgender women are losing en masse to transgender ones and that trans women and girls don’t belong in women’s spaces.

The United Nations official in question is Reem Alsalem—the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She filed an amicus brief with the court supporting trans-exclusionary laws. This comes after years of pushing reports at the United Nations that painted trans women as a danger to their peers. The court’s final opinion echoed the language in her brief.

Hurst’s comment about Alsalem’s work has a few problems. Among them: The numbers are not particularly meaningful or accurate. But facts have never stopped Alsalem. Through her writings to the United Nations, she has become a leading mouthpiece for far-right propaganda and misinformation about trans people, propelling untruths into policy and law and declaring war, in her words, on the concept of “gender equality” itself.

The medals statistic cited by Hurst has been repeatedly debunked. In April 2025, a segment from Last Week Tonight With John Oliver broke down the dubious methodology behind it, and reporting from Erin in the Morning further found the list of trans medal winners on which it is based contains numerous errors and misleading practices—such as the inclusion of women like Imane Khelif, who is not trans, and counting “sports” like poker and competitive video gaming. Erin in the Morning’s investigations also found the anonymous website that developed the stat emerged from an online forum of anti-trans extremists who had been banned from other social media platforms due to hate speech.

Nevertheless, Alsalem cited the medals statistic again in her September 2025 amicus brief with the Supreme Court.

In that brief, she argues that transgender girls should not be awarded the same protections as cisgender girls. Instead, she proposes that all sports have a strictly defined women’s category and an “open” category, which would require grouping transgender and intersex girls with men—and she wants this separation codified in law.

The document makes clear that Alsalem’s recommendations were “neither sought nor given by the United Nations.” And the reports she writes for the United Nations are technically informational, not authoritative; they do not represent the views of the United Nations. This distinction is often lost on the countless lawmakers, media outlets, and laypersons who see her work on UN letterhead or her posts from a UN X account and understandably assume that they are consuming information from a credible source.

Coming with the apparent imprimatur of the United Nations, Alsalem’s work is providing the veneer of legitimacy to anti-trans disinformation. The elevation of her work before the Supreme Court shows both the effectiveness of her project and how it undermines the rights of the very group she is duty-bound to protect: women and girls.

Alsalem proudly calls herself a “normal non-deranged woman from the UN.” (It was her longtime bio on X.) This is already controversial. For starters, as many of her critics emphasize, this makes it sound like she is employed by or represents the views of the United Nations. She does not. Alsalem was appointed in 2021 the Human Rights Council. All rapporteurs are non-salaried human rights consultants, each with their own thematic or geographic specialty. Alsalem has conducted critical research on topics like femicide and women facing genocide in Gaza.

But 15 months into her first term, Alsalem began to use her association with the United Nations to try to block the expansion of trans rights. In 2022, she sent a formal letter to government officials opposing a Scottish bill facilitating trans people’s ability to obtain accurate legal identification Since then, Alsalem has repeatedly bolstered attacks on gender equality across the globe, including through her UN-commissioned reports—one of which was a 2024 treatise on women in sports, which appears to be what pushed the warped statistic about medals into the mainstream.

In June 2025, Alsalem took the stage at the UN headquarters in Geneva, a sprawling art deco structure, to present her report on Sex-Based Violence Against Women and Girls: New Frontiers and Emerging Issues. By the time Alsalem stepped up to the dais, hundreds of human rights and medical groups had already denounced what they characterized as an abuse of her position. One statement, whose signatories include Planned Parenthood Global and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA), accused Alsalem of “manipulating data” and “undermining” long-held policy reforms. Another statement co-signed by Amnesty International says her report “misuses legal, scientific, and testimonial evidence, ignoring established methodologies for interpreting human rights.”

“Sex is as binary as it gets,” Alsalem told the assembly. This, according to the World Health Organization, UN Women, most if not all other rapporteurs, and essentially every other part of the United Nations, is false. Her report derides the concept of “gender identity,” which she falsely describes as “the feeling that some individuals have of not identifying with the sex observed at birth.” (Broadly speaking, that is called being transgender; “gender identity” is something all people have, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender.)

Alsalem argues against the idea of “gender equality” altogether. She wants to replace it with the term “equality between men and women.” Enshrining this binary into international law would strip transgender and intersex people from gender-based protections, which Alsalem says should be replaced by the term “sex-based protections.” The Trump administration has followed suit. This is a talking point from the global “anti-gender” movement, which opposes the idea of gender itself. Human Rights Watch has called it a “global conspiracy myth,” and its roots go back to the 1980s when the Catholic Church feared that a gay and feminist movement was undermining the traditional family. This fantasy of a global gender cabal underlies the Supreme Court’s anti-trans ruling in BPJ and Hecox, as well as in Skrmetti, the 2025 decision that limited trans youth’s access to health care.

“Attacks on gender—including on women existing outside certain roles or LGBTQI+ people existing at all—are a bellwether for rising authoritarian practices,” Tarah Demant, the senior director at Amnesty International researching authoritarianism, told me. “When authoritarians or those in power attack ‘woke gender’ or LGBTQI+ people and their rights or women’s rights or sexual and reproductive rights, it’s the government and people in power exerting control over your body and life—defining who is valuable, who is fully human, and who gets rights.”

One would assume the reports of a UN special rapporteur would rely on rigorous academic research and reputable newsrooms. After all, the special rapporteur code of conduct instructs its purveyors to use “reliable sources” and to “be guided by the principles of discretion, transparency, impartiality, and evenhandedness.” But in an article published in Sexual Health Matters in 2024, scholars criticize Alsalem for her “odd” and “opaque citations” such as her repeated and vague references to “expert consults,” taking quotes out of their context, and using testimony “in direct opposition to what these submissions call for.”

Her sourcing sometimes traces back to far-right and anti-trans outlets and tabloids like Reduxx, The New York Post, and The Daily Mail or known anti-trans groups like Women’s Declaration International and the LGB Alliance. In one such case, she asserted that presumed-cis women were leaving women’s sports en masse over trans athletes. The citation linked back to an article from an anti-trans group about a recreational swimming pond with trans-inclusive policies.

The juxtaposition of her reports and the anti-trans media circuit creates a feedback loop, where far-right newsrooms and groups publish anti-trans propaganda, receive validation from Alsalem, and then spit it back out as if the source were the United Nations itself.

Well-known extremist groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, have been in lockstep with Alsalem. She hosted the ADF, an evangelical legal advocacy group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an anti-LGBTQ hate organization, on the official UN streaming platform for a discussion on the “issue” of trans athletes. And on X, she’s posted that gender-affirming care has “mutilated” and “dechilded” a generation, comparing it to the mass murder of children in Gaza.

“It’s an extraordinary thing,” said Beirne Roose-Snyder, a senior policy fellow at the Council for Global Equality. “For a lot of people who are very rules-bound and technical experts, you see a lot of anxiety and a lot of uncertainty about how to respond, because I don’t know that we’ve seen a special procedure mandate holder use their mandate to harm so proactively.”

Alsalem denounces anyone who calls her an “extremist,” but she advocates for laws that are even more restrictive than the ones in the most right-wing US states. In a 2025 report on “sex-based” violence, she calls for “all actors” to ban youth even from “social transitioning”—apparently meaning that she wants the government to prohibit children from being addressed by their preferred pronouns and name. She also seems to imply that those assigned female at birth cannot “meaningfully consent” to transitioning. On the other hand, she often describes trans women as sexual predators attempting to insinuate themselves into lesbian spaces and women’s facilities.

In email correspondence for this piece, Alsalem denied that her work is hateful or factually unsound. In spring 2025, during initial reporting for Erin in the Morning on the medals statistic, she wrote to me that she didn’t want to ban trans women from sports; she just wants to ban them from women’s sports and to deploy sex tests as a tool of enforcement. Her report acknowledges the violent history of sex tests but says that some athletes may have their sex “contested,” requiring a “non-invasive” investigation into their DNA.

“It’s such an immediate and direct attack on women to have this position that she takes,” explained Anima Adjepong, head of the gender studies program at the University of Cincinnati, who specializes in the politics of sport. They also run the nonprofit Silent Majority Ghana and have a forthcoming book on women’s sports in the region. They warned that sex testing disproportionately harms women of color.

“The history of sex testing within sports—they kept having to change it over and over again, because there’s not a clear, scientific, ‘answer’ for what constitutes a man,” Adjepong said. “And of course, actually, that’s not what they’re looking at, right? There’s not a clear answer for: What constitutes a woman?”

Meanwhile, the criticisms of Alsalem’s conclusions are matched by questions over the sources she uses to reach them. Over email, I asked Alsalem why she cited Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate and extremist groups in her work. She replied, “You may be interested to know that the Human Rights Council Presidency has indicated that defaming, attacking organizations or individuals that engage with the Human Rights Council... will not be tolerated for whatever reason.”

Much of her response to me was recycled later in a near-identical reply to Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, the full version of which you can read here.

But even by her own description of her duties, she violated UN instructions. She told me that as per guidelines for special rapporteurs, she used generic citations to protect transgender individuals from being identified. But her reports link to Fox News and anti-trans outlets and sources that reveal detailed information about people, including their deadnames. In other citations, she failed to redact identifying information about transgender student-athletes—the redactions can be removed simply by highlighting the text. This functionally outs these individuals on a global stage.

Still, Alsalem rejects the idea she wasn’t living up to her duties. “Only the UN Human Rights Council can determine whether or not she violated her duties,” she wrote to me. “You can make a complaint to the council. Otherwise, it is fair to say you are engaging in misinformation and disinfomeation.[sic]”

The process for waging such complaints, however, is obscure if not non-existent, and many human rights experts emphasized that a push to reprimand Alsalem is potentially dangerous. Special rapporteurs are central to the work of the Human Rights Council, and if one goes down, it could put targets on others. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian territories, already faces death threats and harassment campaigns.

“This is a really sensitive topic,” said a staffer from Transgender Europe and Central Asia who asked not to be named because of hostility toward the LQBTQ community in their region. “Not only because of the subject matter,” they said, but because the institutions upholding the special rapporteurs’ work are “constantly at risk.”

In the majority opinion for Hecox, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s reasoning is similar to that of Alsalem and her anti-gender movement: “Allowing a biological male athlete to compete on a girls’ team necessarily displaces or disadvantages a female athlete, replacing her on the roster, knocking her out of the starting lineup, reducing her playing time, depriving her of a medal, and the like.”

On July 9, Alsalem welcomed the court’s decision, saying, “The experiences of women and girls who have lost places on teams, podium positions, scholarships and opportunities deserve to be heard and taken seriously.” She urged states, educational institutions, and sporting bodies to ensure the ruling was applied across the United States. She also re-posted anti-trans rhetoric from Justice Clarence Thomas. It quoted from an account named “TERFs ‘r’ us.” (TERF is shorthand for “trans exclusionary radical feminist.”)

The full impact of the decision is yet to be seen, but experts warned me that the harms will go beyond the trans community. “Pitting groups against each other creates division, and perhaps the biggest influence that we see here is that many people believe this is an issue about trans people,” said Erika Castellanos, executive director of Global Action for Trans Equality. She warned that many of the same groups attacking trans rights are also targeting reproductive rights, queer rights, women’s rights, and free speech.

“The rhetoric that the advancement of the rights of one group removes rights of another group is a misunderstanding of how the human rights ecosystem works,” she said. “Everyone is affected by this.”

Incumbent Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey eviscerated Congressman Seth Moulton on his fairweather allyship for the trans community in a televised debate this week. Both lawmakers are vying for the Democratic Party nomination in this year’s Senate race.

It began with a question from a reporter aimed at Moulton about his prior comments on trans athletes. In 2024, after the Presidential election, Moulton told The New York Times that Democrats lost because they “spent too much time trying not to offend anyone.” He went on to say he wouldn’t want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

After Supreme Court decisions permitting state restrictions of trans athletes, however, Moulton called the ruling an “act of cruelty.”

During the hour-long debate, Tony Fay of WWLP 22News took Moulton head-on and asked him to clarify his stance. “Congressman, what is your position on trans athletes in school sports, and do you stand by what you said in the 2024 New York Times interview?”

Moulton, who went viral over videos depicting him getting booed at Pride and at a No Kings Rally, turned to the camera, telling LGBTQ constituents: “I’ve always stood with you.”

“I have seen the pain that you are going through because of this hateful Trump Administration,” he continued. “I have a 100% voting record from the Human Rights Campaign.”

He clarified that he said he simply wanted to foster “conversations” about trans athletes—a talking point openly touted by conservatives eager to get the left more “comfortable” stomaching anti-trans propaganda.

“Sometimes tough conversations, then, that’s the only way we’re going to be able to fight forward, because so far the only thing that’s happened in this Congress is the Republicans have put forward hateful legislation, and I’ve been proud to vote against every one of those bills. But where’s our fight, Democrats? Where are we taking action for transgender kids, protecting their healthcare, protecting you?”

Markey was having none of it. In response to Moulton’s comment touting his HRC approval rating, Markey pointed out: “The Human Rights Campaign has endorsed me in this race.” Markey also enjoys endorsements from trans rights groups like the Christopher Street Project, he said.

“Congressman Moulton decided that he was gonna throw trans kids under the bus, the political bus, and blame them for the loss of the 2024 election,” Markey continued. “Those kids are vulnerable. Those kids need love. Those kids don’t need to be scapegoated and blamed for what was wrong with the Democratic Party.”

He emphasized his role in sponsoring the Transgender Bill of Rights at the federal level. Among other provisions, the bill would codify equal access to public services, accommodations, and health care.

Though it has yet to gain traction in a majority-red legislature, Markey said he seeks “to enshrine in law those protections for trans kids that are enjoyed by every other American.”

Finally, Markey drew parallels to the kind of anti-trans athlete sentiments espoused by Moulton and to the very Supreme Court decision that Moulton would go on to condemn.

“The Supreme Court of the United States of America just last week took the same position that Congressman Moulton took last year,” Markey said. “They have now said that states across the country, and 29 have these laws, can discriminate against transgender kids.”

The Massachusetts Democratic primary vote will take place on September 1. At this time, almost every single poll points to Markey as the projected winner, though some polls do show a close race. Markey was also named a “Trans Equality Champion of the 118th Congress” by Advocates for Trans Equality.

Tyler Hack, executive director of the Christopher Street Project, told Erin in the Morning the group stands by its endorsement of Markey now more than ever.

“Ed Markey is a proven champion for trans rights,” Hack told Erin in the Morning after the debate. “His opponent, Seth Moulton, is known for two things: a failed 2020 presidential campaign that never made it to Iowa, and turning his back on trans kids immediately after the 2024 election. That’s unacceptable from any Democrat—let alone a Congressman representing a safe blue district.”

“This race offers a crystal-clear contrast: a progressive fighter leading the Trans Bill of Rights versus a coward who chose to throw trans people under the bus the moment he thought it was politically expedient,” they continued. “We’re standing with Ed Markey—because he stands with us.”

You can watch the exchange here:

Governor Pritzker rounded out Pride Month by signing a trio of bills that will protect transgender people’s privacy from out-of-state attacks—most notably, by removing testosterone from the list of prescriptions required by law to be added to a government database.

“The work will continue until all Illinoisans are safe, healthy, and free to express their truest selves,” said Governor JB Pritzker in a June 28 press release.

The Illinois Prescription Monitoring Program (ILPMP) is a longstanding interstate database that enables health care providers to track the prescription of certain substances, in order to curb drug abuse. Transgender people are often prescribed testosterone for hormone replacement therapy—it is most notably associated with trans men, but it may also be prescribed to any trans person who receives gender-affirming surgery impacting their hormone production.

The bill, HB 4834, also preemptively banned adding certain drugs to the program in the future—such as estrogen or mifepristone and misoprostol, a pair of medications used for at-home abortions.

Policies like this “protect trans people from invasive surveillance over their health care,” Alejandra Caraballo, a Harvard law instructor and privacy expert, told Erin in the Morning. In a 2025 report she penned for this newsletter, she explained how similar systems, called Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs), could be exploited to carry out anti-trans attacks.

“The database enabling this crackdown was never billed as a tool for political persecution,” she wrote. “PDMPs were originally established in the 2000s to combat the opioid epidemic and ‘doctor shopping’ for narcotics. Every U.S. state and territory now maintains a PDMP—an electronic registry of controlled substance prescriptions, typically Schedules II through V, that doctors and pharmacies are required to report.”

The ubiquity of this system means it could give bad actors from other states access to someone’s personal medical records, even without a warrant from the state where this care was rendered.

The signing of the law comes as a response to increased efforts by the federal government and red states across the country to reach into trans-friendly jurisdictions to prosecute providers. However, there are currently no public reports of a transgender person or a health care provider being successfully, directly prosecuted with information from a PDMP simply for providing, receiving, or being the parent of someone receiving gender-affirming care.

Hospital systems have comparatively faced more blowback from the Trump Administration, but it’s still important to remember they, too, have managed to avoid any sort of criminal convictions simply for offering gender-affirming care.

But that hasn’t stopped the Trump Administration from antagonizing them anyway, underscoring the importance of laws like this around the country as a protective measure. For example, NYU Langone received a criminal subpoena from the Northern District of Texas, a federal court, demanding information about trans youth care. The move is widely considered to be an act of judge-shopping from the Department of Justice; this district court, though thousands of miles away from New York City, is considered among the most conservative in the country.

It has continued to hang over the heads of trans people and their doctors everywhere.

“No one should fear being monitored or tracked for receiving hormone replacement therapy prescribed by their healthcare provider,” said Illinois State Senator Adriane Johnson, a Democrat. “Protecting medical information is essential to ensuring patients feel safe seeking care, asking questions, and making personal health care decisions.”

Cisgender men and cisgender women may also be prescribed the hormone for anything from cancer treatments to menopause symptom relief. Compared to other hormones associated with gender-affirming care (such as estrogen, progesterone, or spironolactone), testosterone access is especially scrutinized because it’s also heavily associated with drug abuse among cisgender athletes.

It’s also not the only protective law Pritzker signed that day. HB 5492 expands access to hormone therapy by mandating insurance companies cover up to a six-month supply of prescription hormone therapy when a pharmacist or health care provider deems it appropriate.

“In a time when gender affirming care is under constant attack by the federal government, dispensing prescriptions in bulk will give patients from Illinois and others traveling from out of state for care the assurance that they will have access to needed medications,” Pritzker’s press release says.

There was also HB 5095. This takes existing policy by Illinois’ Secretary of State, which makes it easier for people to choose their preferred gender marker on state IDs, and codifies it into law—making it a more permanent fixture, rather than a rule that can be changed on a whim by the next gubernatorial administration.

“Across the country, lawmakers are attempting to strip rights, erase identities, and target our most vulnerable community members,” said Channyn Lynne Parker, CEO of Equality Illinois.

“But here in Illinois, we are fighting back and winning,” Parker continued. “HB5095 preserves gender markers on state IDs; HB5492 expands access to hormone therapy; and HB4834 shields our most private medical information from surveillance. These are not small victories. They are a declaration that in this state, LGBTQ+ lives matter.”

HB 4834 went into effect upon Pritzker’s signing, and agencies have until the new year to transition to compliance. The other two laws will take effect on January 1, 2027.

While trans Americans grieved the Supreme Court decisions curbing gender-based rights, New Jersey offered a glimmer of hope.

After years of tireless advocacy from the LGBTQ community, the Garden State finally passed a shield law, A2218 in the Assembly and S2260 in the Senate. It crossed the finish line on June 30—the same day as the BPJ and Hecox decisions were issued.

The law will protect patients and providers of reproductive health care by instituting safeguards for abortion as well as gender-affirming care for trans people. It is now on its way to the Governor’s desk.

The law clarifies both abortion and transgender-affirming treatment are “legally protected” reproductive care. Advocates emphasized that the bill does not expand the kinds of care available to New Jerseyans or change medical guidelines—it simply institutes a stopgap so that out-of-state actors cannot impede the state’s self-governance and rendering of care.

“A law of another state that authorized a person or government entity to bring [...] legal action to deter, prevent, sanction, or punish any person engaging, aiding, or assisting in providing or prescribing any legally protected health care activity is against the public policy of this State,” the bill reads. This includes treatments like puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and surgery for trans adults and minors, so long as it does not violate New Jersey law otherwise.

“This bill is a firewall against outside interference,” said Khadijah M. Silver, a civil rights attorney and Director of Gender Justice & Health Equity at Lawyers for Good Government, in a press release sent to Erin in the Morning. They were instrumental in the passage of the bill. “New Jersey is drawing a clear line, requiring health care providers in this state answer only to the laws that already govern them—not to hostile actors in other states trying to reach across its borders.”

In 2023, then-Governor Phil Murphy, a Democrat, had signed an executive order creating shield protections, but without the codification of law, the provisions remained up in the air. New Jersey appears to be the last blue state to pass an intentionally trans-inclusive shield law, the final one in the country to do so after the Governor of Hawai’i signed one in late May.

While the efforts have been years in the making, the progressive state saw logistical and bureaucratic hurdles to the shield law’s passage, which were in large part exploited by state Republicans who refer to gender-affirming as care “madness.”

Current Governor Mikie Sherrill is expected to sign the bill.

After the bill failed to pass earlier this year, many trans patients and their families expressed frustration at the fact that the all-Democratic stronghold state could not get the bill over the line. “I’m terrified,” one parent of a trans teen told Erin in the Morning at the end of a prior legislative session, which was earlier in June. She said hundreds if not thousands of trans people, parents of trans youth, doctors, and activists have voiced their support for the measures.

“I don’t understand how I can live in New Jersey, which always says, like, ‘We’re the bluest of the blue.’”

The concern about shield laws has intensified as news broke of rapidfire subpoenas, both administrative and criminal, spread across the nation. From Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in the west to Boston Children’s Hospital in the east, pediatric gender clinics, which often serve legal young adults as well, have been ordered to fork over sensitive data to the Trump Administration.

But some, like NYU Langone, are fighting back against the demands—and it is, at least in part, working.

But not every state has laws like New York to compel the disclosure of subpoenas surrounding health care data, nor assurances that health care institutions will stand up for patients and providers. New Jersey’s law brings the state one step closer to that end.

“The Legislature finally affirmed that in New Jersey, we stand with evidence-based standards of medical care, and with those who provide it,” said Lauren Albrecht, senior director of advocacy and organizing at Garden State Equality, in a statement to Erin in the Morning.

“Truth won out—as did the hard work of our providers, advocates, allies, caregivers, and especially our legislative partners in getting this bill right.”

“The shield act is essential to ensuring that patients can access and providers can deliver reproductive healthcare in New Jersey without fear, intimidation, or interference,” said Assemblywoman Shanique Speight, a Democrat, in a recent press release. She is one of the bill’s primary Assembly sponsors.

“It responds to the real threats that undermine access to legally protected healthcare,” she continued. “As a state that values democracy and respects individual liberty, we are standing firm in our commitment to protecting personal choice and ensuring that legally authorized health care remains safe, accessible, and protected.”

The bill is slated to go into effect upon the Governor’s signature.

On June 30—the last day of the term and the final day of Pride Month—the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling that states may ban transgender athletes from women's and girls' sports, holding that Title IX permits schools to determine eligibility based on “biological sex.” The ruling, authored by Justice Kavanaugh, was narrower than some of the worst-case scenarios: it preserved Bostock, did not overtly strip transgender people of equal protection, and explicitly declined to decide whether states must exclude trans athletes. But its most consequential holding still has vast consequences. The Court declared that "sex" in Title IX "cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex"—a definitional ruling about the statute itself, not merely about sports. And though the majority deliberately avoided saying that blue states must discriminate against transgender people under Title IX, its holding leaves wide lanes for the Trump administration to pressure schools and colleges through funding threats and investigations, and for far-right organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom to file lawsuits targeting trans-inclusive policies in every state in the country.

The decision split along ideological lines, with all six conservative justices in the majority and the three liberal justices dissenting on equal protection. The majority declared directly, "The term 'sex' in Title IX, the Javits Amendment, and the Title IX regulations cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex." This ruling overturns years of lower court precedent. The Fourth Circuit, in Grimm v. Gloucester County, had held that Title IX's prohibition on sex discrimination protects transgender students' right to use bathrooms and play sports matching their gender identity. The Seventh Circuit, in Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District, reached the same conclusion. Those rulings—and the logic underlying them—were foundational to school policies across the country protecting transgender students in both red and blue states.

The ruling was not as sweeping as it could have been. The Court specified two important limiting principles. First, the majority explicitly stated that it was not deciding whether states that choose to allow transgender athletes to participate are in violation of Title IX—noting that "that question is currently the subject of litigation in some lower courts" and that "nothing in this opinion is intended to decide that question." This preserves, at least for now, the legal space for inclusive states to maintain their own policies. Second, the Court declined to resolve whether transgender people as a class are entitled to heightened constitutional protection under the Equal Protection Clause. This was one of the potential worst-case scenarios—a ruling on those grounds could have greenlit virtually any law targeting transgender people by declaring them undeserving of equal protection. Instead, the Court analyzed the sports bans as sex-based classifications subject to intermediate scrutiny, and found they satisfied that standard.

Ultimately, though, the impact of this ruling will likely be severe. The most immediate consequence is that states across the country now have clear Supreme Court authorization to enact education-based bathroom and sports bans targeting transgender students, with Title IX posing no barrier. But the damage will not be confined to red states. The Court gave a wide lane for lawsuits against schools and colleges in blue states that allow transgender athletes to participate. Though the majority deliberately avoided ruling on whether inclusive states are violating Title IX, it heavily endorsed the theory that even a single transgender athlete on a girls' team "displaces" cisgender athletes—devoting an entire passage to the zero-sum nature of sports, writing that "every athlete who makes a team takes a roster spot from another athlete" and "every competitor who wins a race or competition deprives another athlete of that victory, or medal, or prize." That displacement framework is the foundational legal theory behind ADF's lawsuits in Minnesota and other states, and it is central to the Trump administration's Title IX enforcement campaign against schools that include trans athletes. The Court did not adopt ADF's argument that Title IX requires exclusion. But it endorsed the factual premise on which that argument rests—and in litigation, the premise is often all you need.

A more likely and immediate impact of this ruling, though, is the ratcheting up of the Trump administration's pressure campaign against colleges, universities, and public school districts to capitulate to its anti-trans demands. Prior to the ruling, the administration conducted rushed Title IX investigations, finding school districts and universities across the country in violation of Title IX unless they voluntarily enacted bathroom bans, sports bans, dormitory restrictions, and more. Most of these institutions pointed to circuit court Title IX precedent requiring them not to discriminate as their shield against capitulation—telling the administration, in effect, that federal law compelled them to include trans students, not exclude them. That shield is now gone. And while institutions could still point to the Equal Protection Clause, the Court limited that avenue as well: the majority held that sex-based classifications satisfying even a general relationship to the state's interests are constitutional, eliminated the ability of individual plaintiffs to bring as-applied challenges showing a classification doesn't fit them, and declared that even if the factual premise underlying a ban is wrong—even if trans athletes on puberty blockers have no physical advantage—the ban survives anyway.

“This ruling is deeply harmful for transgender women and girls who only asked for the ability to participate in sports with their peers,” said Sasha Buchert, Senior Attorney and Director of the Non-Binary and Transgender Rights Project, Lambda Legal. “Countless studies have demonstrated the myriad benefits that come with participation in team sports. Now, one population, transgender youth and collegians, are targeted for specific and baseless discrimination. We will not be deterred and will continue to fight back to secure the equal participation that all youth, including transgender youth, deserve.”

You can read the full ruling here:

24 43 2b35

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