A woman stepped up to the mic at Rob Sand’s recent campaign event in Iowa City and said she felt compelled to speak on behalf of her neighbor, a 13-year-old boy who loves to play baseball.

This is a matter of national importance because the woman’s neighbor is transgender, and because Sand, in his run as the Democratic candidate for Iowa governor, voiced opposition to allowing trans athletes to play on the team aligning with their gender identity.

“You know the right wing wants elected officials like you to quack, ‘oh I don’t think men should play in women’s sports,’” the audience member told Sand during a Q&A session.

Rob Sand has come under fire in recent weeks after a conservative talk show host asked if he supported “biological men” in women’s sports.

During that interview, Sand replied, “No.”

Now, in front of a packed room, a voter asked Sand: “Can you make clear that you support trans people, you support trans athletes, you are for equal rights for everybody?”

The crowd burst into applause.

Apparently, Sand could not tell this prospective constituent that he supported equal rights for everybody.

“There have been two laws passed related to transgender folks recently,” Sand said. “One is the sports question. I tend to agree with them on that, and I know you might be disappointed in me.”

The crowd, who had applauded his response to most every other question, stayed quiet. Silence. But someone cut through the silence. “Coward!” a voice yelled from the crowd.

Then, Sand continued, “Okay, here’s the other one. They repealed civil rights. So now in the state of Iowa, you can be fired from your job, and you can be evicted from your apartment because of who you are. And I think that’s wrong, also, for the same reason. It’s fairness. That’s not fair to people.”

He also said he would veto any “culture war” bill that comes his way.

The audience clapped.

Still, it seems Iowans did not take kindly to Sand’s revisions to the concept of “equal rights.” In Sand’s definition, “equal rights for everybody” appears to apply to only some people.

In other words, inequality.

“I want everybody to feel welcome in this state,” Sand said. “That doesn’t mean that everybody gets exactly what they want.”

Sand isn’t the only Democrat allowing himself to be pulled to the right on equal rights issues when it comes to trans people. The number of Democratic candidates who accept right-wing narratives targeting transgender people has increased this midterm cycle.

Among the worst offenders on this list of Democratic defectors is Amy Acton, who affirmed her support for Ohio’s trans sports ban and then skipped the meeting her own campaign had organized in the fallout. There’s Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, who has voted for practically every anti-trans bill or provision that has come across his desk. And nearly two dozen more Democratic candidates are being tracked by Erin in the Morning over their anti-trans comments on the campaign trail, anti-trans ads on the airwaves, or anti-trans votes for incumbents in the legislature.

You can see the full exchange between Sand and voters in Iowa City here:

Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed didn’t mince words at a recent campaign event, when one Michigan student asked him about protecting gender-affirming care. It was no small gesture at a time when some Democrats are shying away from full-throated support for protecting equal rights and privacy for trans people.

“My friend and I were wondering together what is your plan—to not only like, legislate health care in terms of like abortion and also gender-affirming health care, but like, to educate the public on that,” the audience member asked. “Because the controversy and misinformation is just so widespread right now.”

“I went to whole-ass medical school,” El-Sayed told the crowded room at Michigan State University as part of an event held by More Perfect Union, a newsroom covering labor issues.

“Everybody I graduated with also went to whole-ass medical school,” he continued. “They are the experts that a patient wants to see when they seek care. And the decision about what healthcare is necessary ought to be held between a patient—and/or their parents if they’re under the age of 18—and their doctor. That’s it.”

When it comes to policy, El-Sayed said, “I don’t think the government gets to have a say about what healthcare is provided in what circumstances and why. And to me, that is the standard on which we decide how we make healthcare decisions, not what the government says you can or can’t do.”

El-Sayed also argued medical autonomy can be seen as a bipartisan issue.

“Even conservatives agree; they just don’t agree when it comes to trans care and reproductive rights,” he said. “Conservatives fought for a very long time for this legislation called ‘Right to Try’ legislation, which was the idea that the government couldn’t tell you [that] you couldn’t have a certain medication if it was available to you. So they agree that the decision about healthcare ought to be between a person and their provider.”

Finally, El-Sayed concluded: “Let’s use that standard and keep to that standard and make sure government doesn’t have the ability to tell you what you can or cannot do with your own body.”

You can see that full exchange below:

Last week, Erin in the Morning reported on over two dozen Democrats running for office who have espoused anti-trans or trans-exclusionary views. Some of these lawmakers also voted in favor of anti-trans or trans-exclusionary policies, such as restrictions on the bathrooms trans people use, the sports teams where trans people play, and the medical care trans people can access through insurance.

This modest exodus—though still far greater than years in the recent past—represents a line being touted by centrist political-consulting elites from groups like Third Way and Searchlight, as well as candidates like the recently defeated Seth Moulton of Massachusetts: that full and equal rights for people regardless of gender identity are too aspirational, that equal rights activists are a political liability to be sidelined, and that supporting equal rights is costing the party votes.

However, as this newsletter has reported many times before, anti-trans activists are betting on Democrats making this political calculation and dragging the nation’s political tolerance rightward. Conservative operatives have openly called trans athletes, for example, a “beginning point” on trans issues. They want to get Americans “comfortable” with anti-trans animus, and from there, they can pull the conversation even further to the right.

It’s not the first time El-Sayed has been asked about transgender people. In August he appeared on Fox News, where he sparred with pundit Jesse Watters on the matter.

“Do you think men should play in women’s sports?” Watters said. “It’s a big issue.”

“It’s insane,” El-Sayed retorted. “I’m here trying to take on the health care crisis and big pharma, and you’re asking me about who gets to play what sport.”

The Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta, Canada, has embarked on a mission to do something unprecedented. Its leaders announced they will assert tribal sovereignty to defy a regional ban on providing gender-affirming care for youth.

“No longer will our children and families have their rights taken away,” Chief Dale Steinhauer said in a speech on Wednesday, as per the CBC. “When one group’s rights are removed, we are all affected.”

Similar to Indigenous reservations in the United States, First Nations in Canada possess autonomy when it comes to lawmaking—although in both First Nations and reservations, individuals can still be bound by state or federal criminal law.

In Saddle Lake’s case, Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith used medical legislation to essentially ban gender-affirming care for youth under 16 in that province. Saddle Lake leaders argue it violates the rights of its transgender and two-spirit young people. On Sept. 9, they launched a fundraiser to mount the legal battle ahead of them, raising over CAD$60,000 in two days, with at least CAD$30,000 more to go.

“Saddle Lake Cree Nation is taking an historic step to assert our Treaty rights, inherent jurisdiction and responsibility to protect the health and well-being of our people,” officials wrote in a press release attached to the fundraiser.

“We are asking Canadians, Treaty people, Indigenous Nations, health professionals, human-rights advocates, allies and people around the world to stand with us,” it continued, vowing to be a “safe haven” for trans youth.

Celeste Trianon, a civil rights activist in Montreal who runs a legal clinic for transgender Canadians, said the fight will take time and money to make its way through the legal system.

At the same time, she told Erin in the Morning that it reflects a long history of Indigenous resistance to forced assimilation, from the dark days of the infamous residential schools to now.

“They’re really helping break this cycle of collective trauma, and basically the consequences of a cultural genocide, through supporting trans youth,” Trianon said. “It is, in short, extraordinary.”

Saddle Lake must also set up a clinic or attract a practice to its territory, about two hours outside of Edmonton.

“They are an independent nation, so I’ll be interested to see if they’re able to attract a doctor to do that,” Smith said in a recent speech.

It is unclear whether other First Nations or Indigenous reservations in the United States may follow suit. In the meantime, Saddle Lake is gearing up for a fight.

“This is about more than one health service,” officials wrote. “It is about Indigenous sovereignty. It is about our responsibility to care for one another.”

There is a GoFundMe to support Saddle Lake Cree Nation’s efforts to establish a safe haven for trans youth in Alberta. That can be found HERE.

Elon Musk’s America PAC has dropped $100 million to support the GOP in critical races that could control the future of the Senate. It includes TV commercials, digital ads, and a social media blitz across platforms Musk owns and platforms he doesn’t. The eleventh-hour push is a brazen attempt to stoke the anti-trans moral panic and turn equal rights for transgender people into a make-or-break campaign issue.

“The PAC’s emphasis on trans issues is striking because that’s been a much less prominent theme in GOP Senate ads so far this election cycle, per AdImpact, which tracks political advertising,” Axios’s Mike Zapler reports. “On its face, the strategy is at odds with what voters say they want candidates to talk about. Concerns about the economy dominate; trans and LGBT issues barely register. But Republicans remember how lethal the Trump campaign’s ‘Kamala is for they/them ads were to Kamala Harris’ campaign in 2024.”

The ads are a smattering of anti-trans hysterics and culture war talking points attacking James Talarico in Texas, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Josh Turek in Iowa, Mary Peltola in Alaska, and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. (Musk is also funding some ads in New Hampshire and Maine, but they did not seem to target trans people.) Ads are running on the airwaves, as well as online on sites like Google, Instagram, and Facebook.

With grainy, high-contrast images and ominous music, the ads warn: “James Talarico believes there are six genders.” They said Brown put “the trans agenda ahead of Ohio’s values” and supports “men in women’s sports.” They said Turek “voted to spend our tax dollars on sex change surgeries for children,” that Peltola wants “your daughter to share a bathroom with a man,” and El-Sayed peddles “sex changes for minors.”

This comes after many of these candidates capitulated anyway. Brown put out an ad in 2024 relying on anti-trans stereotypes and grainy images of swimmer Lia Thomas in an apparent attempt to quell right-wing attacks. And Turek recently issued his official statement opposing equal rights for transgender women in sports and his campaign said he further opposed “taxpayer-funded sex changes.” Not to mention early and eager defectors like Rep. Seth Moulton, who left his Massachusetts congressional seat for a failed Senate run, only to be subdued by incumbent Sen. Ed Markey. Polls showed voters in that race were significantly less likely to vote for a candidate who espoused anti-trans and exclusionary views.

None of that stopped Republicans from using the existence of trans people as a cudgel to attack the Democrats and move the conversation further to the right—a strategy explicitly outlined by conservative operatives in the past. Famously, Terry Schilling of the far-right American Principles Project boasted to CNN: “The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues.”

Plans for some sort of major push from the America PAC were first reported in July and August by Axios and the New York Times, respectively. In addition to TV and digital ads, Musk is also expected to aggressively utilize mailer campaigns and door-knocking initiatives to get out the vote in favor of the GOP.

Musk has been a primary antagonist for the trans community for years now. His daughter, model Vivian Wilson, came out as transgender in 2020, infuriating Musk. He once said she “was killed by the woke mind virus” of gender.

“Now, the woke mind virus will die,” Musk continued.

Still, some Democrats are pushing back on Musk’s attempts to bend the election to his own whim. The most prominent example of this might be Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive with a background in health care, whose candidacy has drawn substantial comparisons to that of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Last month, he sparred with Jesse Watters on Fox News, who tried to goad him into a fight about transgender rights. El-Sayed wouldn’t take the bait.

“It’s no surprise that the world’s first trillionaire would be trying to buy a Senate seat,” El-Sayed spokesman Cole Wozniak said in a statement to the local press after Musk’s latest round of ads.

Rather than pivoting on civil rights issues, El-Sayed’s campaign strategy has been to remain laser-focused on the issues that matter most to voters.

“Michiganders will see right through this,” Wozniak said, “and will send Abdul to the Senate this November to take on the corruption by getting money out of politics, putting money in your pocket, and passing Medicare for All.”

Time is running out for the Department of Defense. A judge has signaled that an injunction for the trans military ban is imminent. In response, the military has supercharged efforts to purge transgender personnel by digging through sensitive medical records, the Federal News Network reports. It seems the Trump administration is trying to oust as many people as possible before a judge can successfully force them to stop.

​​“There is a concerted effort to rush and remove remaining trans individuals from service before September 15—in other words, before an injunction and class action can go into place and offer them protection,” said an anonymous source within the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), an internal organization that defends the Army and its soldiers in military legal matters.

SPARTA Pride, a nonprofit serving transgender service members, is also fielding a ballooning number of reports that the government is using dubious means to identify trans, potentially trans, or intersex service members. Multiple sources documented what they say was a deliberate effort to avoid a written record by issuing orders verbally. One military medical provider said that military officials “demanded a mass review of medical records via verbal order to identify transgender service members.” When the provider asked for the task in writing, the provider said, the military changed course and resorted to “finding other means to identify transgender service members.”

“Those reports also describe verbal directives to avoid written accountability, unprecedented use of military medical systems to identify individuals, pressure on healthcare providers to participate despite serious ethical and privacy concerns, and undue influence on commanders contrary to established policies,” SPARTA’s press statement said.

“It’s worse than ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’” said SPARTA’s executive director, Kara Corcoran, who is an active-duty Army infantry officer who has been issued this kind of separation order. “It’s: ‘Do ask, do tell, and let’s weaponize our systems to hunt them down.’”

A federal court initially issued a preliminary injunction back in 2025, finding it likely unconstitutional, but the Department of Justice has been able to successfully stall further litigation for over a year. Meanwhile, more service members were forced out of their positions. On June 1 of this year, an appellate court upheld that injunction for Talbott v. United States. A judge gave the DOJ 45 days to respond or accept that the injunction would go into effect.

“Many reports reference a 45-day goal to find and separate remaining transgender troops, which suspiciously coincides with a Department of Justice (DOJ) request for a delay of 45 days following the aforementioned court ruling,” SPARTA said in a press release.

“I was just outed by Medical and told that the [Secretary of War] has directed the Surgeon General to digitally comb through all medical records, going above the installation level to bypass typical procedure,” said one transgender Airman in testimony to SPARTA. “There is no other medical condition where they use digital tools at the highest levels to identify people.”

The future of the case is uncertain, but LGBTQ civil rights lawyers appear hopeful. On Aug. 28, the Department of Justice formally filed a petition requesting that the Supreme Court review the case and nip the challenge in the bud—before a judge can hold a trial on whether the ban is constitutional.

GLAD Law’s senior director of transgender and queer rights, Jennifer Levi, told The Advocate the Supreme Court, though conservative, has issued promising rulings in the past where trans troops are concerned.

“We are confident the Supreme Court will affirm that the Trump administration cannot base policies on hostility toward a group of people,” Levi said.

Injunction or not—thousands of people have already been targeted by the ban and removed from their posts because they are transgender.

Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, called trans girls "boys" and embraced sports bans as a matter of safety, sending Ohio's premier LGBTQ+ organization, Equality Ohio, flailing to find its next steps. The Human Rights Campaign released a list of dozens of candidates it endorsed, multiple of whom took anti-trans votes or made anti-trans statements before and after their endorsements. Meanwhile, local LGBTQ+ activists on the ground are fighting both their Democratic Party and their own LGBTQ+ organizations to hold these politicians accountable. One thing is certain: equality organizations were ill prepared for the advent of Democrats staking out anti-trans positions, and real fault lines are emerging in how they address them moving forward.

“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 in a statement to the Toledo Blade after the Supreme Court decision allowing states to ban transgender girls from girls’ sports. “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.”

The statement took Ohio by storm. Local LGBTQ+ activists protested loudly, the state Democratic Party’s Progressive and Pride caucuses openly rebuked Acton, and many called on her to retract her words, which she has not done. Equality Ohio pulled her A rating and changed it to “Pending,” stating, “Comments like the ones recently made by Dr. Amy Acton in the Toledo Blade about transgender Ohioans are extremely harmful.... As a result, we have updated Dr. Acton’s status in our 2026 Candidate Scorecard from an ‘A’ to ‘Pending.’ This reflects our belief that accountability is still possible, and that the door remains open at this time. Should Dr. Acton choose to take meaningful steps forward, we will update the status accordingly.”

The state Democratic Party fought back. It forced the Progressive Caucus to remove its statement criticizing Acton and stonewalled the Pride Caucus. Acton then released a “pro-LGBTQ+” statement that conspicuously left out gender identity, and scheduled a meeting with transgender activists and LGBTQ+ leaders. She did not attend it, sending a campaign official in her place, and transgender leaders in the state were barred from entering. Now Equality Ohio itself has relented, giving Acton a “B,” a grade it defines as reflecting “insufficient record but supportive public statements.” She has still not retracted the statement.

Why Equality Orgs Are Struggling

Following Equality Ohio’s “B” designation for Amy Acton, EITM reached out to the organization to ask why Acton had been given such a high grade following her statements and lack of contrition. When asked how their B grade for Acton aligns with the grade’s requirement of “supportive public statements,” Dwayne Steward at Equality Ohio responded stating, “In the Equality Ohio Candidate Scorecard, a ‘B’ means ‘insufficient record but supportive public statements.’ The reduced score reflects our concern about support of trans Ohioans, alongside her broader record and positions, as stated above.” He then pointed to other statements Acton had made that the organization considers supportive, such as that she “will always stand up for Ohioans, including the LGBT community,” and that “as governor, she is committed to standing up to discrimination and ensuring all Ohioans receive equal protection under the law.” Neither statement mentions transgender people.

When asked if Equality Ohio requested Acton retract her statement calling trans girls “boys” and her support for a sports ban, Equality Ohio did not answer that portion of the question. And when asked about Acton barring the Pride Caucus vice chair from the call and failing to appear at her own meeting, Equality Ohio pointed elsewhere: “We recommend you speak to the Acton Campaign directly about any meetings their team conducted. Dr. Acton’s comments didn’t happen in a vacuum. They’re part of a broader pattern of politicians using trans people as a scapegoat, often based on data that’s simply false. These comments are harmful and a distraction from the issues most voters want addressed.”

The organization also conceded in a previous email that the meeting it had requested with Acton “has not happened yet,” and that it had “not been able to confirm meaningful engagement directly between their campaign and transgender communities.” The gap between the organization’s endorsement grade and Acton’s statements and actions appears to be very wide. Equality Ohio describes Acton’s conduct as harmful scapegoating built on data that is simply false, and then awards her a mark its scale reserves for candidates with supportive public statements.

The move incensed local transgender leaders, such as Ari Childrey, a transgender candidate running for the Ohio House, who stated in an interview with the Buckeye Flame, “This is a slap in the face to every candidate who actually respects our community – those who haven’t misgendered trans people or backed anti-trans policies… If you can misgender trans girls, support discrimination, and still get a ‘B,’ Equality Ohio is telling us transphobia isn’t a big deal, or they’re admitting their scorecard is completely meaningless.”

Equality Ohio is not the only organization struggling with Democratic pressure to endorse anti-trans candidates. The nation's largest LGBTQ+ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, posted a slate of candidate endorsements on June 24, 2026. Among them are Shomari Figures, who voted for Nancy Mace's amendments stripping gender-affirming care from transgender service members, retirees, and their families, one of only five Democrats to do so, and who cast that vote in July, three weeks after HRC endorsed him; Susie Lee and Tom Suozzi, who both voted for an amendment targeting trans people in sports, and who, in Suozzi's case, blamed transgender people for Kamala Harris's 2024 loss; and Sarah Trone Garriott, who is currently running an ad declaring that she opposes "letting men in women's locker rooms" and that "politicians have become too extreme on these issues." None of it was a barrier to their endorsement.

In an email asking HRC about the endorsements, they provided the following statement requesting it be published in full:

“HRC’s endorsements are made with the clear and overriding desire to win a pro-equality Congress so we can halt the assault on our community and push forward vital protections. History tells us that if we were to constrain ourselves to only endorsing candidates who never take a vote we oppose, we would likely never make progress.

Our theory of change is that we need to meet people where they are and move them towards support for our community. To that end, we do work with candidates and elected officials who have taken a vote contrary to HRC’s position — working to ensure they understand the impacts while moving them toward greater support of the LGBTQ+ community. This approach has helped pass bills like the Respect for Marriage Act and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law as well as stopping dozens of legislative attacks since Trump returned to the White House. That only happened because there were members of Congress willing to learn and to stand up for transgender people in the face of political divisions and bigotry. This does not mean that every person we endorse has a perfect record, but they have demonstrated support for transgender people and equality more broadly.”

Is This The Right Approach?

HRC's statement is interesting in that it reveals a broader strategy choice by equality organizations in the face of what appears to be shifting ground in the Democratic Party. It is clear that some at these equality organizations believe granting these endorsements helps maintain a good relationship with the candidates and helps steer them in a positive direction when they take a bad vote or two, or make bad statements. But notably, the candidates named above have not recanted their anti-trans statements or their anti-trans votes. And in at least two cases, the endorsement came first. HRC endorsed Shomari Figures on June 24, and he voted for Mace's amendments in July. HRC endorsed Sarah Trone Garriott on June 24, and her locker room ad began airing in the first week of August. Clearly, the most powerful tool an LGBTQ+ rights organization has at its disposal, an endorsement, did not steer either of them.

Equality organizations exist to promote equality positions, and candidates that receive endorsements gain the prestige (and sometimes the resources) that are going out to these organizations meant to protect LGBTQ+ rights. As a result, supporters of these organizations now have to contend with the fact that some of their support is going towards helping elect candidates that call trans girls “boys” and actively vote for anti-trans policies. That may be a hard pill to swallow for the millions of trans Americans who are concerned about recession of their rights.

An alternate path does exist: putting significant pressure on Democrats who have embraced anti-trans positions not to do so, and withholding or withdrawing endorsements when they do. If equality organizations are not willing to do this, they risk having their goals co-opted and becoming merely another branch of the Democratic Party, rather than independent organizations willing to advocate for the rights of transgender people and to award their endorsements and grades only to those who meet the mark. It is the path many reproductive rights organizations have taken in refusing to endorse anti-abortion Democrats.

The Democratic Party and Democratic officials are under heavy pressure from paid consultants to adopt more anti-transgender positions and policies. Should Democrats embrace those policies and win, the wins will be presented as evidence that abandoning transgender people is what it takes to win elections, and the contagion will spread through the party. And right now there is nothing to stop it. A Democrat can take an anti-trans vote or make an anti-trans statement before an endorsement and receive it anyway, or after an endorsement and keep it. The blessing of the organizations built to defend LGBTQ+ people has become something a candidate can simply take for granted. What remains unknown is how far one would have to go to lose it. Meanwhile, transgender people will keep being cut out of the calculus in favor of candidates who throw them under the bus, with the endorsements of their own movement in hand.

The gravest long-term threat to transgender Americans is not just the Republican Party. It is also the campaign to strip support for transgender people out of all parties. Republicans fall in and out of power, and when they lose it, rights lost under their control can be reclaimed. But if the Democratic Party itself ever flips to being anti-trans, there is no one left to do the reclaiming. There will never be enough lawmakers who both hold power and support trans rights to repeal the damage, and every loss becomes permanent. It is a one-way ratchet, and it is terrifying.

It is not hypothetical, either. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party, the ostensibly left-of-center party, completed exactly this flip, and since taking power it has enacted more horrors on the trans community than even the Conservatives before it. British trans people now have no major party to turn to. That is the endgame of the strategy currently being tested here in the United States.

Erin In The Morning is committed to giving the LGBTQ+ community the information it needs to stop that from happening here. What follows is a guide to anti-trans Democrats in the 2026 election cycle, organized by state. It covers federal and statewide races only: U.S. Senate, governor, other statewide offices, and the U.S. House. Many on this list have cast harmful votes or said things about transgender people that should put voters on alert.

What you do with this information is up to you. Many, myself included, have argued against voting for the worst offenders on this list even where it means a Republican takes the seat. A Republican victory costs the community one seat for one term. A worst-offender victory teaches the party’s consultant class, the Searchlights and Third Ways, that throwing transgender people under the bus is a winning strategy, and that lesson would be applied everywhere until the Democratic Party goes the way of Labour. One seat can be won back. Losing both parties cannot.

Here is the list:

Alabama

Shomari Figures, U.S. House, 2nd District (incumbent). Voted yes on Nancy Mace’s NDAA amendments banning gender-affirming care for transgender service members, one of only five Democrats to do so.

Terri Sewell, U.S. House, 7th District (incumbent). Voted yes on Nancy Mace’s NDAA amendments banning gender-affirming care for transgender service members, one of only five Democrats to do so.

Alaska

Mary Peltola, U.S. Senate candidate; former U.S. representative for Alaska’s at-large district. One of only six Democrats to vote for the 2024 NDAA, which contained severe anti-trans and anti-DEI amendments.

California

Xavier Becerra, candidate for governor. In a May interview, argued that nothing in the Constitution entitles transgender people to play sports, and that if “rules don’t let you play a sport because of who you are,” that is acceptable. This is the position the Supreme Court ultimately took.

Adam Gray, U.S. House, 13th District (incumbent). One of only three Democrats to vote for a bathroom ban on military bases for transgender people, along with a sports ban, a gender-affirming care ban, and several other anti-trans amendments to the NDAA.

Indiana

Beau Bayh, candidate for secretary of state. Called transgender women “men,” and said, “I think we should not have men playing women’s sports, and our state has already passed a law outlawing this.”

Iowa

Josh Turek, U.S. Senate nominee. Actively opposes transgender participation in sports, on the record.

Rob Sand, Democratic nominee for governor. Actively opposes transgender participation in sports, answering “no” when a conservative radio host asked whether “biological males” should play women’s sports.

Sarah Trone Garriott, U.S. House candidate, 3rd District. Running an anti-transgender ad stating that she “opposes letting men in women’s locker rooms” and that “politicians have become too extreme on these issues.”

Louisiana

Cleo Fields, U.S. House, 6th District (incumbent). Voted for the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,” which would strip funding from schools that support transgender people, along with several other anti-trans bills.

Mississippi

Jeffrey Hulum III, Democratic nominee for the U.S. House, 4th District; currently a state representative for District 119. In the Legislature, he voted for Mississippi’s anti-trans incarceration bill.

Nevada

Aaron Ford, candidate for governor. Stated, “I personally do not support trans athletes competing in sports opposite their gender assigned at birth.”

Susie Lee, U.S. House, 3rd District (incumbent). Explicitly voted for Nancy Mace’s military trans sports ban amendment in the FY2026 NDAA.

New York

Tom Suozzi, U.S. House, 3rd District (incumbent). Blamed transgender people for Harris’s loss and voted for a trans sports ban in the military.

Laura Gillen, U.S. House, 4th District (incumbent). Voted for the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,” which would strip funding from schools that support transgender people, along with several other anti-trans bills.

John Mannion, U.S. House, 22nd District (incumbent). Explicitly voted for Nancy Mace’s military trans sports ban amendment in the FY2026 NDAA.

North Carolina

Don Davis, U.S. House, 1st District (incumbent). Voted for Nancy Mace’s amendments barring TRICARE coverage of transgender care for service members and dependents, a sports ban, and the “Don’t Say Trans” bill. He also voted yes on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill criminalizing gender-affirming care.

Jamie Ager, U.S. House, 11th District. Called trans women “men,” openly supports a sports ban.

Ohio

Sherrod Brown, U.S. Senate candidate; former U.S. senator for Ohio. Released an ad in 2024 featuring Lia Thomas’s picture, stating that the practice had “already been banned in Ohio” and that Brown would not “let transgender biological men participate in women’s sports.”

Amy Acton, Democratic nominee for governor Affirmed her support for Ohio’s trans sports ban and called transgender girls “boys,” then skipped the listening session her own campaign scheduled with local transgender advocates.

Marcy Kaptur, U.S. House, 9th District (incumbent). Voted for the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,” which would strip funding from schools that support transgender people, along with several other anti-trans bills.

Texas

Henry Cuellar, U.S. House, 28th District (incumbent). A stalwart opponent of transgender rights in Congress, voting for nearly every anti-trans bill or provision.

Colin Allred, U.S. House candidate, 33rd District. Released a campaign ad in 2024 saying he “didn’t want boys playing in girls sports.”

Vicente Gonzalez, U.S. House, 34th District (incumbent). A stalwart opponent of transgender rights in Congress, voting for nearly every anti-trans bill or provision.

Virginia

Eugene Vindman, U.S. House, 7th District (incumbent). Voted for the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,” which would strip funding from schools that support transgender people, along with several other anti-trans bills.

Washington

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, U.S. House, 3rd District (incumbent). Criticized Democrats for framing trans sports bans as “about love vs. hate,” saying “we miss some of the nuance,” and has taken multiple anti-trans votes, including a vote to defund public schools that support transgender people.

Kim Schrier, U.S. House, 8th District (incumbent). Voted for the trans sports ban amendment to the NDAA in Congress.

Democratic candidate Sarah Trone Garriott of Iowa’s third congressional district isn’t just selling out transgender people this election cycle—she’s fomenting hate. She uses inflammatory rhetoric that stokes right-wing fantasies and paints trans girls as sexual predators infiltrating women’s spaces. And none of it is stopping the anti-trans attacks on her campaign from the right.

“I oppose letting men in women’s locker rooms,” said Trone Garriott in an ad released by her campaign last month. She continued to say that “politicians have become too extreme on these issues.”

Perhaps she thought this capitulation to anti-trans hysteria would spare her some of the vitriol from conservative propagandists. Perhaps her campaign conducted a few focus groups and determined that transgender children are a sacrifice they’re willing to make. In either case, true to form, the anti-trans craze proved once again that it comes for all women, eventually. Trone Garriott’s decision to align herself with hate did not save her.

Trone Garriott is a state senator and minister representing Iowa’s 14th district, including the area around Des Moines. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the state’s Senate minority whip.

This week, the Congressional Leadership Fund—a notoriously bigoted and underhanded right-wing PAC—launched an attack ad against Trone Garriott using footage from the very same commercial meant to satiate anti-trans bloodlust.

As the attack ad points out, Trone Garriott knows the risk of deploying this kind of language about “men” in women’s bathrooms to describe trans women and girls. At an event in 2023, Trone Garriott told constituents:

“The Senate passed a bathroom bill this week about school bathrooms that encourages anyone in our state to file a complaint and the Attorney General needs to investigate [sic]. Schools have been navigating these challenging situations for a while, making the best choices for their local circumstances and making it work. This takes that away from them and creates an incentive for folks to be watching and informing on their neighbors. I don’t think that’s a good way for Iowa to proceed. It’s creating a really hostile environment for a lot of folks. We need to be aware that discrimination is wrong.”

In bending the knee to right-wing fanatics, Trone Garriott has demonstrated a disturbing willingness to throw trans kids under the bus. It’s unclear who she could deem permissible collateral next.

She’s not the only Democratic politician taking this gamble. Rob Sand, who is currently Iowa’s state auditor and running for Governor, ranted in a recent interview about “fairness” in women’s sports and showed his support for anti-trans policies. In July, Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Amy Acton, called trans girls “boys” and endorsed similar restrictions on transgender athletes. Those races are ongoing.

Meanwhile, Congressman Seth Moulton, an early Democratic defector on trans issues, lost his race this week by leaps and bounds to Sen. Ed Markey, a staunch trans ally.

Despite Trone Garriott’s anti-trans ad, she still enjoys an endorsement from the Human Rights Campaign, although that was issued in June—ostensibly before her heel turn.

Erin in the Morning has reached out to the Trone Garriott campaign and the Human Rights Campaign for comment.

The Trump Administration cannot pull funding from California schools over trans-inclusive sports policies, U.S. District Court Judge Cynthia Valenzuela ruled on Aug. 31.

Earlier this summer, the Department of Justice sued the state and the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), which oversees the area’s high school sports competitions. It also tried to block federal funding for California schools to enforce compliance. But a judge ruled this maneuver was unlawful.

“The court rightly recognized that under the Spending Clause, which requires ‘clear notice,’ the federal government cannot use shifting agency interpretations to spring retroactive conditions on states and pull their funding for maintaining trans-inclusive policies,” said Bria Nelson, Gender Justice and Health Equity staff attorney at Lawyers for Good Government, in a statement to Erin in the Morning.

“This ruling sends a powerful message that the administration cannot weaponize Title IX to mandate state-sponsored discrimination against transgender youth.”

In its complaint, the DOJ argued California’s trans-inclusive sports policies, which allow trans students to compete on the team and use the facilities (locker rooms and bathrooms) of their preferred gender, violate Title IX by inherently “displacing” other athletes, specifically on girls’ teams. So, the federal government threatened to pull funding from California schools.

At first, CIF tried to strike a compromise and ended up satisfying no one. It offered cisgender athletes a conciliation spot at the podium if they were beaten by a transgender girl. But bending the knee didn’t keep the Trump regime at bay. CIF was hit with a lawsuit nonetheless. The DOJ argued that it needed to segregate trans students not only on sports teams, but also in locker rooms, bathrooms, and accommodations like hotels on student field trips.

Furthermore, the government asserted that California owed monetary reparations to cisgender girls who competed against trans girls, and that the state was compelled to retroactively strip trans girls of their medals and give them to cisgender athletes instead.

Like many anti-trans lawsuits and laws, the most comprehensive anti-trans policies were surreptitiously pushed through under the guise of the trans athlete “debate.” (The “debate” in question is a politically calculated and manufactured crisis engineered by the right for the explicit purpose of fomenting anti-trans animus.)

“Because Defendants were not given clear notice of the funding condition Plaintiff now seeks to enforce, Plaintiff’s claims are barred by the Spending Clause,” Valenzuela wrote. Therefore, she concluded, it does not matter whether Title IX can be used to mandate trans exclusion.

However, she pointed to the precedent set by West Virginia v. BPJ—the recent ruling by the Supreme Court upholding West Virginia’s anti-trans athlete law. Perhaps counterintuitively, she wrote that the landmark ruling that permitted West Virginia to discriminate against trans athletes also, at least for now, sustained California’s rights to protect them.

“The Court repeatedly framed that holding in permissive terms,” Valenzuela wrote. “It explained that Title IX’s regulations ‘expressly permit schools’ to maintain separate sex-based teams and ultimately held that States ‘may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females’ and ‘may determine eligibility’ for those teams based on biological sex.” The Court did not say Title IX “mandates” schools to do so, nor that they “must” maintain “sex-based” categories.

“The Court thus upheld the biological-sex eligibility rules before it without holding that Title IX requires every school to adopt the same rule,” she continued. “The Court also declined to decide whether Title IX permits transgender girls to participate on girls’ and women’s teams. It expressly stated that nothing in the opinion was intended to decide that ‘distinct question,’ because it was not at issue.”

Lily Norcross, an 18-year-old track-and-field athlete from California in her senior year of high school, told Erin in the Morning the lawsuit was an attack on “our democratic systems.”

It was also an attack on her, personally. Not only is she a trans athlete in the state; she was also targeted and identifiably referenced in the case, though not by name, after another student complained about her at a school board meeting.

The lawsuit claims she engaged in sexual harassment because she was reportedly sitting in the girls’ locker room even after she had changed into her track uniform. Therefore, the Department of Justice concludes, she had “no reason to be in a locker room other than to watch the girls undress.”

“I believe this case was just designed to normalize hatred against trans youth,” Norcross said.

The Department of Justice told the Los Angeles Times that it would file an appeal. If it succeeds, the case would come before the Ninth Circuit.

Brian Dittmeier, Director of LGBTQI+ Equality at the National Women’s Law Center, said that while the case focused on the Spending Clause instead of other Constitutional provisions, like Equal Protection, it still sends a powerful message for states with equal rights policies for trans people. He emphasized Valenzuela’s references to FAU v. Ellison. That Eighth Circuit case from earlier this year ended with the court denying an anti-trans organization’s bid for a preliminary injunction against the Minnesota State High School League’s inclusion of a transgender softball player.

Similar to Valenzuela, that panel of judges declared that the validity of protections for trans athletes under Title IX was not yet a settled matter. More importantly, however, Ellison reinforced the notion that the Trump Administration cannot simply bend Title IX to its will with, say, anti-trans executive orders.

“Executive findings and agency guidance cannot independently establish a claim under Title IX,” Dittmeier told Erin in the Morning. “They are attempting to abuse the enforcement process at the Office of Civil Rights to put forth their own preferred policy vision, instead of upholding the law. The Trump Administration can continue to try and push this view, but they will fail because they will keep running into the law.”

In the meantime, Dittmeier said these cases show promise for states that choose to fight for trans youth and preserve equal rights policies.

“This ruling demonstrates that inclusive policies can continue to be implemented and that states should stand by their policies, which are in accordance with Title IX,” he said.

The full ruling from Judge Valenzuela can be found below.

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Six weeks before a new federal rule stripping Medicaid and CHIP funding for transgender healthcare is set to take effect nationwide, a coalition of 21 attorneys general and one governor has filed a lawsuit to block it. The coalition, co-led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta alongside the attorneys general of Illinois, Maryland, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The lawsuit targets a rule published on Aug. 13 that bars federal reimbursement for puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery for anyone under 18 on Medicaid or under 19 on CHIP, and which could do significant harm to transgender youth in these states, who currently have that care covered. The lawsuit follows an earlier successful suit that blocked the administration from threatening hospitals and doctors with exclusion from Medicare and Medicaid for providing that care. A companion rule that would have barred hospitals outright, through Medicare "conditions of participation," was never finalized, meaning no in-tact federal rule requires hospitals to stop providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth, though roughly 40 dropped their programs anyway and many have not restored them.

"The Administration seeks such broad and unprecedented powers in part to advance its social policy agenda, a key component of which involves relentless attacks on a small and vulnerable population—transgender individuals—whose very existence the President scapegoats to stoke national division,” reads the complaint. "Through this Rule, CMS sets a troubling and unlawful precedent that the Executive Branch can, without Congressional authorization, replace individualized medical judgments made by licensed practitioners consistent with state law with a categorical, agency-determined prohibition on federal reimbursement for healthcare it happens to disfavor, even where the care is widely supported by medical professionals and protected by law in many Plaintiff States."

The complaint alleges four violations by the federal government. The first is a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, alleging that the law the government is relying on to strip coverage for gender-affirming care does not grant it the power to do so. Historically, the provisions CMS leans on, the Social Security Act's "best interests" and "quality of care" requirements, have imposed duties on states rather than granting the agency power to exclude entire categories of care. "Even CMS admits several times throughout the Rule that this is unprecedented action, acknowledging the agency has 'not previously relied on [the statutory provisions it relies on in the Rule] to establish a purpose-based restriction on FFP for a specific category of services in this manner,' nor 'historically taken a position at the Federal level that particular services when provided to particular individuals for a particular purpose are inherently not medically necessary,'" reads the filing.

The second alleged violation is that the rule is contrary to existing law. Under Medicaid's provisions, states must cover services deemed medically necessary for beneficiaries under 21, and CMS's own guidance requires that determination to be made "on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the particular needs of the child." Federal law also states that a state may not "arbitrarily deny or reduce the amount, duration, or scope of a required service...to an otherwise eligible beneficiary solely because of the diagnosis, type of illness, or condition." The rule singles out gender dysphoria as a condition, and CMS concedes such, acknowledging in the rule that it "limits FFP for specific pharmaceutical and surgical interventions for a specific population." The states also allege violations of the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, CHIP, and the Affordable Care Act, all of which, the states argue, require coverage of this care.

The third alleged violation is that the new rule is arbitrary and capricious. The states argue that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services held the evidence against its position to a far more demanding standard than the evidence it relied on, and that it acted contrary to the record before it. The administration leans on its own HHS report, the U.S. answer to Britain's Cass Review, to justify the ban, but the report is filled with language displaying clear animus toward transgender people, including misgendering one of the first transgender people in the United States to receive gender-affirming surgery, and was not written by experts in the field. Meanwhile, the administration issued the rule while ignoring the evidence that gender-affirming care is effective, including comment letters opposing it from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Endocrine Society. In particular, the filing notes that the nine people who wrote the report had each previously published criticism of transgender healthcare while none had expertise in diagnosing or treating gender dysphoria, that they arrived at a conclusion Trump had predetermined by executive order, and that they operated as a federal advisory committee in violation of the law, with no charter filed or public meetings.

"One author, Alex Byrne, explained in detail in an op-ed that the HHS Report advocates for President Trump's policy of suppressing transgender healthcare for adolescents. Byrne states that after surveying the evidence the HHS Report 'found' the sought-after conclusion,” states the complaint.

Lastly, the lawsuit alleges a violation of the Spending Clause. When Congress created Medicaid in 1965, it gave states the authority to determine what care is medically necessary for their own residents, and CMS acknowledges in the rule itself that "the States have traditionally used their policy powers to regulate the practice of medicine." As such, the coalition argues the states retain authority over how Medicaid operates within their borders, including the ability to keep covering transgender healthcare.

The lawsuit is the next major step in the fight to protect transgender healthcare. Similar suits have already blocked other rules and threats, including the one that successfully blocked RFK Jr.'s declaration that gender-affirming care is "unsafe and ineffective" and fails to meet "professionally recognized standards of health care," which a federal judge vacated as unlawful. There is currently no active law, policy, or rule requiring hospitals to stop providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth, though more than 40 hospitals and health systems have stopped or paused their programs in capitulation to Trump.

The states leading the suit are California, Illinois, Maryland, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, joined by Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawai'i, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is suing in his own official capacity because his state's attorney general is a Republican. It was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the same court that vacated the administration's attempt to strip gender-affirming care of essential health benefit status three weeks ago.

Anne Arundel was one of the first districts in Maryland to adopt a supportive framework for trans and gender nonconforming students. But when the Trump Administration came knocking, they changed course. Revised guidelines given to teachers by the district instruct teachers to forcibly deadname a child upon a parent’s request, or worse—out them. Now, some teachers are reportedly saying that they will simply not comply with the new directive.

For years, Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) students of high school age had been able to request accommodations, such as access to different bathrooms or a new name, independently. Moreover, teachers were not allowed to “out” students to their parents.

This policy attracted the ire of one unsupportive family of a transgender student, plus the lawyers at America First Legal—the far-right activist-legal group founded by Stephen Miller as a counterweight to the “radical” ACLU. In early July, they filed a lawsuit against the district, arguing the rule violated the family’s parental rights to dictate the gender identity and expression of their child.

Then, on July 27, the Trump Administration launched an attack. The Justice Department and the ironically titled Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) at the Education Department announced that they would be taking joint “enforcement action” against Anne Arundel County. The basis, they said, was that “the District improperly classifies information about a student’s so-called ‘gender identity’ as ‘confidential medical information’ that cannot be shared with parents.”

They further allege this practice constitutes an infringement of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

By Aug. 19, Superintendent Mark T. Bedell issued a letter to AACPS families notifying them that the district handbook was changing for the upcoming start of the school year. “Nothing in this regulation shall be construed to limit or otherwise interfere with parents’/guardians’ rights under FERPA, including the right to inspect and review their student’s complete education record,” the new policy reads. “Under FERPA, education records generally include all records, files, documents, and other materials maintained by AACPS that contain information directly related to a student.”

What this change would look like for teachers, in practice, was a mystery—until The Banner, a Maryland newsroom, got ahold of training materials that the district presented to teachers.

“If the parent does not agree, the school must comply with the parent’s request, including preferred name, group bathroom use and pronouns,” a district slideshow presentation said.

In other words, parents gained the ability to force teachers to deadname and misgender their students, or otherwise place them in certain bathrooms, locker rooms, or other gendered accommodations, even if it puts the student in danger.

“The protection of our students’ dignity and their right to be treated with fairness and equity at school is among our highest moral obligations as educators,” AACPS teachers’ union president Kristina Korona wrote in an email to union members, The Banner reports. “More than one member has told us that they will not comply.”

The students poised to be the most at-risk are those who have already adopted a new name or gender marker at school. Teachers don’t appear to be compelled to proactively “out” every single trans student; they simply can’t use a new name or grant them access to certain gendered facilities without parental sign-off.

But because the new rule prevents withholding records from parents, those who already came out at school—under the impression that information about their gender identity would be safeguarded—may now be outed by a parental records request for their historical student data.

When teachers are forced to out students to unsupportive families, it puts them in a position of potentially instigating child abuse, pushing students into a mental health crisis, and interfering with private familial relationships. If interpreted strictly, this also puts teachers in the uncomfortable position of potentially having to play gender police, as they must navigate trying to determine which requests from students are “gender affirming” in nature—for example, if a student named “Samantha” asks to be called “Sam” for short.

Critically, no Maryland or federal law explicitly requires deadnaming students.

But the damage may already be done. As per The Banner, Korona told union members in an Aug. 20 email that the new guidance “will begin harming affected students immediately.”

The Democrat who made abandoning transgender people into the post-2024 capitulation script for "moderate" Democrats has now been abandoned himself, by the voters of his own state. Congressman Seth Moulton, the originator of the current wave of anti-transgender Democrats, blamed Democrats' 2024 defeat in part on the party's support for transgender people in the immediate aftermath of the election, fearmongering over transgender athletes and calling trans girls "male" athletes who would run over his daughters on the playing field. His remarks sparked fury in his own state, even as he opted to run for higher office, challenging Senator Ed Markey in the Massachusetts Democratic Senate primary. Rather than run away from transgender people, though, Markey used the moment to differentiate himself, championing transgender people at every turn, and the issue became a defining point of difference between the two candidates at debates and rallies. Now we have a final result: Markey has trounced Moulton, winning 65 to 35 in a race that some polls once showed as fairly close early on, and come January, Moulton will hold no elected office at all, having given up his safe House seat to run.

In 2024, in the aftermath of Kamala Harris's loss to Donald Trump, Moulton became one of the earliest to embrace a new, albeit rare, line of thinking among some Democrats: that transgender individuals were to blame for the election, and that sports bans on transgender youth are good to embrace. Such bans have come with proposals to genitally inspect student athletes, and in Utah, officials secretly investigated a girl's sex all the way back to kindergarten after the parents of the girls she had defeated complained. In an interview with The New York Times the day after Trump's victory, Moulton said, "I have two little girls, I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that." Then, following the backlash, he doubled down in a Washington Post op-ed titled "I'm done with Democratic purity tests" and declared that "the backlash has only served to reinforce my original point."

And backlash he did receive. Immediately after his comments, his constituents pushed back: hundreds of people gathered outside his Salem office waving pride flags, demanding to be heard. "To say that his kids can get run over by people who are previously male shows not only his ignorance about what transgender is, it shows how he is willing to make the most vulnerable people in our community more vulnerable," said Ward 5 Councilor Jeff Cohen, who spoke at the rally. Not long after, organizers launched a concerted effort to primary him and remove him from office. Moulton attempted to sidestep that fight by giving up his safe House seat entirely and running for higher office instead, challenging Senator Markey, the older Democratic incumbent, for his seat. His old seat will not miss him: on the same night Moulton lost, Dan Koh won the Democratic primary to replace him. Koh, a former senior Biden White House official and chief of staff to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, is heavily favored in November, and he pledges to "fight to ensure transgender Americans have access to healthcare, education, and safe, welcoming communities."

Immediately, transgender issues became a differentiator between the two candidates. At Boston's No Kings rally last October, Moulton was booed as he took the stage; Markey came out draped in a trans pride flag and declared to raucous applause that "trans rights are human rights." The topic dominated the candidates' debates: in July, Markey said Moulton had "thrown trans kids under the bus" and noted that the Supreme Court's ruling greenlighting trans sports bans "took the same position that Congressman Moulton took last year," and by the August debate, Moulton was issuing a half-hearted mea culpa, saying he was "sorry if my comments hurt you.” Meanwhile, transgender people and LGBTQ+ organizations organized heavily to keep Markey in office, and those efforts succeeded.

There is good evidence that transgender issues were a major part of Markey's victory, too. In the final weeks of the campaign, a UMass Amherst/WCVB poll asked likely Democratic primary voters how a candidate who "expressed positions opposing transgender rights or policies" would fare with them. A whopping 67% said they would be less likely to support that candidate; only 11% said such positions would make their support more likely. Importantly, the poll's voter pool includes the unenrolled independent voters who can cast ballots in Massachusetts's semi-open Democratic primary, which should be a major lesson for Democrats elsewhere who believe running on anti-trans policies will win over the middle.

When Markey took the stage on Tuesday night to celebrate his victory, he made clear who he credited with helping him across the finish line. The very first person he put on stage was Tyler Hack, the transgender founder and executive director of the Christopher Street Project, the trans-led political organization that made his race its marquee endorsement, who introduced Markey to the crowd. Hack celebrated Markey's allyship in stark terms: "After the 2024 election, a lot of transgender people were terrified. And I remember thinking: Who is going to stay? When people decide we are too controversial, when defending us stops being expedient, who is going to stay? Ed Markey stayed. Senator, you stayed." When Markey took the microphone, he concurred, thanking "Tyler Hack and the Christopher Street Project" by name from the podium: "I am so proud of your historic work."

Update: It would appear trans flags have appeared outside of Moulton’s district office with a “for rent” sign. Curtesy of Jennifer G on Bluesky.

For the first time in the 78-year history of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), leaders have decided to move with haste.

Last week, the government agency notorious for endless waiting lists and red tape surrounding transgender people’s health care opted to shutter the surgical wing of Wales’ only state-run gender clinic, at least for now, in what appears to be the latest politically charged attack on providers. Other services, such as hormone replacement therapy and psychotherapy, remain intact. Youth care is unaffected as the clinic only serves adult patients.

This comes after an anti-trans blogger, Nick Wallis, alleged that the clinic was committing misconduct, purely because it may refer patients for surgery at significantly higher rates than other NHS institutions.

But this isn’t inherently a sign of a problem.

In fact, it may very well signal that the Wales clinic is simply operating more efficiently than other NHS institutions, which are infamous for putting trans patients on decades-long waitlists and forcing them through bureaucratic labyrinths before they are allowed to receive gender-affirming health care.

But because of conservative gender ideologies and medical philosophies that seek to curb the number of transgender people who can access care, this fact was treated as a smoking gun. Natasha Asghar a right-wing politician, who said she had been “working on” the story with that writer, then successfully lobbied to pause the clinic’s surgical operations while a state investigation plays out.

It is unclear how long such an inquiry will take. However, the impacts on patients have been devastating. Existing gender-affirming surgeries on the books were cancelled for the foreseeable future. Some patients were informed of this mere hours before they, themselves, were scheduled to go under the knife. Some had already been admitted to the hospital when news broke. People who had waited years for this care, rearranged their lives, took time off work, and traveled to the clinic from all over the country are now stuck in a medical purgatory.

TransActual, a UK-based advocacy group, said in a public statement that it was “deeply concerned” about the decision by the NHS Wales Joint Commissioning Committee (NWJCC) to suspend care.

“Trans people using their service are now left without any NHS pathway to receiving the surgical care they need, in an extraordinary violation of NHS Wales’ duties as a provider of care,” the statement read.

“This decision appears based on the assumption that WGS referring a greater number of patients than their English counterparts must be indicative of a problem—before any real investigation has taken place, and despite the obvious failures in the English provision of transition care. Given the predictable harms this will cause, and in the absence of any better justification, it’s difficult to understand this as anything other than caving to ideological pressure.”

It concluded that “making this harmful decision without extremely compelling evidence to support it is an appalling failure of governance and demonstrates a clear disregard for trans patients’ wellbeing. This fits a familiar pattern of political attacks on trans healthcare being camouflaged in ‘concerns’ that demonise our healthcare, holding it to standards not applied to other areas of medicine.”

The sheer speed and totality of the care stoppage appears to be unprecedented in the context of this kind of complaint. It stands in especially stark contrast to the agency’s handling of Dr. Ian Paterson, an English surgeon who performed over a thousand botched or unnecessary procedures, largely mastectomies, on patients. It took over a decade for the NHS to shut him down.

On Monday, Aug. 31, TransActual was joined by We Exist, Trans Aid Cymru, and other UK LGBTQ groups in a demonstration at the base of the Aneurin Bevan statue in Cardiff. Bevan is credited as the creator of the NHS.

The direct action group Bash Back further condemned the NHS care stoppage, characterizing it as a “nakedly cruel policy” that will “force patients into months of limbo that massively disrupt their lives, while NHS higher-ups take their sweet time to cook up yet another sham ‘investigation.’”

“The Welsh gender care system, while not perfect, is one of the best in the UK, and delivered for trans people by collaborating with the community,” the Bash Back statement continued.

“This massive U-turn comes under pressure from the Welsh Tories, whipped into a frenzy by a terf blogger and Murdoch rag ‘The Times’, which claimed that Wales having higher surgery referral rates than England somehow proves that harm is done. That’s all it took to obliterate healthcare for hundreds of trans people.”

(Note: In this case, The Times refers to a UK-based publication, not the New York Times.)

The Wales clinic controversy is bitterly familiar. For some, it invoked painful memories of the Tavistock clinic affair. Tavistock was a gender clinic for youth operated by the NHS. Following a politically charged investigation and litigation from a “detransitioner,” the clinic severely restricted and rolled back care. In the aftermath, data indicates trans youth suicides skyrocketed, with 22 trans kids taking their own lives in the year following.

Rob Sand is the Democratic nominee for governor of Iowa and the only Democrat holding statewide office there. He has also become a favorite of the Third Way and Searchlight Institute wing of Democratic consultants, who have spent the past year encouraging Democrats to abandon transgender people and adopt at least a few anti-trans positions; Searchlight's founder, Adam Jentleson, told The Atlantic this month that Sand has "taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table." Now Sand is at the head of a wave of prominent Democratic candidates choosing to throw transgender people under the bus in their pursuit of power. In an interview with Politico's Jonathan Martin, Sand gave his clearest endorsement yet of anti-trans sports bans, stating, "I just think girls' sports are for girls and boys' sports are for boys," while decrying members of his own party who are "much more focused on other cultural stuff."

"Where do you differ from your party?" Martin asked Sand in the interview. Sand responded with a list of conservative positions, a trans sports ban among them. "Well, I have said consistently I think that fairness rules the day in girls' sports," he said. "I think that if we are helping you afford food, you shouldn't be buying sugary drinks with it. We don't want you to build bad nutrition habits that then lead to additional healthcare costs later on. The border was obviously a mess under the Biden administration. That is a national security issue. We need to have a common-sense system that works there. Is that a long enough list?"

"You don't want biological boys playing in high school girls' sports," Martin followed up, to which Sand confirmed, "Whatever it was you said, if you said what I said, then that's what I said," he answered, laughing. "Everybody gets hard on the language. They get mad if you use this word or that word. I just think girls' sports are for girls and boys' sports are for boys. And I think that that's fair and reasonable." He closed by noting he still supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage: "But at the same time, look, I respect women's right to choose and reproductive freedom. If you want to get a gay marriage, help yourself."

You can watch the full exchange here:

This is not a new position for Sand, though it is the most explicit he has been about it. The candidate has carved out an anti-trans path in his quest for the governorship of Iowa. In May 2025, the day after he launched his campaign, conservative radio host Simon Conway asked whether "biological boys or men" should play women's sports, and Sand answered with one word: "No." He followed up with a statement: "I've been clear that I support common-sense policies like the law protecting fairness in women's sports," adopting conservative policies that target transgender kids, often in middle school, who just want to play soccer or volleyball with their friends. That has led to confrontations at his town halls. At one in North Liberty last September, attendees pressed him for the evidence behind the ban; he offered none, saying he was "open-minded about it," and someone in the crowd yelled "Coward!"

Sand is not the only Democrat staking out an anti-transgender stance this election cycle. In June, Ohio's Democratic nominee for governor, Amy Acton, did the same, calling transgender girls "boys" and defending Ohio's trans sports ban as a matter of "safety." Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Iowa, issued a campaign statement that he "does not believe males should be playing female sports." Sarah Trone Garriott, the Democratic nominee in Iowa's 3rd Congressional District, is running an ad declaring, "I oppose letting men in women's locker rooms," because "politicians have become too extreme on these issues." And in the current Congress, more than a dozen House Democrats have cast anti-trans votes. The danger is real: a cancer is growing in the Democratic Party that could threaten Democrats' ability to reverse Republican anti-trans policies for the foreseeable future, even if they regain power.

Iowa has been the site of several anti-trans laws in recent years. The state passed a gender-affirming care ban for transgender youth and has a sweeping "Don't Say Gay or Trans" law for its schools. Likewise, the state passed a ban on transgender students using bathrooms that match their gender in public schools. The state also no longer allows transgender residents to change the sex marker on their birth certificates after SF 418 passed in 2025. Lastly, the state made national news as the first in the country to strip a protected class from its civil rights code, removing gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act. Now, with multiple anti-trans Democrats staking out this stance, transgender Iowans are left to wonder whether there is any hope the tide will turn when no one is left to stand for them.

If you use a trans person’s preferred name or call them by their requested pronouns, then you are more likely to support political violence, a new report commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services claims.

It adds to a growing body of pseudoscientific literature that has been manufactured by the right and used to justify attacks on the LGBTQ community.

The report, titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-

Wing Authoritarian Psychology?”, is based on a survey that polled over 1,200 Americans. It claims to gauge respondents’ support of “the official positions of clinical institutions” on gender-affirming care—institutions like the American Psychiatric Association and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health—and on participants’ propensity towards what these researchers call “left-wing authoritarianism.”

The report draws on these answers to market the argument that “gender ideology” acts as an “accelerant” for “political violence.” But the report doesn’t actually measure what it says it does. Like much of Trumpian science, it uses methodologically indefensible tactics to fuel a transparently predetermined, ideological outcome.

“This so-called study, sponsored by an extreme right-wing advocacy organization, is another example of the outcome leading the research - MAGA Republicans want to sow hatred against our fellow Americans in a desperate attempt to distract from their failures ahead of the midterms,” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said.

The survey does not indicate whether it was governed by oversight from an institutional review board (IRB). It was not published in a journal. It did not undergo peer review. And it is tied to conservative advocacy groups like the Network Contagion Research Institute as well as the Manhattan Institute, whose staffer Leor Sapir also co-authored the HHS’ widely condemned “Gender Dysphoria Report.”

Based on responses, researchers weighed participants’ opinions on a “Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale,” which they claim measures support of major medical groups’ guidelines for treating transgender patients. In actuality, the survey simply asked about the perceived importance of respecting transgender people through name and pronoun usage, not gender-affirming pharmacological or surgical care.

One question does not even contain an opinion at all. It simply states the well-established fact that rejecting a trans person’s gender identity causes “psychological distress.”

Then the study asked respondents to react to a series of statements meant to measure one’s affinity for “left-wing authoritarianism”—as opposed to right wing authoritarianism. This included asking about the killings of figures like Charlie Kirk and United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but also statements such as, “Anyone who opposes gay marriage must be homophobic.”

They also claim the survey measures a person’s sympathy for “gender ideology,” without ever defining what that is. This might be because there is no established definition for the far-right buzzword. According to Human Rights Watch, however, the notion of “gender ideology” is a “Hydra-like global conspiracy myth,” stemming from the Catholic Church, designed to fearmonger about women’s rights, reproductive justice, and the LGBTQ community.

“These are not scales that have ever been validated. They just made them up on their own,” said Andrew Flores, an associate professor of government at American University and a distinguished visiting scholar at the Williams Institute, during an interview with Erin in the Morning. Flores’ own work on how authoritarian principles intersect with anti-trans bias was explicitly referenced in the report.

“It is very much stacking the deck in favor of trying to find these correlations.”

Nonetheless, researchers use this “data” to make sweeping conclusions. “Taken together, these literatures suggest a common mechanism: ideological content that names an oppressor class, certifies ongoing victimization, and locates remedy in coercive institutional or social action which may supply authoritarian psychology with morally justified targets,” the report reads. “The present study asks whether the official positions of clinical institutions on so-called ‘gender affirmation’ instantiate this process.”

“These findings support the paper’s core claim: gender ideology may function as an ideological accelerant, telling left-wing authoritarian psychology who the enemy is, why the situation is urgent, and—in those already disposed toward force—that violence is legitimate,” it continues. “We also assessed catastrophizing beliefs, such as the perceived likelihood that a genocide of individuals that identify as transgender is currently under way, and associate extremist responses, such as belief in the need to censor and punish those who oppose transgender dogmas and ignore Supreme Court rulings on gender ideology issues.” The report also brands such dissidence “anti-democratic.”

The backlash has been swift. Critics have pointed out, for example, that the study only asks about opinions on targeting people and groups considered targets of “left-wing” violence, such as ICE agents or the rich, creating an automatic and erroneous conflation of all violence with “left-wing” violence. This skews the statistics against those on the left. Even another anti-trans academic took to Twitter to say this amounted “junk” science.

“We’d need valid, new items for right-wing [violence] as well,” that writer said. “Note that a lot of the [left-wing authoritarianism scale] has nothing to do with authoritarianism, like ‘All political conservatives are fools.’ It’s junk.”

The report was penned by Rutgers University students Ohad Fedida and Danit Finkelstein, Rutgers professor Lee Jussim, Network Contagion Research Institute head Joel Finkelstein, and the Manhattan Institute’s Colin Wright, a prolific name in the anti-trans pseudoscience network tied to the Society For Evidence-based Gender Medicine and Genspect, which are Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate organizations.

It’s not the only time in recent weeks the HHS has circulated anti-trans propaganda tied to current or former hate group actors. The government agency recently published “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine,’” which bolstered right-wing talking points with the help of Aaron Baer of the Center for Christian Virtue and Dr. Quentin Van Meter of the American College of Pediatricians, both of which are also classified as anti-LGBTQ groups by the SPLC.

Wright, a principal investigator for the HHS study, took to Twitter to defend the report from criticism, claiming the report “isn’t about trans people at all!” but about views on what he calls “‘gender-affirming’ norms.”

R.G. Cravens, a political scientist and senior manager of research and analysis at the SPLC, told Erin in the Morning these reports are dangerous additions to the right’s anti-trans playbook. The federal government and the anti-LGBTQ movement have been trying to claw their way into validity for years by using (or abusing) the academic publishing industry. Barring that, they’ve sought the seal of approval from a federal agency.

“It is anti-LGBTQ ideology seeking legitimation from the federal government, from HHS,” Cravens said. “The hard right will claim this is evidence that trans people, especially, are violent, terroristic threats. And they’ll try to use that to erode rights and civil liberties.”

These efforts have been turbocharged under Trump. In May 2026, the White House added “pro-transgender” groups to a report on its counterterrorism strategy. Conservative behemoths like the Heritage Foundation created the idea of “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” to target trans people in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Project 2025, the Foundation’s widely circulated blueprint for establishing an authoritarian theocracy, argues transgender expressions should be classified as “pornographic,” and that teachers or librarians who address the topic should be put on the sex offender registry.

“To what extent will this be used to justify the pursuit of criminal cases against doctors, or against LGBTQ people directly?” Cravens asks. “That’s an open question.”

Yesterday, Greg Abbott completed a favor three years in the making: appointing one of the only Democrats to vote for a gender-affirming care ban to a Texas judgeship. Shawn Thierry, who has since left the Democratic Party, stood for twelve minutes in support of Senate Bill 14 in 2023, the law that banned transition care for trans youth in Texas and strips the license of any doctor who provides it, making her one of the first Democrats in the country to take an anti-trans turn. That session she also broke with her party to back a sports and LGBTQ+ books ban. The votes drew a major backlash that forced her out of office: she lost her primary to a queer woman, Lauren Ashley Simmons, and drew a censure from her local Democratic Party. Now her decision to break ranks and vote to harm transgender people appears to have earned her a prestigious judicial seat in Harris County.

"Governor Greg Abbott appointed Shawn Nicole Thierry as Judge of the 515th Judicial District Court in Harris County, effective September 1, 2026, for a term set to expire December 31, 2028, or until her successor shall be duly elected and qualified," reads the press release from Abbott's office. The 515th District Court, under the law that created it, "shall give preference to civil cases," meaning she will preside over civil lawsuits in the Houston area. "Thank you, Governor @GregAbbott_TX for the honor of this judicial appointment and the opportunity to serve the people of Texas once again. I look forward to serving on the bench with integrity, fairness, and respect for the rule of law," Thierry wrote on Twitter in response to the appointment, adding a verse from Galatians, "And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not," and the words, "To God be the glory."

Thierry first gained notoriety in 2023, in the early days of the nationwide anti-trans panic, as a wave of anti-trans bills moved toward passage in Texas. Her district, the 146th District of the Texas House, is not a swing district. It covers predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Houston that vote heavily Democratic; Thierry had beaten a Libertarian 87-13 in her last contested race. That is why her decision to stand up in favor of the anti-trans bills stunned nearly everyone. She then delivered a twelve-minute floor speech calling transgender girls "biological males," and compared the medical care they receive to tattoos and tanning beds. She closed by casting the vote as a religious duty: "For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind, so it remains my legislative duty and my moral obligation to vote the conscience and core values of my constituency." Immediately afterward, she began liking tweets from Gays Against Groomers, Moms for Liberty, and other anti-trans accounts, completing her turn.

The response to her anti-trans vote was swift. The Meyerland Area Democrats, in the heart of her district, voted to censure her, saying she had betrayed her voters. A movement to find a challenger began almost immediately. Thierry responded by calling gender-affirming care "Black genocide," and her supporters put up yard signs across the district reading "Stop the Genocide of Black Children," which she declined to denounce. Ultimately, Lauren Ashley Simmons, a queer Black union organizer, stepped forward to primary Thierry, and Simmons won in a 65-35 rout in the seat Thierry had held for eight years, the first of several anti-trans Democrats to lose a primary following an anti-trans vote.

Thierry did not accept defeat gracefully. Instead, she abandoned many of the principles she had professed. Three months after her loss, she joined Genspect as director of political strategy for its U.S. wing, an international anti-trans organization the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group, which campaigns against transition care for anyone under 25 and which has partnered with the Alliance Defending Freedom. Days later, she switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, announcing her turn at a Moms for Liberty event in Washington, D.C.. She also began reposting content from Libs of TikTok. She has since become something of a celebrity among anti-trans forces, who had been trying unsuccessfully, and remain largely unsuccessful, at peeling away the Democratic Party's support for transgender people.

Thierry's trajectory follows a path worn smooth by other anti-trans careerists: Riley Gaines, a swimmer who became famous for tying for fifth place with a trans woman; Graham Linehan, a sitcom writer whose comedy career collapsed as he devoted himself to denouncing trans people; Jesse Singal, a magazine writer who turned a single 2018 story scaremongering over trans kids into a career. Each discovered what Thierry discovered: that in the far-right movement, the only qualification required is a willingness to launder pseudoscience and moralize against transgender people, and the rewards are real. And now, Thierry becomes the latest to reap those rewards for personal gain and power over the constituents who already rejected her.

The August 19 school board vote in Tabor, Iowa, was expected to be a mere formality. Ace Rios had already been offered the job of band teacher at Fremont-Mills Community School District. He had already been granted keycard access to school buildings, been assigned a classroom, and decorated the walls with colorful posters and a bright red “Mr. Rios” sign.

But now, Rios has stripped down the posters, leaving behind bare walls, and the middle school and the high school are going without what should have been their new band teacher. That is because the man they’d offered the job to—Rios—is transgender. And when community members found out, there was an uproar on social media, calling for the board to reject his final confirmation mere days before classes began.

A crowd of a couple dozen had assembled at that August 19 board meeting—likely a record turnout for the district that serves just over 400 kids total between both schools. As the very first speaker in the public comment section of the meeting put it: “Obviously, the issue is with you guys hiring a transgender [sic].”

“I am opposed to my grandchildren being subjected to that lifestyle,” said another attendee to the board. She identified herself as a former board member of over 14 years.

Other members of the community stepped up to speak and say that Rios’ gender identity was against their “biblical” values, or that they were concerned about where Rios might use the restroom, or that if Rios was hired, they’d pull their child from the district. On social media, he was reportedly labeled an “it” and a “pervert.”

Rios, a recent graduate of the music education program at the University of Nebraska, sat there in the room, listening to all of it.

Two board members—Jen Wyant and Mary Beth Korver—voted to greenlight Rios’ hiring in spite of the backlash.

“As a school board member, I believe my responsibility is to make decisions based on the qualifications of the candidate and the needs of our school district,” Wyant said to the crowd.

“Our administrators conducted the interview process, evaluated the candidates, and are recommending this individual for the position. The candidate has the appropriate educational background, performed very well academically, received positive recommendations from student teaching experiences, and interviewed well.”

“Opinions do not replace an established hiring process, District policies, or the professional judgment of the administrators we have entrusted to make these recommendations,” Wyant continued. “As a veteran, the principle of integrity is particularly important to me. For me, that means doing the right thing on what is based on facts and responsibilities entrusted to me, even when that decision may not be the most popular one.”

But the other board members—Eli Forney, Wes Hill, and Shannon Smith—did not vote to approve Rios. So when the dust cleared, Rios was out of a job, and the small, southwestern Iowa community was forced to commence the school year without their new band teacher.

“School starts on Monday and this hasn’t been resolved,” a parent said in the aftermath.

It is unclear what they will do in the interim as they search for another band teacher. A board member said they couldn’t answer at the meeting—but the decision was final. And as the board prepared to move on to another topic, Rios stopped and stood up in front of the room. “If you would like to come visit the classroom that I have set up already for these lovely students that I was so excited to teach, please come do so after this meeting,” he said. “I was super excited to be here. Be there for your children. Teach band. That’s what I do. Nothing else.” He sat back down.

Now, Rios told a reporter, he is consulting legal counsel to sue the district for discrimination.

“While a number of local governments in Iowa previously adopted ordinances prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law this year barring cities and counties from keeping such protections in place,” The Advocate reported on the matter. “That came a year after Reynolds signed a law removing gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act.” This makes Iowa the first state to eliminate a protected class from civil rights code.

Critically, this doesn’t nullify federal protections against employment discrimination as outlined in the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision for Bostock v. Clayton County. However, federal protections may be enforced at the whim of circuit court politics and/or Trumpian policy goals.

Indeed, Tabor’s extended back-and-forth on Rios’ “sexual identity” is an echo of Project 2025, the playbook for the authoritarian right. It classifies “transgender ideology” as “pornography.”

“Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women,” the document reads. “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

The board did not immediately respond to a request for comment about what music education would look like without their hire for the position.

Many parents also expressed outrage at the outcome of this vote.

“It’s new here. We live in a place in southwest Iowa where you don’t see people like Ace,” one father told the room in an impassioned speech. “But you know what else you don’t see? You don’t see people who are coming in here. That might be the person that changes my daughter into Mozart. But because they dress different, it’s a problem?”

“People like that guy right there—maybe somebody needs that change in this place,” he said, gesturing to Rios, still sitting in the room. “We need change.”

On Aug. 20, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation published an analysis of 2.45 million responses to the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey, collected between July 2021 and September 2024, and concluded that 12% of American adults identify as LGBTQ+, the highest figure any major survey has ever produced and three points above Gallup's most recent estimate of 9%. Importantly, the analysis also found that a larger-than-expected 2.34% of American adults, roughly one in 43, identify as transgender or gender-expansive, more than double the 1.1% Gallup reported earlier this year, and that young people are increasingly free to come out: nearly one in three adults under 25 now identify as LGBTQ+. LGBTQ+ people make up more than 10% of the adult population in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. The findings were published in a landmark report on HRC's website.

The results are remarkable. LGBTQ+ identification has grown across the United States through the first half of the 2020s. Gallup has been one of the primary tracking sources for LGBTQ+ identification, and its polling shows that LGBTQ+ people began identifying themselves as such to pollsters in growing numbers starting in the mid-2010s: the share of adults identifying as LGBTQ+ rose from 3.5% in 2012 to a record 9.3% in 2024, and held at 9% in 2025. But Gallup's figure comes from live telephone interviews, only ten thousand or so of them. HRC's analysis instead uses a self-administered government survey, run online by the Census Bureau during the years it was still asking about sexual orientation and gender identity, and found an even higher number. Importantly, there is reason to think the real number is higher still: respondents had to be comfortable disclosing their own sexual orientation and gender identity to a federal survey.

The findings also have particular significance for transgender people. Whereas earlier surveys and estimates placed transgender prevalence at somewhere between 0.5% and 1% of U.S. adults, that number has been rising in recent years, raising the possibility that being transgender is far more common than previously thought. HRC's dataset does not break out transgender people by age, but Gallup's polling puts trans identification among older generations at 0.2% to 0.3%, against 1.9% of Gen Z adults in its 2022 data. Younger generations are far more open to coming out as transgender or gender-expansive, and with one in 43 U.S. adults now identifying that way, Americans interact with transgender people constantly, knowingly or not, something advocates hope will build acceptance as more people come to understand that transgender people are already part of their communities.

The analysis also determined which states have the highest concentrations of LGBTQ+ people today. Some of the states at the top of the list are unsurprising. Among the 50 states, Oregon and Washington (17% and 16% LGBTQ+, respectively) come in at numbers one and two, and both carry a reputation for being incredibly queer-friendly, with strong civil rights protections. Colorado (14%) comes in at number three, a state that many transgender people have chosen when fleeing neighboring red states, and one with similarly strong protections. Perhaps surprisingly, number four on the list is Alaska (14%), an ostensibly red state with fewer civil rights protections, but also one of the only red states not to be fully subsumed by the anti-trans panic of recent years. California rounds out the top five, with 14% of adults identifying as LGBTQ+.

You can see the list here:

Collectively, the findings raise an important point. The onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ panic has not reduced the number of LGBTQ+ people or scared the vast majority of them into hiding their identities. To the contrary, LGBTQ+ people feel more free to come out now than ever before. It is important to note, however, that 2025 and 2026 numbers could look different, given the extreme anti-LGBTQ+ attacks from the current Trump administration, a possibility hinted at by recent Gallup polling, which found the number holding flat in 2025, the first year since Gallup began tracking in 2012 that it did not rise.

Further research in this area is uncertain, however, as the Trump administration has dismantled federal data collection on LGBTQ+ people since taking office, stripping sexual orientation and gender identity questions from hundreds of federal data collection forms in its first year. "Reliable data are essential for understanding who lives in this country and what our communities need to thrive. Removing sexual orientation and gender identity questions from surveys like the one used for this analysis introduces significant gaps in this understanding. These findings show that LGBTQ+ people are a substantial and growing segment of the population, underscoring the need for our continued inclusion in data collection efforts," said Tari Hanneman, the HRC Foundation's senior director of research and education.

Amnesty International UK seemingly filed a copyright claim against a Harvard Law instructor who had shared its since-deleted anti-rights reports naming “gender critical” (anti-trans) groups in its analysis. This resulted in the reports being removed from her Google Drive. A webpage hosting the documents were also wiped from the Wayback Machine; however, alternate links to the report still exist within the web archive. This comes after billionaire Holocaust denier and TERF activist JK Rowling threatened to sue organizations who called anti-trans groups “anti-rights.”

Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney at Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic, uploaded links to the documents to her social media, only to have them deleted—at the request of Amnesty International UK, evidence shows.

“This is an organization that has gone to bat against murderous dictators, genocidal governance, and all kinds of the most evil, dangerous people in the world,” she said.

It began in July, when Amnesty International UK issued a report focusing on anti-rights organizations—among them was Beira’s Place, a women’s shelter founded by Rowling. The shelter is specifically designed to turn away trans women, who experience the highest rates of domestic violence of any gender group.

It was one of many “LGB” groups—an anti-trans buzzword, indicating the exclusion of trans people from equality measures—named in the report. This offended Rowling, who offered to finance all of these trans exclusionary groups should they want to sue Amnesty International UK for defamation. In essence, Rowling is acting as a one-woman anti-trans censor.

Amnesty UK caved. They agreed to launch an internal investigation, retracted the report, and struck another one that was critical of JK Rowling and TERFs, saying they were not reflective of their institutional values; that they had not gone through proper review. The reports, titled “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK” and “Like a snowball: the growth and impact of the gender critical movement in the UK” were subsequently pulled from the Amnesty website.

Caraballo posted about the situation, uploading a PDF of the report to Google Drive and sharing the link with her over 200,000 Bluesky followers. But within a day or so, the reports had been removed from archival caches online, and it had been stricken from Caraballo’s Google Drive.

Through emails Caraballo received from Google, cross-referenced with data from Lumen, she was able to determine it was taken down from her Google Drive due to a copyright violation claim. And the actor who issued the complaint appears to be none other than Amnesty UK itself.

Caraballo is in the United States, which has more robust free speech protections (at least on paper) compared to the United Kingdom. The material was also taken down under the DMCA, a US, not UK, copyright law. And it doesn’t even apply in this case, Caraballo said; sharing the document in its entirety for commentary and critique is squarely fair use.

So if Amnesty UK won’t fight censorship in court, Caraballo said she will.

“Being silenced and targeted is meant to send a message: You cannot criticize JK Rowling, or her gender critical friends, or she will bankrupt you with lawfare,” she said.

The situation has also sparked ire from other civil society groups.

“Individuals and organizations should have wide latitude to publish reports and criticize movements and groups they believe threaten human rights or other important values,” said Aaron Terr, the Director of Public Advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

“Organizations that believe they’ve been subject to false factual accusations that have harmed their reputation are entitled to sue for defamation,” Terr told Erin in the Morning. “But labels like ‘anti-rights’ are generally expressions of opinion, which can’t be defamatory. Debates over how fair those characterizations are should play out in the court of public opinion, not a court of law.”

Amnesty UK did not confirm or deny it was behind the DMCA claims, but defended its decision to back down from Rowling.

“We hold ourselves to the highest standards of evidence and rigour in everything we publish, and to accuracy in how we describe the position of any organisation or individual we name. This briefing did not meet either standard: it did not provide sufficient evidence to support its claims, and it described named organisations inaccurately,” a spokesperson told Erin in the Morning. “That is a failure of research quality, not a change in what we believe.”

A Douglas County judge declared the state’s invalidation of a transgender woman’s Kansas driver’s license was likely an unlawful violation of her right to Due Process—paving the way, potentially, for other Kansans to contest anti-trans ID laws on the same grounds. The full memorandum from the judge is at the bottom of this piece.

Many trans Kansans across the state lost their driver’s licenses and IDs earlier this year. They were forced to seek out new ones with an incorrect gender marker by SB 244. The bill, passed in February, has become one of the most restrictive anti-trans laws in the country. It invalidated state IDs that don’t match one’s sex assigned at birth and instituted a bathroom ban on state-owned or -operated facilities, such as many parks, libraries, airports, bus terminals, and courthouses.

It also greenlit a “bounty hunter” clause, which enabled private citizens to sue anyone they suspect of being transgender in a bathroom that doesn’t align with their sex assigned at birth. If the claim is substantiated by the courts, a person could collect monetary damages—a cash reward for enduring the injustice of sharing a bathroom with a trans person. (There have been no reported incidents of someone successfully making this claim, however.)

But the rollout, like that of many anti-trans policies, was haphazard, messy, and disorienting, robbing Jamie Miller of Lawrence the opportunity to meaningfully contest the invalidation of her state ID. This caused irreparable harm, the judge found.

“Due Process is nothing more (and nothing less) than the right to meaningful notice of what action the Government intends to take/has taken with respect to some personal interest and a meaningful opportunity to be heard,” District Court Judge James McCabria wrote. “When the government fails to make sufficiently clear what action is going to occur, when it will occur and what steps one must take to be heard on that action, Due Process has not been afforded.”

McCabria granted Miller a temporary injunction, as first reported by the Lawrence Journal-World. This means she will be able to retain a “female” gender marker as the case continues to play out in the courts. “No other remedy will suffice,” McCabria wrote.

Since the bill went into effect, Miller has had to spend money on alternate modes of transportation, resort to getting around by e-bike, and navigate describing her intimate medical history any time she needs to produce an ID for verification purposes.

It was a drastic and sudden shift for the nearly 60-year-old Kansan, who has been living openly as a woman for over a decade now.

The invalidation of Miller’s driver’s license “has caused her to isolate from public life, created roadblocks to obtaining necessary medical care, created issues for caring for her disabled adult daughter, limited social interactions and limited interactions with distant family members,” the initial April complaint reads. It also says the situation “leaves her without the form of identity verification required in daily life including but not limited to voting, getting prescription medications, air travel, banking, or requesting government documents” and that she “cannot sign or approve any document listing her sex or gender as ‘male’ without committing fraud.”

The court also found Miller has a “substantial likelihood of prevailing” in her legal claims against the state. The implementation of SB 244 was painted as inconsistent and opaque, as seen in a series of contradictory notices sent to Miller.

“Summarily, the notices can be read as ‘your license will be invalid in two days, you can appeal, no, wait, your license isn’t invalid yet, you can appeal, no, wait, your license has been invalidated because you didn’t do anything to appeal but if you want to appeal, call us,’” McCabria wrote. “This is not ‘meaningful notice’ and there was never ‘meaningful opportunity’ to be heard before or after the invalidation of Plaintiff’s driver’s license. This is not a procedure defined by any statute.”

Miller is a U.S. Army veteran who was honorably discharged in 1997. Currently, she is also the primary caretaker for her adult daughter, who is disabled—another facet of her life severely impacted by the sudden invalidation of her ID, the complaint says.

This is not the only challenge to the law. In the same filing, the court rejected a bid to consolidate Miller’s case with another similarly situated case.

Moreover, earlier this month, a group of transgender men known as the “Kansas Compliance Crew” went viral for challenging the law through malicious compliance—using the women’s restrooms that state law requires them to use. At one park where they demonstrated, the manager called the police. The KCC told Erin in the Morning neither the staff nor law enforcement had known about SB 244.

Kansas lawmaker Rep. Abi Boatman, a Democrat, told KCUR earlier this summer that SB 244’s ID provision, like its bathroom restriction, is causing more problems than the state seems to be willing to address. Boatman is transgender, too.

“There seems to be a disconnect between the law that was passed and the way it’s being enforced,” Boatman said. “I think part of it may be that it was just so quick and so ill-informed and unplanned that they have run into more difficulties than they expected, invalidating people’s licenses.”