The Case For Hope: Transgender Rights Going Into 2026

This last year has been one of the hardest years for transgender people in memory. Somehow, though, I'm feeling hope going into 2026.

Photo by Jamie Fenn on Unsplash

Every year around this time, I look back and try to make sense of what we’ve lived through. Since I began reporting on LGBTQ+ news, there has never been a shortage of material—years defined by a mix of real victories and relentless harm. In the past, I’ve marked the end of the year by listing the wins, but as 2025 comes to a close, that tradition feels hollow and even dishonest, given how much this year has taken. And yet, beneath the exhaustion, I find myself feeling something unexpected: hope. Not because the danger has passed or because things are about to suddenly get easier, but because even with so many levers of power turned against us, we are still here. We are still finding care. We are still finding one another. We are still surviving. That persistence—the simple fact that we have not been erased—is what gives me hope for the future, even as the forces arrayed against us lash out with what increasingly feels like desperation.

I want to remind readers of what we have lived through this year—especially those who are newer here, who may have found my work because a family member passed it along over the holidays. In 2025 alone, we’ve faced dozens of executive orders and federal policies touching nearly every part of our lives: bans on passport gender marker changes, threats of revocation, and national sports bans spanning everything from darts to figure skating. Colleges have capitulated to Trump’s demands, pledging to bar transgender people from bathrooms, and even the U.S. Capitol building has followed suit. Many people have lost health insurance coverage or had identification documents withheld. Transgender youth, in particular, have been hit hard—dozens of hospitals have stopped offering care, courts have ordered forced outings to parents, and access to stability has been stripped away piece by piece. This is only the tip of a very cruel iceberg we have endured throughout 2025, with three more years of a Trump presidency still ahead.

And yet, we have not met our doom—at least not yet. Gender-affirming care for transgender adults remains available in all 50 states, with Florida imposing some restrictions, ones that transgender people have nevertheless found ways to work around. Many hospital systems continue to offer care to transgender youth, and some are actively fighting to keep doing so. At the same time, private clinics have emerged across the country providing youth care entirely disconnected from federal funding threats. The Trans Youth Emergency Project is helping families bridge the gaps, offering stipends, information, and travel assistance so care can continue. Even after everything that has been thrown at us, they have still failed to stop transgender healthcare in the United States.

Other federal policies are hitting us hard as well. The passport ban remains in effect, and many transgender people are living with uncertainty as the administration waffles on whether it intends to revoke passports issued during the injunction period that briefly allowed gender marker changes after Trump shut the process down. However, for now, those who updated their passports before the crackdown remain unaffected, and many people were able to renew or change their documents just before the presidency began, giving them nearly a decade of safety. As of this moment, passports updated during the injunction still appear to be valid and usable for travel. While some people are nevertheless being deeply impacted by the current policy, this pain is not permanent. In a few years, there will be another election, and because none of these restrictions are federal law, a future administration could reverse them just as easily as they were imposed.

Looking more broadly, there is no national federal bathroom ban. There is no total national ban on transgender youth healthcare. There is no nationwide sports ban enacted through a law passed by Congress—and many states continue to protect transgender participation in sports, despite capitulation by national sports organizations. Numerous states are still maintaining sanctuary-style protections, and people continue to travel across state lines to access the care they need. Quite simply, the administration is failing—often spectacularly—at erasing transgender people. They are making our lives harder, yes, but many of us are finding strength in community, sharing information, and relying on word of mouth to navigate around restrictions that are often riddled with holes and, with enough effort, still bypassable.

There are also more concrete reasons for hope. In Congress, only a small number of Democrats defected on a national sports ban. More recently, when Marjorie Taylor Greene’s national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth came to a vote, more Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats than Democrats crossed over to vote with Republicans. The margins were narrow on both sides, to be sure—but they show that the fault lines have not cracked into earthquakes. National Republicans, it turns out, are often less unified on these issues than their state-level counterparts. And amid all of this, sustained pressure—including lobbying by Rep. Sarah McBride, who has faced criticism in the past (including from me) for what some viewed as overly cautious positioning—helped strip anti-trans medical provisions from the NDAA, even after similar policies had passed both the House and Senate. It’s hard to look at this record and not see that we still have a fighting chance.

Going beyond Congress, there are signs that the anti-trans fever that gripped politics over the last several years is beginning to break. In 2024, anti-trans advertising was widely credited with helping Republicans flip key races. A year later, voters are no better off: prices remain high, government dysfunction persists, and inequality continues to deepen. The promised fixes never arrived. As that reality sets in, voters appear increasingly exhausted by the constant effort to pin society’s failures on transgender people. What once functioned as a mobilizing wedge is now being recognized for what it is—a distraction meant to redirect anger away from those actually in power. That distraction is losing its potency. Even among voters who may hold mixed or conservative views on transgender issues, there is growing evidence that they do not see those issues as a governing priority, and may even be turned off by politicians who make anti-trans attacks the centerpiece of their campaigns. The results speak for themselves: sweeping 2025 losses for anti-trans firebrands in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, and in school board races across the country.

This is no promise that 2026 will be easy. I expect continued regression, particularly in red states that still believe they must deliver cruelty toward transgender people to satisfy their base. We will likely see new and inventive ways to target us, along with further federal attacks from President Trump. Adult care may face threats in some states, or even nationally, before this is over. But the deeper we move into Trump’s presidency, the less time he has to enact the most extreme ambitions of his party. Even when new policies are announced, they are likely to be tied up in court for months, if not longer. And even when the Supreme Court ultimately signs off—as it has repeatedly shown it is willing to do—the clock will be closer to running out. The tunnel is long, but the light at the end of it is still there.

And so, as we move into 2026, my advice to the community I belong to—and write for every single day—is this: there will be hard moments ahead. There will be people who tell you to give up, and there will be days when hope feels distant. My reporting will continue to cover things that are difficult to read, because the truth often is. But it is through understanding the threats we face, maintaining connection with one another, and quietly, relentlessly finding ways around policies meant to erase us that we continue to survive. We carve out space not because it is given to us, but because we insist on it. And when history does bend toward justice—as it always eventually does—it will be because people like us were there, hands on the arc, bending it.