Being Trans in Trump’s America

Asher Thye came out as transgender as a teenager in suburban Texas about a decade ago. He was the first trans person many people in his life had ever encountered. As a result, Asher fell into the role of educating the people around him about trans issues and what it meant to be trans from a young age. 

“Many people in my life had an image [of trans people] as the punchline in sitcoms from the ’90s. You know, caricatures like a man in a dress,” Asher says, reflecting on the difficulties of overcoming stereotypes often presented in the media. “I found it meaningful to use my skills to help other folks. I was one of the first out trans kids at my high school and had to talk with sports teams and administrators about athletics and what bathroom to use. Future trans students benefited from it, too.”

After high school, Asher attended Southern Methodist University, where he wrestled with questions about what it meant to call Texas home as a trans adult within SMU’s Human Rights Program. Today, Asher works for the Transgender Education Network of Texas as a field organizer engaged in person-to-person education and advocacy for trans folks in Texas. In this role, Asher utilizes the skills he developed as a young trans person professionally supporting trans folks of all ages across the state. (Note: This piece uses “transgender” and “trans” to refer to people identifying with a range of labels, such as nonbinary, genderqueer, gender-nonconforming, agender and more.)

Texas is among the states most hostile to trans folks, with more anti-trans bills introduced than any other state, and almost 140 this year alone. Some of this anti-LGBTQ+ legislation includes bans on gender-affirming mental health care for minors and on school clubs focused on gender or sexuality, as well as authorizations for school boards and advisory councils to remove certain books from schools.

These comprehensive and wide-ranging attacks pose major roadblocks for advocates like Asher, whose work centers on educating trans Texans on their rights and available resources. Furthermore, Asher notes a marked decline in available resources for trans and nonbinary Texans in recent years, especially since Donald Trump returned to the White House. “We’re helping people connect to resources, but that list of resources is always changing,” including “therapists leaving the state or federal and state funding being stripped. … Resources that used to be a privilege supported by our government have been rolled back.”

Texas isn’t the only place where trans folks have had to adapt and resist anti-trans policies. In Florida, trans community members face legislation like the infamous Don’t Say Gay law, which proscribes discussion of gender and sexuality in the classroom. Mark, a trans community member who requested anonymity due to safety and privacy concerns, said the city of Sarasota was the “testing ground” for much of the anti-trans legislation currently appearing nationwide. “In reality, the groundwork was laid years ago, when Trump first got elected in 2016,” he said. “I told people, ‘It’s not just about banning books, this is the beginning of [something] more.’”

Mark grew up in a right-leaning Midwestern state during the 1990s. His grandmother, an educator, taught him a lot about accepting difference from a young age — having taught about the Holocaust for many years. Mark said he knew his parents had queer friends, but was “specifically instructed not to talk about it at school because in [my home state], you could get in trouble. … As a kid, they’d tell us in classes that if you’re gay, don’t tell anyone because you could lose your job.”

Mark struggled to find the words to describe his identity growing up. Eventually, he began presenting androgynously, after many years working in highly gendered spaces like banking. He found that poetry, art and therapy helped him express his identity. Mark also found that using both “he” and “they” pronouns helped render their transness more visible, as they pass as a cis man. “I started to describe my identity [to my therapist],” Mark said, “like: ‘When I found androgynous clothing styles, I made it work.’ My therapist said, ‘But this is your identity. You don’t make it work; it just is.’”

While many folks in Mark’s position seek to evade the bombardment of anti-trans legislation in states like Texas and Florida, other cities and states have seen a rise in trans folks seeking refuge. Several states have enacted trans health care “shield laws” to protect recipients and providers of gender-affirming care from civil or criminal penalties. One such state is Maryland, where Renee Lau, a 70-year-old transgender woman, works to ensure that trans folks in Baltimore have access to stable housing.

Unlike Asher and Mark, Renee came out much later in life, at 63, having grown up in a strict Catholic household. After coming out, she became estranged from her friends and family, a trauma compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and a cancer diagnosis. Facing a high risk of homelessness, Renee sought out housing resources for transgender seniors in Baltimore. This is how she discovered Maryland Safe Haven, where she currently serves as a special projects coordinator and administrative assistant. “The best harm reduction in the world is having secure housing,” Renee said. “Even though we are a transgender-led and run organization, we serve the entire community,” including low-income folks and those dealing with substance abuse disorders.

Renee notes a significant rise in requests for housing since the governor designated Maryland as a sanctuary state and the mayor made Baltimore a sanctuary city. Requests for shelter and assistance “almost went up threefold,” she reports, “to the point where we and Baltimore city don’t have enough housing to put people up. But that doesn’t stop [trans folks] from seeking sanctuary in Maryland.”

Along similar lines, Emma Vosicky of GenderNexus observes a broader trend of trans people migrating to safer environments. “A number of the folks with whom we work are struggling with the existential dread of living within a state and a country which refuses to recognize their humanity, instead making them a target in order to further accumulate power driven by hate.” Emma adds that “many of them are leaving this state, and those with means are leaving this country, concerned that this new wave of hate will result in the loss of everything.”

Even within relatively progressive states, the trans community still faces major barriers. Owen Ziegler, who also identifies as trans, experienced this firsthand when they tried to change their legal name in Colorado about a decade ago. In Colorado, trans folks seeking a name change must pass federal and state background checks with fingerprints to prove that they are not disqualified due to any criminal history.

When Owen changed their name about 10 years ago, they also had to publish their name change in the newspaper. The newspaper that published Owen’s name then misspelled their last name — even though their last name was not changing. “It’s a dignity thing, you know? Making you go through these hurdles and not even respecting the proper spelling of the thing they make you publish,” Owen told me. This led them to the Colorado Name Change Project, where they are currently the deputy director. The organization works to reduce barriers for trans folks to change their names, because “when you talk about the trans experience,” Owen explains, “there’s this constant undercurrent of being dehumanized or being invalidated.”

Yet, some trans people are now choosing to reverse their name change due to safety concerns, given the current political climate. One of Owen’s clients opted to change back to their given name because they couldn’t medically transition, didn’t pass well and feared for their safety. Others have sought court orders to change their gender markers on official documents from the neutral “X” to “M” or “F” because of the new U.S. Customs and Border Patrol rule that requires airlines to ignore “X” gender markers. This can cause potential delays or confusion that may disrupt international travel for trans and nonbinary people.

As Owen put it, trans folks “are again having to fit ourselves into the binary for the comfort or convenience of the system that is apparently existentially threatened by our simple freedom of authentic selfhood.” Owen continued: “The current administration is prompting people to seek further gender marker changes than maybe they’d usually present. … A lot of people are refraining from name changes right now because you never know what list you’re on.”

The mental health toll of such rules and legislation can be onerous. Taryn Sinclaire, a mental health provider, has witnessed this firsthand. “On a professional level,” she says, these policies “make it harder for a population that already had difficulty accessing services to access those services. It also makes them fearful.” Echoing Owen’s observation, she adds that “[Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] has been talking about putting people that have neurodivergence on a list. It makes you wonder, when we diagnose people with gender dysphoria, are they going to end up on a list?”

Insurance companies, Taryn explains, are aware of patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria because of their access to medical and mental health records of care received by policyholders during a given period. Private information like diagnoses is protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, HIPAA, but Taryn worries about how effective such protections are in the Trump era. “Already here in Michigan,” she says, “we have Rep. Josh Schriver, who tried to … label presenting yourself on the internet as a gender identity other than the sex you were born with as a criminal act.”

As a trans woman herself, Taryn has undertaken precautionary measures in her professional and personal life. For example, she’s establishing a financial fallback plan and has invested in personal safety. She’s also helping her partner in her private psychotherapy practice to become paneled and credentialed, as she currently has nine people financially dependent on her. Taryn is concerned about the possibility of losing her practice under the current administration. “With me being trans … if something happened to me or my ability to practice or be licensed, like we’ve seen in other fascist regimes, all of my team wouldn’t be able to pay their bills,” she tells me. “In Nazi Germany, under Hitler, they yanked Jewish people’s licenses to practice.”

Yet the stories of trans leaders and advocates exemplifies an extraordinary degree of resilience in the face of growing hatred and bigotry. Owen, for example, tells me they find reasons for hope. “Just seeing [the trans community] continue to be fabulous is so encouraging,” they said. “You can be hateful but you can’t stop the fabulous. You can’t stop the glitter. You can hate me all day but that’s not going to stop me from being who I am and how I am. … We’ve come a long way [and] the infrastructure of us helping each other has improved a lot.”

Asher notes that many trans youth forced to remain in Texas have still found ways to build community: holding after-school gatherings in cafés and attending queer sleepaway camps. He has witnessed this community firsthand as a volunteer at kin•dom camp, a summer camp where queer and trans youth can explore their identities in a safe environment while participating in traditional camp games and activities. They add that we must not lose sight of the bigger picture. What anti-trans government officials want from us, they tell me:

… is to be afraid and frozen and paranoid. It’s not just trans people: it’s about immigrants and women giving birth and anyone they view as expendable. They attempt to wear us down and freeze us. But push past that paranoia. Look to trusted organizations and resources and … find ways to carve out joy where you can.

Renee highlights the importance of embracing authenticity, despite the political climate. “I’d like to ask the trans community to stay strong,” she says. “Don’t be forced back into the closet and don’t suppress who you are. … If you remain silent, you’re only hurting yourself.” Mark also foregrounds authenticity in calling for trans people to resist erasure, stating:

One of my favorite lines from “Hamilton” is when George Washington tells Hamilton that “it’s hard to live, it’s easier to die.“ When I look at that, it speaks to authenticity to me. It’s harder to live inauthentically. … If you find your authenticity, all that resentment you feel about someone else doing what you want to do or breaking rules you want to break will subside.

This doesn’t mean that living authentically is easy, of course. Taryn is all too familiar with the fear and anxiety that people in the trans community experience. Still, she’s adamant that trans folks can resist the harmful rhetoric that saturates current political discourse. “I know that when we’re scared and anxious, our inclination is to withdraw, to board ourselves up into our safe spaces and bear down until it’s over,” she tells me. “But one of the reasons we’re in this mess is we got comfortable with saying it’s someone else’s problem. From a mental health perspective, there’s a lot of research that suggests that when you’re feeling disempowered or scared or isolated, getting involved makes us feel more empowered.”

Taryn’s call to action extends beyond the trans community:

A lot of people that are supportive of the trans community aren’t willing to do so vocally and definitely aren’t willing to challenge loved ones. … Let’s be real, we’ve always done it ourselves, our community is good at that … [but] boy, it would be a lot easier if we had other people pitching in.

Aidan Key, founder of TransFamilies and GenderDiversity.org and author of “Trans Children in Today’s Schools,” also exhorts allies to call out the harm caused by anti-trans policies and ideology. “Plan for the worst but work hard for the best,” he says. “Beyond those most directly impacted, we need to hear from everyone else — extended family members, neighbors, those who don’t have direct skin in the game — that enough is enough. These children, trans people in general, and the families which they’re a part of should not be targeted in this way.”

If the advice and example set by trans leaders and advocates spanning generations tells us anything, it’s that trans people are adaptable, resilient and tenacious. Even as the government, media and political parties advance transphobic rhetoric and use trans folks as scapegoats, the trans community continues to survive.