One Day in Anti-Trans America

Three excellent pieces of reporting paint a devastating picture

Sometimes, it helps to take a step back and look at what's happening all at once. As a trans person, I often find myself needing to look away from the daily onslaught of anti-trans policies and rhetoric just to maintain my mental health. But today, I want to highlight three pieces of truly excellent journalism that, when viewed together, illustrate just how relentless the attacks on trans rights have become.

In a single day—December 10, 2024—we saw reporting on:

• Worries about the Democrats potentially abandoning trans healthcare protections in the face of Republican attacks

• Florida prisons implementing cruel restrictions on trans inmates

• Republicans using the must-pass defense bill to strip healthcare from military families' trans kids

Let's look at each of these stories and what they tell us about the state of trans rights in America.

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The Democratic Party's Crisis of Courage

Jael Holzman at Rolling Stone delivers a deeply reported piece examining how Democrats might respond to Republican efforts to eliminate trans healthcare access nationwide. The reporting reveals a party apparatus that seems more concerned with managing political optics than protecting vulnerable citizens.

What's particularly striking is how the evidence doesn't support the narrative of trans issues hurting Democrats electorally. Blueprint's lead pollster Evan Roth Smith explicitly tells Holzman that people are misreading his company's data: "Democrats lost this election on the economy and also some immigration stuff. That's why we lost." He explains that Republicans merely "successfully found a vulnerability in Democrats supporting small groups generally," but giving in to that would mean abandoning a core tenet of the party's appeal.

The piece exposes a troubling lack of preparation within Democratic circles. As Holzman reports, when asked about who they consult for talking points on trans rights, Democratic staffers gave a telling response: "good question." Even more concerning is the revelation that the Human Rights Campaign advised the Harris campaign to "tread delicately" in responding to anti-trans attacks, rather than mounting a robust defense.

This paralysis comes at a particularly dangerous time. The article details how Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term, includes plans to effectively nullify Supreme Court protections for trans people and legalize various forms of discrimination. Yet instead of preparing to fight these threats, many Democrats seem ready to compromise before the battle even begins.

Florida's Cruel Prison Policies

Beth Schwartzapfel's reporting for The Marshall Project provides a devastating look at how Florida's new prison policies are systematically stripping trans inmates of their dignity and identity. The details are haunting: trans women subjected to breast examinations using a scale designed for adolescents, then having their undergarments confiscated if they don't measure up to arbitrary standards.

The human impact is heartbreaking. Josie Takach describes being ordered to lift her shirt for a male doctor who "glanced at her breasts and wrote something down without saying a word." When she tried to ask questions, a nurse "told me not to ask any questions and to just shut up and do what I'm told." As Takach later tells Schwartzapfel, "It felt like I was being treated less than human."

The policy's cruelty goes beyond medical care. Women report being forcibly given buzz cuts, with Mariko Sundwall describing being put in handcuffs and led to the prison barber after spending 10 days in solitary confinement for refusing to cut her hair. "I feel like they're taking away my identity," says Jada Edwards, who had her hair forcibly cut at Dade Correctional Institution.

The state's justification for these policies relies on questionable evidence. They cite a 2022 Florida Medicaid report that a federal judge already found to be "a biased effort to justify a predetermined outcome, not a fair analysis of the evidence." Yet the human cost is very real. As Sasha Mendoza tells Schwartzapfel, "If they took away my hormone therapy treatment, I would be ready to end my life... It may sound drastic. But FDC just let me start my transition and I was doing so well, and now they are making me stop. I'm halfway there and halfway not there."

Using the Military to Attack Trans Kids

Jennifer Bendery's HuffPost piece meticulously documents how Republicans are using the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act to force anti-trans policies into law. The strategy is particularly cynical: slip discriminatory language into legislation that's considered essential for national security, then dare Democrats to vote against it.

The provision itself is deceptively simple—just one sentence buried on page 399 of an 1,813-page bill: "Medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization may not be provided to a child under the age of 18." But as Bendery's reporting shows, this language is fundamentally dishonest. She cites a July 2024 Harvard School of Public Health study finding no instances of gender-affirming surgeries in youth under 15, and only minimal rates (2.1 per 100,000) in teens 15-17, with most being chest surgeries that don't affect fertility.

The cynicism goes deeper. As Bendery points out, the provision still allows TRICARE to cover similar treatments for cisgender kids, including "breast reduction surgery for cisgender men with gynecomastia" and "hormone treatments for cisgender women with polycystic ovary syndrome." This reveals the true intent: not protecting children, but specifically targeting trans youth.

The human cost is stark. As Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon notes in the piece, "Our soldiers need to be able to focus on their missions, not [worry] whether their children are able to get medical treatment they need." Nearly 300 pro-LGBTQ rights organizations have urged opposition to the bill, warning that "Preventing thousands of family members from obtaining medically necessary care is a betrayal of the promise to our military families and an unnecessary threat to our national security."

The Bigger Picture

What these three pieces collectively reveal is a coordinated assault on trans rights happening at every level—federal, state, and institutional. The attacks are coming through multiple vectors: direct legislation, bureaucratic rule changes, and backdoor provisions in must-pass bills.

More troubling is how this matches historical patterns of systematic discrimination. When Florida prisons start conducting humiliating physical examinations to determine who gets to keep their underwear, we're not in the realm of reasonable policy disagreement anymore. We're watching the systematic degradation of human dignity, justified by bureaucratic language and enabled by political cowardice.

The quality journalism documented here matters. These reporters took the time to understand the nuances, check the facts, and present the human impact of these policies. But it's not enough for journalists to document what's happening—those with political power need to actually do something about it.

As these three articles make clear, we're at a critical juncture. Will Democrats find the courage to stand firm? Will institutions resist being turned into instruments of discrimination? Will enough Americans recognize what's happening and speak up? The answers to these questions will shape not just the lives of trans people, but the character of American democracy itself.