You've seen it: state laws against transgender girls in sports, bans on minors taking hormones and puberty blockers, bathroom bills, and the like. Used as a political cudgel and broadcast in campaign ads, this vilification of transgender people has resulted in a shift of public opinion. Hostility has penetrated the middle of the road, where most people could once be characterized as neutral or indifferent, but where they now put themselves in the majority that opposes specific transgender rights.
A UK councillor has dubbed her local authority's data breach "crazy" after the personal details of individuals behind a series of complaints were revealed to her. Dulcie Tudor, an independent councillor for the Threemilestone and Chacewater area in Cornwall, England, publicized the data protection gaffe via social media following complaints about comments she made during a November council meeting. Cllr Tudor received ten complaints after asking fellow councillor Leigh Knight whether a trans woman was a real woman.
President Donald Trump has long pushed for restrictions on transgender rights around , education and even daily life. That effort has been even more pronounced in his second term of office. Behind any policy from the White House is a team of advisers who guide its phrasing, provisions, and execution. When it comes to issues around gender and trans rights, chief among them is May Mailman, who was a senior policy strategist for Trump from January to August 2025.
The poll from the liberal publication The Argument found broad opposition to transgender rights among U.S. registered voters, with only around a third of Americans supporting letting trans kids get puberty blockers with parental consent and a doctor's recommendation. Over half supported requiring trans people to use the restroom associated with their sex assigned at birth. And a large majority - 60% - supported trans sports bans.
In the modern anti-transgender panic, several states have passed laws banning transgender people from restrooms consistent with their gender identity. Early bills focused primarily on K-12 schools, but the scope quickly expanded. Some states extended bans to even private colleges and universities. Others adopted sweeping "government building" prohibitions, barring transgender people from restrooms in all publicly owned facilities - a far broader category than it sounds, encompassing airports, rest stops, and other everyday spaces.
Dr Beth Upton, the trans doctor at the centre of a high-profile tribunal brought by a nurse who complained about sharing a women's changing room with her, has since left the NHS. Both Dr Upton and the NHS board she worked for, NHS Fife, were taken to an employment tribunal by nurse of 30 years Sandie Peggie, who was supported in her case by gender-critical group Sex Matters.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.
Denying people the ability to update the gender marker on their identification is not only discriminatory; it is dangerous. In an increasingly hostile climate, mismatched identification can expose individuals to harassment, threats, and violence. It can also create serious barriers to employment, housing, and access to essential services.
The original legal case concerned a doctor who was prosecuted for performing gender reassignment surgery on transgender women, amid law enforcement frustrations that female-presenting transgender sex workers could not be prosecuted for their profession due to their being legally male. The doctor was found guilty of violating Japan's eugenics laws, which prohibited surgeries resulting in sterilisation if they were deemed inessential.
The state of Indiana just banned trans people from updating the gender markers on their driver's licenses. Advocate reports that the state's Bureau of Motor Vehicles added a small statement to its website on Monday saying that it will no longer allow people to change their gender on state IDs, even if they have a court order. The notice can be found by clicking through several webpages on the state's BMV website:
The Indiana state Senate passed in a 37 to 8 vote last week S.B. 182, which would create legal definitions of "male" and "female" based on sex assigned at birth, or as the bill states, "anatomy, hormones, and the gametes oriented toward fertilization without regard to the individual's psychological, behavioral, social, chosen, or subjective experience of gender." It now heads to the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives.
Along with using his wife's pregnancy announcement as proof that he gets action (shudder), Vice President JD Vance used his speech at the March for Life rally on Friday to announce a devastating expansion of the Trump administration's global gag rule. The rule, which already blocked federal funding for global organizations that even dare utter the word "abortion," will now include any organization that the administration deems as promoting transgender rights or diversity inclusion initiatives.
Guidance on how to implement the landmark supreme court ruling on gender is being adapted to lessen its impact on businesses and to ensure it tries to balance single-sex spaces with the lives of transgender people, the Guardian has been told. Lawyers from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) are understood to be in discussions with government lawyers over the practicalities of guiding businesses and other institutions about last year's ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex only.
The funding - supporting hospital clinics, HIV/AIDS programs, educational institutions, and more - would be conditioned on sweeping new restrictions barring "social transition" and gender-affirming care at any age, including therapy and counseling. While the administration has already frozen large portions of foreign aid, this rule would formalize those efforts and dramatically expand their reach, with potentially severe consequences for transgender people worldwide as the administration escalates its campaign against transgender lives both at home and abroad.
Anti-trans politics dominated the 2024 election season when Donald Trump painted former Vice President Kamala Harris as too far to the left on the issue and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads to hammer the message: "Kamala Harris is for they/them, President Trump is for you." The Harris-Walz campaign largely tried to avoid the issue, perhaps hoping voters would believe that Harris' position on trans rights was not that important in determining who should be president.
Griffin-Gracy, born in Chicago, spoke about her move to NYC in her youth on the LGBTQ&A podcast in 2021. "The trans community was everywhere," she reflected, "I went immediately to 42nd Street. Everybody went to 42nd Street: trans girls, everybody. Finding them was not a problem.... I found an apartment that I moved into. It was six floors of nothing but trans girls. It was fabulous. There were so many of us that it was a full life."
