What’s At Stake for Trans People In 2025

A Primer for Allies & Comrades

In all of the chaos following the 2025 US Presidential Inauguration, you may have heard that trans people are under attack. But you may not know what is really at stake: Why are we so worried? Why are some people calling this a “trans genocide,” and is it really that serious?

In short: Regardless of what you call it, the situation for trans people in the US and globally is extremely serious. For the past 10 years, mainstream media has often framed trans rights as a matter of identity, focusing on topics like pronouns and language, gender-bending fashion, and other aesthetic issues. As a result, there is often a sense in liberal society that the main need trans people have is to be “validated.”

But the current dangers trans people currently face go far beyond emotional validation. This Substack post, which is a lightly adapted version of a slide deck I posted to Instagram on Feb 2, is a basic primer on what’s at stake for trans people in our current times.

Some Significant Threats Trans People Are Currently Facing:

This is neither an exhaustive list, nor perfect political analysis. The situation is likely to vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, as well as over time. The current state of affairs on trans rights and freedom is rapidly evolving on both local and global scales. This information is intended to offer some foundational considerations for people interested in a material analysis of trans lives - that is, a way to understand the actual dangers that trans people face today beyond the relatively shallow idea that trans people’s identities need to be “validated” because it makes us “feel better.” The truth is that trans people in many geographic regions - including but not limited to the United States - are currently experiencing life danger, in many cases sanctioned by the state.

1) Denial of Legal Identification

When a government declares that it will only recognize “two biological sexes, male and female,” what it is actually saying is that it is threatening the legal personhood of trans people. As we are already starting to see, policies like this can be used to deny trans people the right to request, update, or use identification documents such as driver’s licenses or passports. They can also be used to seize and confiscate documents, which we have also already seen happen in the United States.

The denial of trans people’s legal personhood can have serious day-to-day impacts on our lives: International travel, for example, is not possible without legal ID; and anti-trans policies also gives border security agents the grounds to potentially detain and interrogate any travelers whose physical appearance “looks incongruent” with the sex designation on their ID. Furthermore, accessing many forms of social services and healthcare, including emergency shelter and medical care, can become difficult or impossible as a person whose gender is not legally recognized. Trans people in prisons especially are exposed to massive danger and deprivation.

2) Gender Affirming Care Bans

The US federal government, like several other jurisdictions globally, is attempting to ban gender affirming medical care for youth. Many trans people fear that this will soon be followed by attempted bans on gender affirming care for adults as well.

Gender affirming care comprises a wide array of medical treatments, including hormone therapy, surgery, laser hair removal, and more. Gender affirming care is essential to the mental health and well-being of many trans people, form whom living without it can be seen as a form of psychological torture. For others, gender affirming care is a necessity for social and physical safety, as it supports trans people to “pass” as non-trans in environments that would otherwise be dangerous or hostile. People, including youth, who have already started gender affirming medical care, may also require ongoing treatment to maintain their physical health and development

3) Censorship & Erasure

The US Federal government has enacted broad censorship of any formerly federally supported research, scholarship, and public health information regarding trans people. This means that recognition of trans people’s existence has essentially been deleted from major hubs of scientific, medical, and cultural knowledge. Indeed, in the past week, we have already seen the word “transgender” (and all similar terms) removed from the Stonewall website, which is egregious for many reasons, not least of which is the key role that trans people played in the Stonewall Riots. Extremely important data, such as information on trans health and social statistics on trans rates of employment, housing, life expectancy, and more have also been suppressed.

Many jurisdictions are also attempting to prevent educators from mentioning trans people in schools or providing students with educational materials about trans people, thereby preventing trans young people from accessing essential information about themselves.

Many trans people fear that there will be further bans enacted on trans literature and cultural production, both in traditional media and on the internet. This would amount to attempt at the total destruction of trans history and culture.

4) State-Sanctioned Discrimination

In many places, we are seeing legal efforts to entirely strip legal protections against discrimination from trans people - including, of course, in the United States today. Throughout the past century, trans and gender-nonconforming people, have been subjected to disproportionate violence and discrimination in key sectors including healthcare, housing and employment.

In the current time, society is currently experiencing a massive social panic about trans people, with anti-trans sentiments having been whipped up among large groups of people, most of whom likely never thought about trans individuals a few years ago. An explicit removal of legal protection for trans human rights might be seen as an encouragement to discriminate against us or even attack and kill us.

It is important to remember that up until a few decades ago, violence and even deadly violence against trans people was seen as culturally normal and even legally defensible in many cases.

5) Elimination From The Public Sphere

All of the other attacks on trans rights and freedoms listed in this post converge into a single pressing imperative: The complete, forced erasure of trans people from public space. The anti-trans movement and government hope that without access to legal identification, vital information, the social service network, or the social determinants of health such as housing or healthcare or employment, in combination with exposure to a hostile and potentially physically violent social context, trans people will disappear and die out entirely.

In some jurisdictions, further efforts to wipe out trans people by criminalizing “cross-dressing” or “drag” in public have already been made.

What You Can Do To Help

A more extensive post on actions that non-trans allies and comrades can take is forthcoming, but for now here are some basics:

Do Not Comply With Transphobic Policy: Just don’t do it. If you are in a position where you are being ordered to censor trans voices or educational information, refuse. If you are being ordered to ban or de-recognize trans people in your organization or institution, push back.

Give Money, Time & Other Resources to Trans People: Offer material support to trans individuals and grassroots organizations, especially those local to you.

Build Solidarity Between Class Struggle & Trans Lives: Talk and organize with a fervent dedication to undoing the myth that trans people should be scapegoated for the suffering of poor and working people. The billionaires and their crony politicians love a scapegoat. But trans liberation and class struggle are the same struggle. And the billionaire and political classes are the real enemy.