I don’t want to mince words: Transgender people in the United States are facing an existential threat. You’ve likely heard the numbers, but they are disturbing enough to bear repeating. In 2024 alone, Republicans have introduced more than 640 bills targeting the civil rights of trans people, with four months of the year left to go. It’s a record-breaking amount of anti-trans legislation, and it’s the fifth year in a row that particular record has been broken. Anti-LGBTQ+ violence has also reached record highs, with attacks based on gender identity increasing a staggering 33 percent from 2021 to 2022. This year, for the first time in its 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans.
But in a stunning abdication of moral responsibility, Democrats made little mention of trans rights during this year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC). Trans people were mentioned in just two speeches, and neither speaker received prime-time speaking slots. For the first time since 2012, the DNC did not feature any trans speakers.
This glaring absence has extremely high stakes. While Republicans have focused much of their ire on trans women in sports and gender-affirming health care for trans youth, they have also made it clear that their aims are far-reaching — they would like to see trans people eradicated from public life. In a campaign video released last year, Donald Trump decried gender-affirming care as an act of child abuse and pledged to instruct “every federal agency to cease programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.”
Just this week, a federal appeals court cleared the way for Florida to enforce a ban on puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth (surgeries, which are rare for minors, were already banned). But the law also restricts care for trans adults by effectively banning telehealth treatment, barring all nurse practitioners from prescribing gender affirming care and requiring providers to fill out new, lengthy consent forms. An analysis by journalist Erin Reed found that the Florida law impacts up to 80 percent of care for trans adults, in addition to the total ban on gender-affirming care for trans children.
Democratic leaders, however, seem to think that the issue — which carries life-or-death significance for the 1.6 million trans people in the United States — is too divisive to address. A recent BBC article listed “identity politics” as one of three things the Democrats avoided during the DNC, casting “transgender issues” as a “hot-button social topic” that was excluded from the programming.
“If you look at who was featured in the prime-time slots, it’s middle-of-the-road people,” Melissa Michelson, a professor of political science at Menlo College, told NBC News. “It’s people who are going to appeal to that chunk of swing voters in the Sunbelt, in the Rustbelt, those swing states, and transgender rights are not a high priority issue for those voters and not the way they’re going to decide their vote.”
Such a cynical approach is egregious on its face: The ability of trans people to live safe, happy and healthy lives is, of course, a fundamental human right — including for the hundreds of thousands of trans people in the Sunbelt and Rust Belt states — and not just a “hot-button” political talking point.
The idea that trans rights are wildly unpopular is also not true. A poll conducted last year by The 19th and SurveyMonkey found that only 17 percent of the public want politicians to focus on restricting gender-affirming care. More than half of adults acknowledge that trans people face a great deal or fair amount of discrimination in this country, polling from Pew Research found.
Such discrimination was, after all, on full display at the Republican National Convention in July, where main stage speakers peddled misinformation and took plenty of jabs at the trans community.
“They promise normalcy and gave us transgender visibility day on Easter Sunday,” claimed far right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). Transgender Day of Visibility, which happened to fall on Easter Sunday this year, has been celebrated on March 31 since 2009. Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) lambasted trans rights as a “fringe agenda” and baselessly claimed that LGBTQ+ education in schools was promoting “the sexualization and indoctrination of our children.”
The official Republican National Committee platform takes a similar approach. It pledges to end “gender indoctrination” and cut federal funding “for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
Despite the inflammatory rhetoric, this far right agenda isn’t actually very popular. Forty-four percent of adults surveyed by The 19th and SurveyMonkey didn’t think trans issues should be a legislative focus at all. In light of this, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz could choose to expand their embrace of the term “weird” as a campaign insult to focus on Republicans’ assault on trans rights — it is weird, after all, that Trump and his allies have become obsessed with intruding on the private lives of trans people.
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court is now set to hear oral arguments later this year on laws banning gender-affirming care for trans youth. The decision by the conservative supermajority, expected in June 2025, could have dire consequences for trans protections across the country.
Democrats should be laying out a vision for how they could approach restoring health care to trans youth in states where it has been blocked. The party should be publicly and proudly reaffirming its commitment to protecting the rights of all trans people and continuing the fight to expand federal protections for the LGBTQ+ community. But the DNC’s neglect of trans rights is also an important reminder of the importance of grassroots efforts and mutual aid: As the legislative attacks on trans people continue, we must work to keep each other and our communities safe.
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