The nation’s first shelter for transgender and gender-nonconforming people experiencing homelessness opened its doors this week in New York City.
The shelter, a joint venture between a local LGBTQ nonprofit and the city government, will provide transitional housing and specialized services for trans New Yorkers who are homeless, including mental health support and job training and placement. The city is fully funding the facility in Long Island City, which will cost $65 million to operate through 2030, the local news outlet Gothamist reported.
“It’s been just a labor of love to watch it manifest, to hear from community what it is that they want to see in a project, in a program, and to watch other community advocates become excited about it as well,” said Sean Ebony Coleman, founder and CEO of Destination Tomorrow, the organization that will manage the shelter.
The shelter’s name, Ace’s Place, honors Coleman’s late mother, who would have turned 72 this week.
“Ace was my mom’s nickname, and she dealt with her own challenges and struggles, but the one thing was that she always had a home because my grandmother made sure of it,” Coleman told The Hill in an interview on Wednesday. “Regardless of what my mom’s struggles were, she always had a safe place that she could come and reset and recenter. I thought that was the best way to honor her memory, while also doing the same thing for community members.”
With 150 beds — housed in 100 single bedrooms and 25 doubles — residents will each have access to their own restroom and two commercial kitchens. One of the kitchens will be used as a teaching space for the shelter’s culinary arts and hospitality program, Coleman said, part of its commitment to facilitating economic mobility.
Ace’s Place will also have a full-time, onsite psychiatric nurse practitioner who will work closely with social workers and other credentialed staff providing mental health support, according to a news release announcing the shelter’s opening. Added onsite clinical staff will provide health education through coaching and counseling sessions, and yoga and meditation classes are also available to residents.
Coleman and Destination Tomorrow plan to work closely with New York City officials in operating the shelter, Coleman said.
“We couldn’t be prouder to make this historic announcement that strongly affirms our values and commitment to strengthening the safety net for transgender New Yorkers at a time when their rights are roundly under attack,” New York City Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park said in a statement, referencing a string of recent Trump administration actions targeting transgender Americans.
Joslyn Carter, administrator for the city’s Department of Homeless Services, said Ace’s Place is the nation’s first city-funded shelter of its kind. “New York City has long been a leader in advancing LGBTQ+ rights,” she said.
In the U.S., LGBTQ people experience homelessness at disproportionately higher rates than heterosexual and cisgender people, studies on the subject have found. Roughly 17 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, the Williams Institute reported in 2020, and more than 8 percent of transgender people said they were homeless in the past year.
A 2018 National Alliance to End Homelessness analysis of Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data found that transgender people accounted for approximately 0.6 percent of the general population and 0.5 percent of the nation’s total homeless population. The U.S. Transgender Survey, the largest survey of transgender people in the U.S., reported in 2024 that 30 percent of respondents said they had experienced homelessness in their lifetime.
Reported rates of homelessness are even higher among transgender people of color; more than half of Black transgender women who took the U.S. Trans Survey in 2015 said they experienced homelessness in their lifetime. Nearly 60 percent of Native American transgender women also reported experiencing homelessness, as did 49 percent of trans women of Middle Eastern descent and 51 percent of multiracial trans women.
“For far too long, Transgender and non-binary people — especially Black and Brown Trans people — have been forced to navigate systems never built for us,” said Bryan Ellicott-Cook, a New York City-based transgender rights advocate, in a statement about the opening of Ace’s Place. “This shelter, created for Trans people by Trans people, represents safety, dignity, and a tangible investment in our community’s right not only to survive, but to thrive. It continues to show what we have always known — that Trans people are the ones taking care of each other, from elders to youth, from healthcare to housing and beyond.”
New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R) signed a gender-affirming care ban into law on Friday that bans anyone under 18 from using puberty blockers or hormone treatments for gender transition care.
H.B. 377 – the first of its kind in New England – also prohibits minors from receiving gender-affirming surgery, despite the fact that it is already almost never performed on trans kids under 18.
Starting January 1, 2026, providers are barred from providing hormone care and puberty blockers only “if the performance or administration of the procedure or medication is for the purpose of altering or attempting to alter the appearance of or affirm the minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex, if that perception is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex.”
The ban does not hold medical providers criminally liable for violations, but rather subjects them to administrative disciplinary action by the state board of medicine. It also allows minors already receiving treatment to continue doing so. Minors and their parents can also sue medical providers for violating the law.
Ayotte also signed a second bill specially preventing minors from having top surgery except for “procedures needed to treat malignancy, injury, infection, or malformation and those needed to reconstruct the breasts after such procedures.”
“Medical decisions made at a young age can carry lifelong consequences,” Ayotte said in a statement, “and these bills represent a balanced, bipartisan effort to protect children.”
Despite Ayotte calling the legislation bipartisan, the bills passed overwhelmingly along party lines. Only two Democrats voted for H.B. 377, and only one voted for the top surgery bill.
While expressing support for the bill, State Sen. Kevin Avard (R) called trans identity a “craze” that “seems almost a cult-like following.”
“I do believe biology speaks volumes,” he said, according to NBC Boston.
Courtney Reed, policy advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, called the laws “merciless, cruel, and painful for transgender young people, their families, and their doctors.”
Chris Erchull, senior staff attorney at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, said the legislation “epitomizes extreme government intrusion into the private lives and personal decisions of New Hampshire families.”
“The best way to protect the health and well-being of young transgender people is to ensure they have continued access to necessary, age-appropriate medical care provided by licensed physicians practicing in accordance with established standards of medical care,” he said.
Ayotte signed the bills despite the fact that earlier this Month, she vetoed several anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including an anti-trans bathroom bill, a book-banning bill, and a ban on teachers giving students “get to know you” questionnaires without parental permission. State Republicans lack the two-thirds majority needed in both the House and Senate to override the governor’s vetoes.
The island nation of Cuba will now allow transgender people to change the gender markers on their government-issued identity cards without having to undergo “bottom surgery,” a legal change long sought by the country’s trans and nonbinary communities.
On July 18, the country’s National Assembly of People’s Power (NAPP) approved a law allowing people to change their gender markers without first requiring a court-approved document proving that applicants had undergone genital affirming surgeries.
This new law is one of several recently approved by the NAPP to update the technology and policies of the nation’s record-keeping system. Cuba’s new Civil Registry code will now recognize unmarried couples’ emotional unions or cohabitation agreements, providing some legal recognition of various domestic partnerships.
In 2008, Cuba became the first Latin American country to provide comprehensive coverage for gender-affirming surgeries and related medical care. However, despite the country having the highest per capita population of medical doctors in the world, years-long U.S. trade embargo against the nation has prevented many doctors from accessing the hormone replacement medications and surgical supplies they need, according to a 2024 report from Teen Vogue.
Additionally, years worth of budget cuts by the Cuban government have forced many medical professionals to leave the island nation in search of higher-paying work abroad. As a result, trans Cubans must self-medicate using hormones purchased on the internet, something that can present risks since patients must then undergo the physical and psychological side effects without medical consultation.
CENESEX, the government-funded LGBTQ+ rights organization, ostensibly schedules trans-related healthcare for citizens. But one trans person told the aforementioned publication that the organization never contacted them back when they tried to schedule such care. CENESEX didn’t respond to the publication’s request for comment, and a security guard at the organization’s office said that CENESEX was closed and was only seeing patients “on an as-needed basis.”
Same-sex marriage is legal in Cuba. It was legalized on September 27, 2022, following a national referendum where a majority of Cubans voted in favor of a new family code that includes the legalization of same-sex marriage. The new family code also included provisions for same-sex adoption and surrogacy.
Although Cuban law currently prohibits “discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, statelessness, or access to education or health care,” the international LGBTQ rights site Alturi.com said, “Nonetheless, societal discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity persists.”
Over 100,000 people marched in London’s Trans+ Pride event on Saturday, making it the biggest trans Pride march in the world, according to The Guardian. The event’s theme, “Existence and Resistance,” was developed in response to the recent U.K. Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman in non-discrimination law is based on biological sex rather than gender identity.
“It was an emotional and powerful day,” the event’s co-founder Lewis G. Burton told the aforementioned publication. “At a time when the Supreme Court is making sweeping decisions about trans people without consulting a single trans person or organisation, and when a small, well-funded lobby of anti-trans campaigners continues to dominate headlines and waste public resources, our community came together to show what real strength, solidarity and care looks like.”
The march began at 1 p.m. local time on Saturday and proceeded for just under two miles, from near the BBC Broadcasting House to the Parliament Square Gardens. The event’s speakers included Heartstopper actress Yasmin Finney and activist Caroline Litman, whose trans daughter took her life in 2022 after waiting nearly three years for gender-affirming healthcare, the BBC reported.
London Trans+ Pride began in 2019 as an alternative to the city’s more commercial Pride march. This year’s event gained over 40,000 additional participants, compared to last year’s crowd of 60,000, the BBC noted.
“The message was clear: We will not be erased,” Burton said. “Our existence is natural, historic and enduring. You can try to take away our rights, but you will never remove us from society. We are a part of humanity – and the public will not stand by while harm is done to our community.”
The event occurred in the aftermath of a recent Supreme Court case in which For Women Scotland (FWS), an anti-trans organization, mounted a legal challenge over the definition of a woman under the country’s 2010 Equality Act. After the court ruled that the law’s definition of a woman is based on “biological sex,” the U.K.’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said trans women and men “should not be permitted to use” the public restroom facilities that align with their gender.
Alex Parmar-Yee, from Trans+ Solidarity Alliance — one of the groups that marched in the weekend event — said the EHRC’s guidance “has not provided any additional clarity, and actually is going to devastate the lives of trans people [who] will lose access to essential services and spaces.”
“The main concern really here is that it feels like there’s not been a consideration of trans members of the community, and that this guidance will pass behind closed doors, without the scrutiny, and without visibility, and without democracy,” Parmar-Yee added, saying that she and other trans organizations are pushing for the government to provide greater transparency around trans-related policies and guidances.
Speaking with Attitude magazine, activist Litman expressed concern over The Online Safety Act, a newly enacted U.K. law that requires websites with explicit adult material to conduct user age checks. Critics of the law worry it’ll be used to block age-appropriate LGBTQ+ resources for minors.
“It’s really scary,” Litman said. “[My late daughter] Alice got a lot of help and support online, whilst feeling very isolated in her own lived experience world that didn’t really have anything for her. Her online world really protected her – and so both these legislations are really concerning and need to be seriously looked at for reversal.”
When asked what she would tell her daughter now, Litman said, “Find your community. That’s what I’d say – find your community. Because they’ll save you, they’ll look after you, they’ll nurture you and support you and get you through this. To do this together. That’s what I’d say to her. And I love her. Love. I love, I love, love, love, I love.”
Nearly a decade after North Carolina passed its controversial “bathroom ban,” sparking nationwide backlash and corporate boycotts of the state, transgender bathroom restrictions have made a resurgence.
Nineteen states have laws that prohibit trans people from using the bathrooms that align with their gender identities in K-12 schools, and in many of those states the restrictions apply to other government-owned buildings as well. As a result, more than 1 in 4 trans people live in states with policies that restrict their bathroom use, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank.
These measures are similar to North Carolina’s HB 2, a law enacted in 2016 that was widely referred to as the “bathroom bill.” The law sparked nationwide protests and corporate boycotts, most notably from the NCAA, which moved seven championship sporting events out of the state that year. The General Assembly repealed HB 2 with a compromise bill in 2017 that placed a statewide moratorium on municipalities passing nondiscrimination ordinances until 2020, and the state hasn’t passed a similar law since.
Though North Carolina’s law generated widespread protests, the bathroom policies passed over the last few years have received little national or corporate response, despite many of them being far broader than HB 2. That could be due, in part, to the dozens of other bills states have considered and passed targeting trans people.
Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, said part of why there was more backlash to HB 2 was because it was among the first “bathroom bills.” In 2016, the year the bill became law, state lawmakers had introduced about 250 bills targeting LGBTQ rights, and many of those were bathroom restrictions and “religious freedom” bills, which are intended to protect people and businesses who say abiding by state and local nondiscrimination laws would violate their religious beliefs.
This year, Casey said, he’s tracking more than 700 anti-LGBTQ bills, up from nearly 600 last year, and they affect everything from trans people’s access to bathrooms, sports and health care to what LGBTQ materials students can be exposed to in schools.
“Just the sheer volume of attacks made it a lot harder for even just the general public to really track everything that’s been happening,” Casey said. “That’s been a big part of what has allowed so much to happen at once, is that they’re sort of flooding the zone with all these anti-LGBTQ attacks.”
‘I feel singled out’
Of the 19 states that subject trans people to bathroom restrictions, six have bans that apply to all government-owned spaces, including K-12 schools and colleges; eight states restrict bathroom use in K-12 schools and at least some government-owned buildings; and five states restrict bathroom use in K-12 schools only, according to MAP.
Most of those states also have a law or policy that legally defines “sex” in a way that could impact trans people’s access to bathrooms. Four additional states — Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas and Texas — define sex in a way that could affect trans people’s access to restrooms but don’t have official “bathroom bans” on the books.
Proponents of measures that restrict access to bathrooms and other sex-segregated facilities argue that allowing trans women to use women’s bathrooms could threaten women’s safety and privacy. However, a 2018 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that allowing trans people to use facilities that align with their gender identities does not increase safety risks.
Some states have expanded the scope of their bathroom restrictions in recent years. Arkansas, for example, passed a law in 2023 requiring trans people to use the bathroom of their birth sex in K-12 public schools and public charter schools. Earlier this year, the state passed another law expanding that measure to apply to shelters, correctional facilities and all public buildings, which include public colleges and universities.
A trans woman working at a university in Arkansas, who asked to be anonymous because she fears how speaking to the press could affect her current and future employment in the state, said the bathroom restriction, for her, “means segregation.” The day after the expanded law was enacted, the woman said her boss told her she would need to walk across the building to use a single-occupancy bathroom. If that bathroom is occupied, which she said it often is, she has to walk across campus to the only other single-occupancy bathroom.
“I feel singled out for something I don’t have any control over,” she said. “I’m not being treated equally to any of my cisgender colleagues. It makes me feel dehumanized.”
She added that some of her colleagues’ reactions have been upsetting, because “they’ve reacted as if I should be happy, like I have a private bathroom, and I don’t understand how they could come to that conclusion.”
As a direct result of the law, she said, she has accepted another job outside of the public university system that she’ll start next month. In the meantime, she said, more of her colleagues have started to misgender her.
“At this point, I really wish I just hadn’t come out at work,” she said.
Bathroom restrictions, Casey said, can contribute to more hostile workplaces and schools for trans people because they can be interpreted as the government “green-lighting” discrimination.
Many of the bills, like Arkansas’, also use vague language, which Casey said is intentional, because it can “provide cover” for the law to be applied more broadly.
“Because of the confusion and the fear around these bills, as well as the hostile climate that they contribute to, there can often be misperceptions that they also apply to private spaces,” Casey said. “That makes it much harder for trans people to actually know in those states what their rights are and aren’t, and can lead to far more reaching bans than the letter of the law actually calls for.”
Casey noted that there have been an increasing number of cases in which even cisgender women, who are not trans, have been questioned in restrooms. For example, in May, two women filed a discrimination complaint against a Boston hotel where they say a security guard followed them into the bathroom and accused one of them of being a man. Neither Massachusetts nor Boston has measures restricting trans people’s bathroom use.
A different environment now from in 2016
North Carolina’s General Assembly passed HB 2 in response to a 2016 Charlotte ordinance that expanded the city’s existing nondiscrimination protections to include LGBTQ people. The expansion specifically protected trans people’s right to use the bathrooms that aligned with their gender identities.
When HB 2 passed that same year, the backlash was swift and far-reaching. As a direct result of the law, PayPal announced that it would no longer open a new operations center in Charlotte, which would have included investing $3.6 million in the state. The NCAA announced that it would not hold championship events in the state, and prominent musicians including Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Demi Lovato, Nick Jonas and Maroon 5 all canceled performances, citing the law.
Michael Walden, a retired economics professor at North Carolina State University who gave interviews about the boycotts when they happened, said North Carolina’s status as one of the first states to pass such a law triggered more protest and attention on the issue, and, as a result, businesses had to quickly figure out how to respond.
“When a lot of businesses saw there was a huge backlash, they didn’t want to be associated with that at all, which is understandable,” Walden said.
Recently, however, businesses have likely “assessed that the environment is different,” he said.
“They do observe some protests. They do observe some rallies and marches, etc., but nothing like we saw 10 years ago,” Walden said.
Trans rights have also become increasingly politicized and painted as controversial. Walden noted that in the last few years North Carolina has joined the more than two dozen states that have enacted laws prohibiting certain transition-related medical care for minors and banning trans students from playing on school sports teams that align with their gender identities. Neither of those laws generated national backlash or a response from the business community in the way HB 2 did.
“My analysis would be that the average business doesn’t want to take a position on any of this, either pro or con, unless they think they really have to, to satisfy their customer base or investor base,” Walden said.
The landscape for LGBTQ rights was also much different in 2016, the year after same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, Casey said.
“Opponents of LGBTQ equality were really sort of casting around and looking for some new way to continue to use LGBTQ issues as a wedge issue for a broader radical agenda, and bathroom bans and religious exemptions were really the two things they were focused on at that time, and both of those were relatively unsuccessful,” Casey said.
He pointed both to HB 2 and Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which passed in 2015 and led to criticism from tech giants like Apple and Yelp. As a result of the potential business effects Indiana’s law could have on the state, lawmakers quickly amended the measure to explicitly prohibit it from being used to justify discrimination.
More bathroom bans are likely on the horizon. Fifteen states have considered them so far this year, including three that successfully expanded their existing bans, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. A judge blocked Montana’s law in May while a lawsuit against it proceeds.
A new, broader version of North Carolina’s defunct ban could also be resurrected. Earlier this month, Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed a far-reaching bill that would redefine sex in the state to only recognize birth sex and would prohibit trans North Carolinians from changing the sex on their birth certificates and driver’s licenses. The law explicitly requires sleeping quarters on public school trips to be separated based on birth sex and could affect what bathrooms trans people can use in schools and public buildings. Though Stein vetoed the bill, Republicans in the state’s General Assembly could override his vetoes and plan to try to do so when they reconvene on Tuesday 29.
The US Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Tennessee’s ban on gender identity care for transgender minors earlier this summer has fueled ongoing polarization around LGBTQ issues and controversial policies across the nation. The high court has also agreed to take on more cases dealing with trans rights in its next session that begins in October.
Twenty-seven states have passed lawslimiting access to gender identity health care for transgender children and teenagers, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy think tank. An estimated 40% of trans youth ages 13 to 17 live in these states.
There have already been more anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in state legislatures so far this year than in any full year since at least 2020, a CNN analysis of American Civil Liberties Union data found. These bills span various aspects of everyday life, including bathroom access, school sports and identification documents.
CNN is tracking where these laws are being passed and where these bills are being introduced. This story will be updated.
Gender identity care includes medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned sex— the one the person was designated at birth — to their affirmed gender, the gender by which one wants to be known.
Most of the states limiting gender identity care for trans minors adopted their bans in 2023, a record-breaking year for such laws. So far this year, one state — Kansas — has passed a ban, prohibiting the use of state funds to provide or subsidize health care for transgender youth.
Not all laws are currently being enforced, however. The ban in Arkansas has been permanently blocked by a federal court, though the state said it would appeal the ruling. Montana’s ban is also permanently blocked, according to KFF. Though Arizona has a 2022 law on the books banning surgical care for transgender minors, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed an executive order in 2023 ensuring access to gender identity health care.
Nearly 600 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced into state legislatures as of July 11, which is already more than any other year on record, according to the ACLU.
Education and health care continue to be key targets. There were more bills restricting student and educator rights — enforcing school sports bans and targeting students’ access to facilities consistent with their gender identities, for example — than any other category of bills, according to a CNN analysis of ACLU data.
Legislators in Texas have introduced 88 anti-LGBTQ bills so far this year, more than double the number of bills being considered in any other state. Four of those — including one that limits changes to gender markers on state medical records — have been passed into law.
Lawmakers in every state, except for Vermont, have filed at least one anti-LGBTQ bill in 2025, according to a CNN analysis. Twenty-two states have signed those bills into law.
A Hong Kong judge on Wednesday ruled to strike down regulations criminalizing the use of bathrooms designated for the opposite sex, ruling in favor of transgender individuals’ rights to access public toilets matching their identity.
Judge Russell Coleman approved the judicial review of K, who was born a woman and identifies as a man, saying the regulations contravene an article of the city’s mini-constitution that stipulates all residents should be equal before the law.
But he suspended the declaration to strike down the regulations for a year to allow the government “to consider whether it wishes to implement a way to deal with the contravention.”
He said in the judgment that the regulations and “drawing the line of a person’s biological sex at birth create a disproportionate and unnecessary intrusion into the privacy and equality rights.”
The ruling marks another step forward in recognizing the rights of LGBTQ+ people in the Chinese financial hub. In recent years, the government has revised policies following activists’ wins in legal challenges.
Currently, only children under 5 years old accompanied by an opposite sex adult can enter a public washroom designated for the opposite sex. Those violating the rule face a fine of up to 2,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $255).
K launched a legal challenge in 2022, seeking to expand the exemption to pre-operative transgender people who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and have a medical need to undergo the process of living in their identified gender. He argued that his constitutional rights were infringed by the prohibition against him using public toilets allocated for men, the court heard.
The Environment and Ecology Bureau said in an emailed statement that the government will carefully study the judgment and consult the Department of Justice on the appropriate follow-up action.
Quarks, a group serving transgender youth in Hong Kong, welcomed the ruling, urging officials to take immediate action to rectify what it called long-standing discrimination in the system.
“The ruling is not just an affirmation of transgender rights legally but also a big step forward for Hong Kong’s overall human rights development,” it said on Instagram.
In 2023, Hong Kong’s top court ruled that full sex reassignment surgery should not be a prerequisite for transgender people to have their gender changed on their official identity cards.
The next year, the government revised its policy to allow people who have not completed full gender-affirmation surgery to change their genders on ID cards as long as they fulfill certain conditions. The conditions include the removal of breasts for transgender men, the removal of the penis and testes for transgender women, and having undergone continuous hormonal treatment for at least two years before applying.
Applicants also have to continue their hormonal treatment and submit blood test reports for random checks upon the government’s request.
In April, activist Henry Tse, who won the legal battle in 2023 and received his new ID card reflecting his gender change last year, lodged a fresh legal challenge over the new requirements.
Puerto Rico’sRepublican Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón signed into law Wednesday a far-reaching ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender people under 21, enacting one of the harshest measures of its kind in the United States and its territories and prompting swift condemnation from medical experts and LGBTQ+ advocates.
The law received the governor’s approval late in the day, according to the Associated Press.
The law, Senate Bill 350, prohibits the use of puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender-affirming surgeries for anyone under 21, threatening doctors and other health professionals with up to 15 years in prison, a $50,000 fine, and the permanent loss of their licenses and permits. Public funds are also barred from being used for such care.
In recent days, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Association of Psychology, the College of Social Work Professionals, the Puerto Rican Association of Professional Counseling, and the Bar Association, among other organizations, had urged that the bill be vetoed.
The Advocate previously reported that González-Colón had asked for amendments to protect access to puberty blockers and allow minors already undergoing treatment to continue care, but lawmakers did not adopt those changes. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Skrmetti that a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors could be enacted, which allowed other states and territories to continue to ban such care.
“What a disgrace! Jenniffer González, through her actions, declares herself the most anti-equality governor in history. She ignored her own Secretary of Health and the medical associations that support treatment for trans minors. By signing Senate Bill 350 into law, she has just endangered trans youth and their families and criminalized health professionals for doing their job,” Pedro Julio Serrano, president of the Puerto Rico LGBTQ+ Federation, said in a statement to The Advocate.
Harvard Law Instructor Alejandra Caraballo reacted to the law’s signing on Bluesky. “A twenty-year-old trans person can go drink themselves to death but can’t legally get hormones,” she wrote, noting that the drinking age in Puerto Rico is 18.
The Federation, a coalition representing hundreds of individuals and more than 100 organizations, said it would pursue legal action against the new law.
In a landmark ruling for the country, after rejecting claims that womanhood was preserved only for those who can bear children, the High Court of Andhra Pradesh ruled that trans women were “legally entitled” to recognition as women.
Presiding over the case, justice Venkata Jyothirmai Pratapa decided that tying the definition of women to pregnancy was “legally unsustainable” and contradicted India’s constitution, which emphasises equality before the law.
Quoting a Supreme Court decision from 2014, which legally recognised the rights of “third gender” individuals, Pratapa said that prohibiting trans women’s right to identify as women “amounted to discrimination”.
The case was brought to the high court in 2022 after transgender woman Pokala Shabana looked to use a section of the Indian penal code to seek protection from her in-laws, whom, she said, had been abusive towards her.
Her husband’s parents petitioned the court to deny her use of Section 498A, which protects women from cruelty by a husband or relatives, arguing that it only applied to cisgender women. They claimed that trans women don’t meet the legal definition of women under Indian law because they cannot get pregnant and said Shabana’s allegations of harassment lacked evidence.
However, the judge said that articles 14, 15 and 21 of the constitution, which guarantee a variety of discrimination protections, including the right to life and personal liberty, meant trans women’s rights to be recognised as women superseded the law.
“A trans woman, born male and later transitioning to female, is legally entitled to recognition as a woman,” he wrote in his ruling. “Denying such protection by questioning their womanhood amounts to discrimination.”
Trans activist and artist Kalki Subramaniam told the Washington Blade that she was relieved and delighted to see the court “upholding our basic human right to be identified as what we want.” She went on to say: “For [the] transgender community, especially trans women, this verdict means a lot.”
The Indian government has been under mounting pressure to modernise its laws and policies on LGBTQ+ rights. Same-sex marriage is still illegal, despite growing support for its legalisation.
Prime minister Narendra Modi’s government have previously labelled same-sex marriage an “elitist” viewpoint that “seriously affects the interests of every citizen”.
An affidavit establishing the government’s views on same-sex unions, in 2023, proclaimed that marriage was valid only between “biological males and females [and that] this definition [was] socially, culturally and legally ingrained into the very idea and concept of marriage and ought not to be disturbed or diluted by judicial interpretation”.
A Tennessee state law banning gender-affirming care for minors can stand, the US supreme court has ruled, a devastating loss for trans rights supporters in a case that could set a precedent for dozens of other lawsuits involving the rights of transgender children.
The case, United States v Skrmetti, was filed last year by three families of trans children and a provider of gender-affirming care. In oral arguments, the plaintiffs – as well as the US government, then helmed by Joe Biden – argued that Tennessee’s law constituted sex-based discrimination and thus violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. Under Tennessee’s law, someone assigned female at birth could not be prescribed testosterone, but someone assigned male at birth could receive those drugs.
Tennessee, meanwhile, has argued that the ban is necessary to protect children from what it termed “experimental” medical treatment. During arguments, the conservative justices seemed sympathetic to that concern, although every major medical and mental health organization in the US has found that gender-affirming care can be evidence-based and medically necessary. These groups also oppose political bans on such care.
All six of the supreme court’s conservative justices joined in at least part of the decision to uphold the law, although several also wrote their own concurring opinions. In his majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that the ruling primarily rested on the justices’ finding that the law did not violate the equal protection clause, rather than on an ideological opposition to trans rights.
“This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound,” Roberts wrote. He added: “We leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.”
In recent years, the question of transgender children and their rights has consumed an outsized amount of rightwing political discourse. Since 2021,26 states have passed bans on gender-affirming care for minors, affecting nearly 40% of trans youth in the US. Twenty-six states have also outlawed trans kids from playing on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity.
Many of these restrictions have been paused by court challenges, but the supreme court’s decision could have vast implications for those lawsuits’ futures. A study by the Trevor Project, a mental health non-profit that aims to help LGBTQ+ kids, found that anti-trans laws are linked to a 72% increase of suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the majority opinion, alongside Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan. Because the law discriminates on the basis of sex, Sotomayor argued in her dissent, it should face higher legal scrutiny than the majority decided to give it.
“Male (but not female) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like boys, and female (but not male) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like girls,” Sotomayor wrote. “By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.”
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