A trans woman’s court victory in Kenya could have wide-ranging implications for trans rights in the East African nation, after a judge agreed she suffered inhuman and degrading treatment at the hands of government authorities and directed Parliament to enact protections and recognition in law for trans Kenyans.
The plaintiff, Shieys Chepkosgei, was detained in 2019 and charged with “impersonation,” despite the fact that she had held official documents, including a birth certificate and passport with female sex markers, while living in another country where she had also competed in women’s athletics.
Chepkosgei was arrested by Kenyan police while visiting a teaching hospital, Q Newsreports.
She was remanded to a women’s facility, strip-searched, and ordered by a court to undergo “gender determination,” which included a genital examination, hormone testing, blood sampling, and radiological testing.
Chepkosgei challenged her detention and the nonconsensual medical examinations in court, arguing they were unconstitutional, violated her inherent dignity, and highlighted a legislative gap in the treatment of transgender persons in custody in Kenya.
Justice R. Nyakundi of the Eldoret High Court agreed that Chepkosgei’s rights to dignity, privacy, and freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment had been violated, according to Jinsiangu, a Kenyan intersex, transgender, and gender non-conforming rights group. She was awarded the equivalent of about $8000.
But the judge went a step further, directing the Kenyan government to initiate legislation in Parliament addressing the rights of transgender Kenyans, either with new protections or by amending current legislation on the rights of intersex people currently moving through Parliament.
“This is the first time a Kenyan court has explicitly ordered the State to create legislation on transgender rights, and a first on the African continent,” Jinsiangu’s Lolyne Ongeri told Mamba Online.
“If implemented, it could address decades of legal invisibility and discrimination faced by transgender persons by establishing clear legal recognition of gender identity, protections against discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, and education, and access to public services without bias or harassment.”
Kenya has a fraught history with LGBTQ+ rights, with colonial-era penalties for same-sex behavior still in effect, and discriminatory legislation modeled on Uganda’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Act – which allows for the death penalty for homosexuality – introduced in Parliament.
Same-sex relations remain criminalized, with “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” and “gross indecency” punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Transgender people in Kenya face widespread stigma, discrimination, and violence. Current law bars trans Kenyans from legally changing their gender identity from the one assigned at birth.
While LGBTQ+ people have found relief in the courts, homophobia pervades Kenyan society and the legislature.
In 2023, Kenya’s Supreme Court affirmed a decision granting an LGBTQ+ rights group official status and legal recognition as a non-governmental organization (NGO). The decision ignited protests in the country’s second-largest city, led by clerics and homophobic politicians.
At least 21 hospitals and health systems have suspended or reduced health services for transgender minors and young adults in 2025, according to an NBC News analysis. Many providers cited fears of federal investigations and the potential loss of government funding.
This rollback comes against a backdrop of escalating legal attacks on transgender health care. In recent years, 26 states have passed bans restricting gender-affirming care for minors, with six making it a felony to provide certain treatments. Roughly 40% of trans youth ages 13 to 17 now live in states where access to care is restricted, according to KFF. In June, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban, effectively green-lighting similar laws nationwide.
At the federal level, restricting access to transition-related care has become a main policy objective of the administration. In January, the president signed an executive order directing federal agencies to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors and instructing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and criminalize providers and health centers that offer such care. In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered the DOJ to investigate providers, hospitals, and clinics that provide gender-affirming care to trans youth.
The crackdown escalated earlier this summer when federal prosecutors issued subpoenas to more than 20 hospitals and clinics. In August, sixteen states and the District of Columbia filed suit in an attempt to block the administration’s investigations. However, several providers that received subpoenas chose to suspend offering gender-affirming care instead of waiting for the outcome of the lawsuit.
The chilling effect has extended even into Democratic-led “sanctuary” states, where lawmakers have promised protections for transgender people. While attorneys general in those states initially reminded hospitals that scaling back gender-affirming care could violate state anti-discrimination laws, none have pursued enforcement actions. In practice, this has allowed hospitals to quietly eliminate or reduce programs without consequence.
The Whitehall City Council voted unanimously to pass an LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinance and a conversion therapy ban at their regular meeting on Tuesday.
The Columbus suburb became the 37th location in Ohio to pass LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination protections and the 14th location to ban conversation on minors.
Joseph Soza, Equality Ohio’s Central Ohio organizer, lives right on the border of Columbus and Whitehall.
“I was previously living with the awkward scenario of having legal protections at home, but not in many of the public spaces I frequent in Whitehall,” Soza said in a statement. “Until we achieve statewide nondiscrimination protections, I know that most Ohioans find themselves in a similar situation. While I’m grateful for the initiative taken by cities like Whitehall, it continues to be disappointing that we don’t have these protections statewide.”
Whitehall’s nondiscrimination ordinance covers a range of identities – including sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression – with protections extending to employment, housing and public accommodations. The ordinance contains an exception for religious institutions to give preference to those who share their religion, provided that such “offerings are not for commercial purposes or supported by public funds.”
Whitehall’s conversion therapy ban prohibits mental health professionals from engaging in “any practices or treatments that seek to change a [minor’s] sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender.”
Both the nondiscrimination protections and the conversion therapy ban are housed under Whitehall’s prohibition on “unlawful discriminatory acts or practices.” Violations could result in a civil penalty of up to $2,500.
Ohio does not have statewide LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination protections, despite decades of attempts by legislators. The Ohio Fairness Act, which would grant these protections, currently sits in the Ohio House (HB 136) and Senate (SB 70), but has not been scheduled for a hearing in either chamber.
There also is no statewide ban on conversion therapy on minors, despite many years of attempts by legislators. A bill to ban conversion therapy on minors currently sits in the Ohio House (HB 300) and Senate (SB 71), but has not been scheduled for a hearing in either chamber.
LGBTQ+ advocates point to Whitehall as an example of what can be achieved locally, despite the lack of movement in the Columbus Statehouse.
“Equality Ohio is embarking on a journey to flip the state back to equality through our bold new local advocacy strategy,” said Dwayne Steward, executive director of Equality Ohio. “We have won before. And we will win again. But only if we do so together.”
The presidential administration has quietly ended federal employees’ insurance coverage for gender-affirming care. An LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organization called the policy “not only cruel, [but] illegal.”
A letter sent last Friday from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management Healthcare and Insurance to insurance companies said that the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) and Postal Service Health Benefits (PSHB) Programs will no longer cover “gender transition” services for people of all ages starting in 2026. The letter says that insurance companies can develop an exemption process for patients currently receiving gender-affirming care “on a case-by-case basis,” though it doesn’t specify how.
However, the programs will still cover “counseling services for possible or diagnosed gender dysphoria,” including “faith-based counseling,” which might be a euphemism for conversion therapy, a widely debunked pseudoscientific practice that purports to change a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation.
The letter also directs insurance companies not to “list or otherwise recognize” providers of gender-affirming care in directories of medical professionals and clinics covered by insurance, Them reported.
In a statement condemning the letter, the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group Lambda Legal wrote that the “policy violates constitutional protections and multiple federal anti-discrimination laws.”
“This discriminatory policy… is not only cruel—it is illegal,” wrote Lambda Legal Counsel and Health Care Strategist Omar Gonzalez-Pagan.
“The federal government cannot simply strip away essential healthcare coverage from transgender employees while providing comprehensive medical care to all other federal workers,” Gonzalez-Pagan added. “Beyond the fundamental equal protection guarantees enshrined in our Constitution, which prohibit such animus-laden actions, multiple federal laws also prohibit this type of discrimination.”
Lambda Legal pledged to explore all options to respond to the discriminatory policy and asked federal employees harmed by the policy to contact their organization.
While the current presidential administration has sought to eradicate gender-affirming care for trans youth, something the administration calls “chemical or surgical mutilation,” this policy change is one of many that show the administration’s interest in ending gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages.
In January, the president issued an executive order (that has since been blocked by several courts) instructing the Department of Justice to use laws against false advertising to prosecute any entity that may be misleading the public about the long-term effects of gender-affirming care.
On February 7, the Department of Defense issued a memo halting gender-affirming medical procedures for adult military service members. In June, the administration finalized a rule modifying the Affordable Care Act to remove requirements that insurance providers cover gender-affirming care as an essential health benefit.
Gender-affirming care is supported by all major medical associations in the U.S., including the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, as safe and life-saving for young people with gender dysphoria.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued subpoenas to medical providers who offer gender-affirming care to transgender youth, demanding that they provide private information on their young patients. The subpoenas demand “billing documents, communication with drug manufacturers, patient’s Social Security numbers, addresses, emails, Zoom recordings, voicemails, encrypted text messages, as well as every writing or record of whatever type” doctors have made from January 2020 to the current day, The Washington Post reported.
While Attorney General Pam Bondi admitted last month to sending 20 subpoenas to hold “medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology” accountable, she didn’t specify which organizations and individuals received the subpoenas. Anonymous informants told the aforementioned publication that some of the subpoena recipients (who got the subpoenas in June) operate in states with laws protecting gender-affirming care for youth. One trans civil rights activist called the incident an “unprecedented and disgusting violation of medical privacy.”
“[The government] is using its investigative powers to target medical providers based on a disagreement about medical treatment rather than violations of the law,” Jacob T. Elberg, a former federal prosecutor specializing in health care fraud, told The Washington Post. He added that the DOJ must show that the information it demanded is “relevant to a legitimate law enforcement probe.”
The publication contacted numerous clinics and professionals offering gender-affirming care for youth, but none would say whether they had received a subpoena, citing fears of violent threats or government retaliation. Other hospitals have been closing their trans youth clinics and erasing any mention of gender-affirming care from their web pages to avoid federal threats to cut funding or pursue prosecutorial charges.
“The subpoena is a breathtakingly invasive government overreach,” said Jennifer L. Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group GLAD Law. “It’s specifically and strategically designed to intimidate health care providers and health care institutions into abandoning their patients.”
Fewer than 3,000 teens nationwide receive puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy, according to a 2025 JAMA analysis of private insurance data, The Post noted.
Responding to the news, transgender civil rights lawyer Alejandra Caraballo wrote via Bluesky, “This is an unprecedented and disgusting violation of medical privacy,” adding, “The fact that no lawsuit has been commenced challenging these subpoenas in court is ominous. My best guess is that many of the providers have complied and now DOJ is potentially sitting on the records of thousands of trans youth covering everything from therapy notes to pre- and post-op photos.”
Though there is no federal law banning gender-affirming care, the current presidential administration has sought to eradicate the practice through a January executive order (that has since been blocked by several courts). The order instructed the DOJ to extend the time that patients and parents can sue gender-affirming doctors and to use laws against false advertising to prosecute any entity that may be misleading the public about the long-term effects of gender-affirming care.
In April, Bondi issued a memo to DOJ employees, telling them to investigate and prosecute cases of minors accessing gender-affirming care as female genital mutilation (FGM); even though hospitals don’t conduct such female genital surgeries. The memo threatened to jail doctors for 10 years if they provide gender-affirming care to young people.
Gender-affirming care is supported by all major medical associations in the U.S., including the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, as safe and life-saving for young people with gender dysphoria.
One doctor interviewed by The Washington Post called the federal government’s crusade against gender-affirming care a “toxic plan” that will force some patients to detransition, potentially forcing them into adverse psychological and physical effects, including increased anxiety, depression, and the development of unwanted physical changes.
“This goes way beyond any degree of moral or ethical dilemma that any of us have ever experienced,” the doctor said. “It is completely scientifically and medically unfounded.”
Republican attorneys general in Texas and Tennessee have demanded similar patient information from providers of youth-centered gender-affirming care outside of their states, but they dropped their demands after courts blocked their efforts.
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.
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