The first week of the Trump presidency has already proven to be a disaster for trans and non-binary Americans. On Tuesday, the president pushed through his third major executive order targeting trans rights, which seeks to restrict gender-affirming medical care for anyone 19 and under (this cut-off slowly creeps up the age of majority, targeting not just youth but some legal adults as well). While it is likely to be challenged in court, its contents are alarming. Hospitals, clinics and med schools that provide gender-affirming care to youth are now at risk of losing their federal funding: if fully enacted, the order would force such spaces to choose between continuing to provide care, or losing crucial funding that allows them to serve a greater number of patients.
The order also seeks to allow patients, or their parents, to sue doctors should they later be unhappy with the gender-affirming interventions they or their children received, which advocates fear could create a severe enough medical chill to dissuade practitioners from providing care.
The title of the order, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” gives us an immediate taste of its alarmist, anti-scientific nature. Throughout, the order claims, erroneously, that children are being “maimed” and “sterilized” in growing numbers. It also presents the thoroughly debunked concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria as a legitimate concern.
As someone who has reported extensively on trans youth, this order has felt to me like the most cruel of the bunch. I can’t imagine the panic and pain young people in the U.S. must be feeling right now, scared that their life-saving care will be stripped from them. I can’t imagine the agony of supportive parents of trans children, who are probably terrified that their ability to protect their own kids is going to be torn away.
Sitting my couch this week, reading the text of the announcement and reflecting on how we got here, there was one thought I couldn’t shake: every just-asking-questions op-ed, every piece that parroted “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” as if it were a real thing, every paper that platformed so-called “parental rights” activists—their authors allowed this to happen.
There are plenty of enablers. The New York Times has been singled out for its biased coverage of trans issues—especially youth gender-affirming care—time and time again (including by Xtra). The criticism isn’t unfounded: the New York Times has quoted sources with ties to known anti-trans groups in its coverage. At the same time, a 2024 study from Media Matters and GLAAD revealed that the Times failed to quote a single trans person in 66 percent of its coverage of anti-trans legislation.
This biased Times coverage has been weaponized against trans people long before this week. Lawmakers have cited Times coverage in order to justify bans on gender-affirming care for youth on the state level. The paper has even almost come close to achieving self-awareness on this.
The Times, of course, is not alone. Publications such as Reuters and the Atlantic, and here in Canada, the National Post and Radio-Canada, have all produced questionable coverage of youth gender-affirming care, presenting interventions as a dangerous, understudied area of medicine that requires more regulation and study.
These pieces—especially when they’ve come in the form of opinion columns—often claim to be “just asking questions.” They’re “just asking” whether youth transition is safe, whether kids really need gender-affirming care, whether they will come to regret it, how it will impact their lives.
This week’s executive order lays bare the insincerity of that claim. Governments and pundits alike have long had access to the answers to such questions. While research around gender-affirming care has historically been underfunded, and a deeper body of research would be welcome by doctors and trans advocates alike, the studies we do have have consistently shown that access to gender-affirming care improves well-being for both youth and adults, that the number of youth who access medical transition is very low, that the rate of regret or detransition is even lower.
But that science has been routinely ignored—first by journalists and now by governments and lawmakers. If a question is answered, but that answer is repeatedly rejected with wilful ignorance, it quickly becomes clear: there was no real interest in the answer after all.
“Respectability never lasts. The uglier thing that lurks underneath it always comes out once it’s given permission.”
Outside of far-right media, most of this coverage is presented with a veneer of respectability. Pundits, reporters and columnists have done a delicate dance, subtly calling into question the legitimacy of gender-affirming care—sometimes even of transness itself—often without using blatantly hateful language. The line is always the same: We don’t want trans people to disappear, we just want to protect the youth.
But each piece has chipped away at the legitimacy of this care. Each piece has sown distrust in a public that understands so little about the healthcare system, about what medical interventions like puberty blockers even entail, about trans life itself. Each piece has helped to build a top-of-mind fear and discomfort surrounding transness in a population that in all likelihood scarcely thought of trans people at all a mere decade ago.
Respectability never lasts. The uglier thing that lurks underneath it always comes out once it’s given permission. Whether or not liberal columnists and publications meant to, they’ve helped to manufacture that permission. Knowingly or not, they’ve contributed to a moment where the worst, most hateful actors feel emboldened, where they can thrive.
This week, the mask is undeniably off. This executive order refers to gender-affirming care for youth as a “dangerous trend” that may result in “horrible tragedy,” and “a stain on our Nation’s history.” Language matters—and this type of language belongs to a well-established tradition. Language that invokes dirt, disease and unwellness has been used to justify and accelerate fascism for more than a century. We’ve been here before.
It’s clear that the fight against misinformation will be ongoing. The current U.S. administration is in the midst of trying to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—the man who has publicly stated that pesticides can somehow turn kids trans.
These executive orders are not law. Doctors shouldn’t comply in advance of them becoming so. Anyone who cares about trans rights, about human rights, about bodily autonomy, about access to healthcare, needs to prepare to fight now. The lives of trans youth—and of all trans people, because they won’t stop at just youth—depend on it.