This article is long, and may be upsetting to some readers. Scroll down to the map of the United States if you just want to read how this may affect you.

Blue text contains links to citations and sources.

Trump’s America is in full swing, and we’re looking at another year of inhumane attacks on rights, particularly so from our corner of the nation. ICE has heartlessly ripped apart immigrant families, killed Americans exercising their Constitutionally-protected rights, and shaken faith in ‘the system’ from all angles. This has finally led to Kristi Noem’s overdue departure and replacement with Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin. How well that goes for America remains to be seen.

These have – and rightfully so – been a critical focus of large movements and organizations that deserve praise: No Kings, Siembra NC, and the Immigrant Defense Network, just to name a few. But there’s another group at high risk, and this one seems to have been dealt with more quietly – to the point where it misses the daily news cycle, is barely reported on, and seems to have no end in sight.

Earlier this year, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security published an article raising a red flag on the potential for genocide here in the United States, specifically calling for protection of America’s transgender (or trans) population. The risk factors were already there, the stage already set: This was a warning, something that could (and does) in fact, happen here.

See also: What is a transgender person? What does it mean?

Beyond that, there are other concerns – many have described the current administration as ‘sliding into fascism’. There’s a component of this that should worry everyone – transgender or not. Keep reading.

When Donald Trump took office in 2025 after an election cycle filled with anti-trans rhetoric and lies, the transgender community was already panicking. The first presidency had been hard enough, given the sharp rise in hate crimes and sudden reverence towards bad laws like North Carolina’s HB2 (the infamous ‘bathroom bill’), and many of us wondered – what was next?

We now know the answer.

2025 was the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans legislation, with an insane 1,022 bills introduced on the Federal and state levels. 126 passed, beginning this presidency’s cycle of hatred towards a group making up an estimated 0.6% of Americans.

These bills and laws had much to do with restriction, testing the waters to see what would pass and what wouldn’t. Transgender armed forces were removed from service and told to pack their bags, banned from serving the country they loved. Within the first 100 days of this presidency, it got worse: Trump attempted to cut HIV funding, attempted to define gender as the one of two sexes, completely forgetting about the existence of intersex people (ostensibly to “protect women”, from a man appearing in the Epstein files over 1,000,000 times), and even attempted to tell schools to ignore vulnerable children, potentially opening them up to abuse at home.

See also: What is an intersex person?

It wasn’t just Federal, though; Even in North Carolina, we saw a small handful of Democrats cross the aisle (and consequently get primaried off of the ballot in March) over bills like HB 805, a bill that restricts gender transition based on a “discriminatory definition of sex, required transgender people’s birth certificates to include their assigned sex at birth, extended the statute of limitations for suing gender-affirming care providers, banned gender-affirming care for incarcerated people, and censored school library books.” (ACLU)

We also saw bills restricting movement and freedom – last year, I and many other transgender people were forced into passport changes, or dangerous misidentification on official documents. There have been cases where passports were seized. In Georgia, businesses, childcare institutions, and more were given the right to discriminate against our population; in Texas, the state began creating a directory of transgender residents for no clear reason via legal documentation (including drivers’ licenses), and then began classifying sex with or without consent based on ability to reproduce – to say nothing of Florida’s restrictive trans erasure attempts. Missouri introduced more anti-trans bills than any state aside from Texas in 2025, causing many residents to begin preparations to flee the country. Kansas was the most successful when it came to surveilling their trans population: After a legal ruling in 2019, the state began the widest-reaching directory of transgender residents in the United States.

In 2026, we see the full extent of this administration’s senseless wrath, partially driven by the Heritage Foundation and partially driven by none other than the metaphorical ghost of Jeffrey Epstein – not the will of voters, and certainly not by the will of a population facing historic fuel prices, inflation, stagnation of wages, and loss of jobs. Combined with new mass-surveillance technology like Flock cameras (which are present in Rowan County), documents nearly every adult must have to drive or get a job, and a president with a clear willingness to legislate against marginalized groups, it is not difficult to imagine that the ‘genocide’ experts have warned about is upon us. But we’ll get there in a moment – keep reading.

What’s the danger of having a license with the wrong sex? Wouldn’t it be easier to just have it, and keep your social transition? It’s just a license, right?

Wrong. It may be just a license, but this one document – targeted by more than 20 states as of this writing, can be the difference between getting home or getting detained – if not worse.

1. It exponentially increases risk of harassment and violence, including from law enforcement and security forces, and not just in the United States.
   ID is required for everyday situations such as applying for a job, going to a bar, interacting with the TSA, or even a simple traffic stop. When a gender marker doesn’t match someone’s appearance – say, a man with a beard that has an ‘F’ marker on their license – it can lead to invasive questions (when was the last time you were asked what your genitals look like by a complete stranger? For me, it was last week). In some cases, a license can be taken with claims of fraud, or false identification. Beyond that, it can mean job opportunities lost, strip searches at the airport, or even become the trigger for someone to justify assault.
   Outside of the United States, say, in Mexico, it can lead to your ID being seized at a checkpoint and requiring financial or other bribes to get your passport back, and that’s if you aren’t detained.
2. It interferes with daily activities.
   Picture walking into your precinct to vote, showing your ID, and then having the official refuse based on assumed false identification. At minimum, you’ll then need to drive to the Board of Elections to clear it up – and you may not have time, so you don’t get to vote. Imagine trying to pick up a prescription and then being denied it based on suspicion of false ID, or worse, having to explain in a public setting, with people who may decide to harm you. Or perhaps imagine going to an ABC store or bar – and then having your ID cut up in front of you for being ‘fake’. How do you drive home? How do you get your car back? And how fast is it to wait for an appointment at the DMV to get a new license? Do you think the police will help? (In many cases, no.)
3. Invasion of privacy:
   Your medical records are sealed, and HIPAA fines and regulations are strict for a reason – but not if your identification doesn’t match your appearance. At a minimum, you can expect invasive questions from literal strangers, ranging from your appearance to sly questions about “but did you get the surgery?” (What surgery does this even refer to? I still don’t have clear answers.) We don’t even ask people if they’re pregnant. How is this comfortable or normal?
4. It can do serious harm in healthcare settings.
   First responders are trained to work with identification to properly and compassionately treat patients. When identification doesn’t match, it can create confusion and delays in care as EMTs or nurses have to decide whether or not the ID is of the person they may be treating, which means it takes longer to find medical records in situations where seconds may count.

And now, back to 2026.

In the past few months, legislatures across the country have taken this sort of lawful discrimination and accelerated their efforts to target transgender Americans and residents. Various authors and reporters have covered it to little fanfare while people see their bathroom access, healthcare, ability to vote, and ability to participate in public life taken away.

In Texas, the Attorney General mandated that therapists must – instead of treating a population already more than 7.6x more likely to attempt to commit suicide – administer ‘conversion therapy’, a practice known to cause lasting psychological harm even back in the 1990s.

During the State of the Union address, Trump told our nation that being transgender should be banned. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. There’s precedent for humans becoming illegal – we saw it leading up to World War II. Even as recently as a couple days ago, Trump added anti-trans provisions to the SAVE Act.

In Kansas, perhaps the scariest of all thus far has happened: With no grace period, the legislature revoked every single transgender resident’s driver’s license practically overnight, as well as some birth certificates. Unless surrendered and reissued with the wrong gender marker (at the licensee’s expense), trans drivers face an immediate Class-B misdemeanor and fine. Many are considering fleeing their state. What if this was happening to a broader class of people – what if this was happening to you?

Beyond that, Kansas continues to disappoint, but they aren’t the only ones: There now exist states (including theirs) with bounty laws aimed at reporting transgender people simply using the bathroom, complete with rewards and the right to sue for emotional distress.

All of this over the person peeing in the next stall. I certainly don’t like using public restrooms at all, but I wouldn’t classify using a public restroom with another person in there distressing.

(A quick search reveals no instances of a transgender person assaulting a child in a public restroom in the United States in the last two years. However, a Harvard study showed that 36% of transgender or gender-nonbinary students with restricted bathroom or locker room access reported being sexually assaulted.)

And don’t worry – there’s more. New Federal guidelines on transgender prisoners amount to what some call ‘forced conversion therapy’, restricting their necessary medications (and in some cases, life-saving as many trans bodies no longer produce hormones naturally, which is required by all humans to live). There is no oversight – the transgender population could become illegal with an executive order overnight and be forced into these same conditions. After all, the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025 and 2026, want to designate transgender people terrorists. The point of this isn’t to ‘protect’ anyone – it’s to force us out of public sight, out of public life, and to (somehow) force us out of existence despite trans people existing in every period of history.

Before we go further, I’d like to direct you to a map of anti-trans legislation and invite you to look at it from the perspective of someone who realizes that exact dilemma: What do you do when your existence can and may well become illegal before this administration leaves office? (Click on the map to view the source and explanation of the map)

So what does this have to do with you, the (presumably) non-trans reader?

Outside of a love of our shared humanity and experiences, there are actual, solid reasons you should care about this – because it will eventually likely affect you, too. Even if the law is directed at someone else, maybe not even a group you particularly care or think about, it’s the start of something bigger. We’re already seeing consequences with legislation like the SAVE Act, where a name change (such as one typically done upon marriage) could be enough to prevent you from voting. We’ve also already seen more masculine or non-traditional looking women stopped in public restrooms – despite being exactly the people bathroom laws are purported to protect. We’ve seen athletes in the past few years forced to prove their sex and gender identity before competing (and some have been barred anyway), and seen cisgender people who depend on some hormone replacement therapy unable to get it despite, again, not being transgender.

History, too, can teach us where this may begin to encroach on your rights. In the famous poem by German pastor Martin Niemöller “First they came“, we can reflect on how many people stayed silent as the Nazi occupation targeted one marginalized group after another – and by the time the persecution reached everyone else, there were very few left to speak up or defend them. There is evidence in the regular news cycle that what’s happening to transgender Americans and immigrants will eventually roll out to others – protesters, women, Democrats and leftists, Muslims, and anyone else Trump and his cronies take issue with. One just has to take a look at the existing Wikipedia article on this specific topic to get a solid idea. This is a warning, and it won’t stop with us.

Imagine for a moment that your ID could be used to criminalize or harass you – imagine a world where routine tasks like driving, voting, or even going to a pharmacy could expose you to fines, harassment, or worse. Picture for a moment a society where a random executive order could redefine legality and citizenship for… well, anyone. History warns us first: those in power come for a vulnerable minority, and if the rest of our society remains silent, that small net widens.

As we often say in my household, history never repeats perfectly, but it does rhyme. In this case: isolate a vulnerable minority group, frame them as a social problem or the root of the problem, make them both very strong and incredibly weak in the public eye, then pass laws that erode their rights until they themselves are ‘less than’ under the eyes of the law. Right now, transgender Americans are an easy target, but once the government begins deciding some citizens are “more equal” than others, the precedent won’t stop there.

It’s not a question of whether someone understands or agrees with transgender identity or our right to exist – it’s more a question of whether we will accept a society where the rights of one group can be methodically stripped away by legislation, and if we’ll do anything to prevent it before it reaches everyone else. As Picard in Star Trek has been oft-quoted saying “with the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied – chains us all irrevocably.“

Our democracy depends on equal protection under the law.

It affects all of us. If they can do it to one, they can do it to anyone. We must draw the line somewhere.

Written on March 8, 2026 by Anduin and Lloyd Craighill-Middleton.