In less than one week, Republicans have advanced legislation restricting transgender Americans' participation in sports and declared a federal definition of gender that excludes those who do not conform with their sex assigned at birth, setting the stage for policy attacks on LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms unlike anything the nation has seen before.
Almost immediately after taking office Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order hinging sex on biology and limiting it to male and female with respect to government documents and federal policy, fulfilling a campaign promise to restrict the rights of transgender Americans. Meanwhile, the House last Tuesday passed legislation banning transgender athletes from participating in women's and girls' sports. That bill, which is one of the first standalone anti-trans bills that a chamber of Congress has been able to advance since 2023, also established a definition of sex based solely on someone's "reproductive biology and genetics at birth."
With Trump back in office, Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, transgender and LGBTQ+ rights advocates told Salon they're watching to see what — and how many — anti-trans bills and provisions they'll have to fend off this legislative session. The passage of the anti-transgender sports bill, coupled with the president's executive order, signals that the federal government will wage an unprecedented assault on transgender Americans for at least the next two years — and this week's moves are only the beginning.
"All of this is part and parcel of the same overall effort: this anti-trans extremism among many on the right that is really coming from a desire to force transgender people out of our communities, out of our schools — out of public life entirely," Ian Thompson, a senior legislative advocate at the ACLU handling LGBTQ rights, said in a phone interview.
The so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 passed largely along party lines last Tuesday in a 218-206 vote and has since moved to the Senate for consideration.
The bill, which gained the support of just two Democrats, requires the Comptroller General to conduct a study that purports to document "the adverse psychological, developmental, participatory, and sociological results to girls of allowing males to compete, be members of a sports team, or participants in athletic programs, that are designed for girls."
While the majority of anti-trans legislation — and anti-LGBTQ legislation more broadly — arises at the state level, David Stacy, the vice president of government affairs for the Human Rights Campaign, told Salon that he anticipates an increasing number of anti-trans bills to originate at the federal level.
"We saw them attack trans and LGB rights at unprecedented levels for the last two years in the House, so I fully expect we will see a similar behavior — and they've given every indication — for this two years of Congress," Stacy said in a phone interview.
In the last 24 months, Congress has seen an increasing number of anti-trans bills introduced, with 87 proposals in 2024 and 53 the year before. All but two failed, per the Anti-Trans Legislation Tracker data showed.
Those successful anti-trans efforts were provisions included as riders in federal authorization or appropriations legislation. A provision that passed in December 2024, which eliminated coverage of gender-affirming care and hormone therapy from military insurance, for example, was a rider on a sprawling national defense authorization law for fiscal year 2025.
Advocates are expecting a flurry of anti-LGBTQ legislation in the coming months, with provisions like gender-affirming care bans and prohibitions around workplace discrimination protections for queer and gender-expansive Americans tucked into larger authorizations and spending bills.
The riders "that have been particularly concerning from our vantage point, are those that are designed to strip away federal funding for healthcare for the transgender community," Thompson said.
Both advocates said that they're also closely watching for proposals targeting healthcare access and funding. Prohibitions on Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care, as proposed in House Bill 498, which was introduced this session, would have "devastating" consequences for trans people, who disproportionately rely on the government-funded healthcare program, Thompson said.
Eight total anti-trans bills have been introduced in Congress since the most recent legislative session began in early January, most of which take aim at transgender students' participation in school sports or restrict access to gender-affirming healthcare.
Andrew Bales, the founder of the Anti-Trans Legislation Tracker, said they're anticipating nearly all other anti-trans bills introduced at the federal level to similarly focus on "reproductive biology and genetics at birth" and stoke "fear," as evidenced by the titles of 2024 bills like the "Stop the Invasion of Women’s Spaces Act" and "Stopping the Mutilation of Children Act of 2024."
"Whether they target sports, bathrooms, or education, the bills lead with fear and uncertainty as they seek to define trans people out of public life," Bales told Salon in an email. "They do this by offering new definitions for terms like "man", "woman", "mother", and "father," as well as replacing the term "gender" with "sex."
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Trump's latest executive order, which claims to defend "women from gender ideology extremism," follows a similar model. It recognizes only two "immutable" sexes, male and female, and defines them, "at conception," as a person who belongs to the sex that produces sperm and a person who belongs to the sex that produces eggs, respectively.
In addition to a slew of other provisions, Trump's order requires the federal government to only issue identification documents — like visas and passports — that reflect one's sex as assigned at birth. It also punts the Biden administration's allowance of access to single-sex spaces based on gender identity under the Supreme Court's Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which outlawed workplace discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.
Stacy said that Trump's executive order poses a "very serious threat," surpassing "anything we've ever seen before as far as scope."
It's unclear, however, how much of it the administration will be able to and willing to implement through the administrative rule process, he added, noting that the rule-making requirement "tripped up" the first Trump administration.
The partisan split in support of passing the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 also makes it unclear whether these anti-trans bills will ever become law given the need for Democratic support to make it out of the Senate.
Republicans were joined by only two politically vulnerable Democrats — Reps. Vincente Gonzales and Henry Cuellar of Texas — in advancing the bill. Both represent districts that supported Trump in last year's election. Gonzales, in particular, has said that Republicans accusing him of supporting transitions for children during the 2024 election cycle took a toll on him politically, according to the Texas Tribune.
Democrats in Congress dubbed the bill the "Child Predator Empowerment Act," arguing that it places school children's safety and privacy at risk and could expose them to possible inspection of their bodies.
Thompson said that limited Democrat support for the bill gives him hope that it won't make it past the Senate. Republican lawmakers were likely hoping the vote would have strayed more from party lines with Democrats breaking more significantly on issues of trans rights and freedoms — and that wasn't the case, he argued.
Because Republican's Senate majority is nowhere close to the 60 votes needed to advance the bill, "they're going to require at least seven Democratic senators to vote for this legislation in order to successfully pass it," Thompson said. "I think that the fact that Democrats in the House were so united in opposing the bill is a strong indication that we can probably expect the same from Democrats in the Senate."
Even then, Stacy said, the threats posed are "very real" even if they're not immediate. He called on Americans to express their opposition to their representatives and senators in Congress and submit comments on rules as the administrative rule-making process progresses as a means of slowing down the process.
"People really need to weigh in. Now is the time to take action, and not just stand idly by," he said, adding: "We have been successful in blocking a lot of these things in the past. I think we will be successful again but not without effort and not without engagement of everyday people who are concerned."
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