Ash Orr, an advocate from West Virginia, stated that he is hurrying to update his passport’s gender marker and legally alter his name.Katie Jenifer, a lawyer from North Carolina, is attempting to get her transgender daughter ready for a year on estrogen. Mx. Dahlia Belle, a writer and comedian from Oregon, is committed to supporting immigrants and individuals with disabilities.
Together with the parent of a trans teen, these three are among nearly a dozen transgender Americans who spoke to NBC News about preparing for the second administration of a president-elect who has pledged to limit their access to transition-related healthcare, change their identity documents, join the military, and play on sports teams, among other things.
Nearly all trans persons told NBC News that they are more prepared than they were eight years ago, while having a range of concerns about President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign pledges regarding trans people.
In contrast to 2016, when they were crying and feeling devastated by the election results and the impact that Trump’s policies would have on marginalized communities, including trans people, Heron Greenesmith, the deputy director of policy at the Transgender Law Center, who uses the pronouns they/them, said they felt clear-eyed the day after the election.
Greenesmith stated, “I know what to do this time, but it’s not going to be any different.”
Greenesmith noted that although transgender people’s rights were violated during the first Trump administration, we also prospered.
We offered mutual support and safety, protected ourselves from criminal prosecution, rescued ourselves from jail when necessary, and gave medical attention to those in need. Massachusetts-based Greenesmith stated. We will repeat the same action. We succeeded.
Day 1 promises
According to AdImpact, a company that monitors political ad spending, between September 19 and November 1, Trump and his supporters spent about $60 million on eight anti-trans network-TV advertisements, one of which was in Spanish.
Less than 1% of American adults are transgender, yet he has backed several legislation that target them. During summer campaign rallies, he pledged to take at least two steps to address the trans community on his first day in office: he would repeal the Biden administration’s Title IX protections that permitted trans students to use gender-neutral restrooms and he would stop federal funding for schools that force transgender insanity, critical race theory, and other offensive racial, sexual, or political content on our children.
Additionally, Trump pledged to implement a new regulation that forbids transition-related treatment for minors nationwide and to reinstate a ban that was put in place during his first term that prohibited transgender individuals from joining the military. According to his website’s agenda, he would announce that any facility or physician that treats transgender children would no longer be able to meet federal health and safety requirements for Medicaid and Medicare and would be promptly removed from the program.
In order to make it more difficult for transgender individuals to modify the gender markers on official papers like passports, the president-elect’s program also calls for federal agencies to define sex as the sex assigned at birth.
Plans for IDs, moving and medical care
Legal experts suggest that a new federal definition of sex could put an end to the State Department’s policy of issuing the gender-neutral X designation on passports in April 2022, in addition to the standard M or F. According to Greenesmith, if the Trump administration continues to permit transgender individuals to modify the gender marker on their passport, it may compel them to present documentation of gender-reassignment surgery, making gender-marker alterations unaffordable for the vast majority of transgender individuals.
According to Greenesmith and Sasha Buchert, director of the nonbinary and transgender rights project at Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ legal advocacy group, it is unclear what will happen to people who currently hold passports with an X gender marker if the Trump administration stops issuing new X passports. For instance, there is currently no law that would permit the government to mandate that individuals surrender their X passports.
According to Buchert, updating any identity documents that need to be updated is always a good idea in light of the current situation.
A U.S. passport typically takes four to six weeks to process, and the expedited option, which costs an additional $60, takes two to three weeks.
Ash Orr, who is the press relations manager for Advocates for Trans Equality, the biggest trans rights group in the country, and resides in Morgantown, West Virginia, said he decided to legally change his name because of the election. He intends to apply to update his passport as soon as his name change is finalized, and his hearing for the change is set for January 15.
In addition, he intends to depart his home state by spring due to the election and the recent shift toward conservatism in West Virginia politics. Due to safety concerns, he declined to disclose the state where he and his partner are relocating, stating that he has received a growing number of threats in the last two years.
“I’ve had to realize that your home isn’t always a place where you can thrive,” Orr said, adding that he has struggled with the feeling that he is leaving his community and the trans people in the state who cannot afford to leave. “West Virginia is my home, and it has always been my home,” he said.
Twenty-year-old Finn Franklin, who is completing his associate’s degree at Rogue Community College in Grants Pass, Oregon, stated that the election has impacted his plans for where he would apply to complete his four-year degree.
Franklin stated, “I like the smaller school size, so I was looking at some rural schools.” However, since I don’t want to spend the next four years living somewhere other than Washington, Oregon, or California, I won’t be applying to schools outside of the West Coast after the election. Because of the typical political differences between urban and rural locations, as well as the availability of health care, I believe I wish to live in a metro area.
According to Franklin, Oregon Health & Science University Hospital, located in Portland, some five hours north, provides telehealth services for him to get his testosterone. Because he receives his medical care through the Oregon Health Plan, the state’s Medicaid program, he is concerned about how the next administration may impact that treatment as well as a consultation for top surgery that he has booked for October 2026. If Trump fulfills his pledge to reduce Medicaid funding for hospitals that offer transition-related treatment to minors, it could have an impact on OHSU Hospital, which has a program that offers gender-affirming therapy to kids and teens.
It kind of becomes completely unreachable if the financing for those kinds of activities disappears, and that’s obviously extremely frightening, Franklin said.
In the event that Trump imposes federal limits that might limit access to transition-related care for kids across the country, North Carolina attorney Katie Jenifer stated that she is attempting to obtain a year’s supply of estrogen for her daughter, Maddie, who is 17. Although their insurance only covers one month at a time, her daughter’s doctor recommended enough medication for a year. The drug costs $109 a month out of pocket, but Jenifer got a voucher from the drugstore that lowers the price to $49 a month.
Jenifer earlier stated to NBC News that, depending on the results of the election, she and Maddie intended to relocate either out of the state or out of the nation.
On Tuesday, Jenifer stated, “We will attempt to stay until high school graduation in June and continue to monitor and make plans to exit soon after or before if necessary, provided I can get enough medication on hand to get Maddie to 18.” We will most likely attempt to depart in mid- to late-January if we are unable to obtain the necessary medications. My job hunt will determine where we go.
Advocates claim that LGBTQ youth in particular are already feeling the effects of the election. In the 24 hours following the election, the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention group, witnessed a 700% increase in crisis contacts compared to the weeks before. According to a spokeswoman who talked to NBC News, over 40% of the contacts were trans or nonbinary youth, and around one-third (30%) identified as LGBTQ youth who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color.
Organizing within community
Some transgender people told NBC News that they immediately began mobilizing with local community groups following the election.
For instance, Orr stated that he would be volunteering to provide emergency contraception and other reproductive health supplies around West Virginia as part of Holler Health Justice, a reproductive health group run by queer people of color.
In reaction to growing worries of violence following Trump’s statements regarding transgender people, Bennett Kaspar-Williams, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer with martial arts training, said he is collaborating with other local activists to set up self-defense seminars for women and LGBTQ individuals.
He claimed that he volunteered for Democrats prior to the 2020 election because, as a trans guy, he was worried about what his child’s future might hold if Trump were to win reelection at the time of his pregnancy.
“I definitely wouldn’t have believed you if you told me that he would win again in four years,” he remarked. The generation that waited until they were old enough to begin a medical transition and now faces the prospect of never being able to do it at all makes me very afraid for them and what that represents.
Additionally, a lot of trans persons talked about directly contributing to mutual assistance organizations, particularly those that assist trans people of color.
Aldita Gallardo is the the director of the Action for Transformation Fund, a partnership between the Transgender Law Center and the Emergent Fund, a national rapid response fund that supports groups led by LGBTQ people of color. An initial attempt to transfer funding directly to trans activists operating in their local communities was the $1 million Action for Transformation Fund. Gallardo pointed out that a 2021 research by Funders for LGBTQ concerns found that foundations that support LGBTQ communities gave less than 4 cents out of every $100 donated to trans communities and concerns in the United States.
The Action for Transformation Fund, which was established in September and recently awarded its first round of grants, was not previously considering long-term fundraising, but that changed following the election, according to Gallardo, who is located in Oakland, California.
According to Gallardo, we now see it as a chance to contribute more money to the growing quantity of need. We are aware that during the four years of the administration, things would get worse.
The fund’s first round of grants went to organizations like the Unspoken Treasure Society, a Black, trans-led organization in Jacksonville, Florida; Transgender Advocates Knowledgeable Empowering, or TAKE, which offers services to trans people of color in Birmingham, Alabama; and House of Tulip, which houses trans people of color in Louisiana.
Mx. Dahlia Belle, a comedian and writer based in Portland, Oregon, who also works as a peer support operator for a trans nonprofit, encouraged trans people to support those outside of their immediate community as a second Trump administration begins. She fears her job with the trans nonprofit could cease to exist if Congresspasses a billthat would allow Trump to target nonprofits tax-exempt status. If that were to happen, she could lose access to health care. She claimed that she still feels quite fortunate and safe.
We as a community are facing a very real existential threat, Belle said. However, she added, in the grand scheme of things, the threat we are facing pales in comparison to the immediacy and severity that will be faced by immigrants and people with disabilities and people who may be in need of reproductive care.
She acknowledged that trans people and LGBTQ people more broadly fit into all of these categories and said it s those intersections of identity where I feel our advocacy is most needed and needs to be focused.
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