March 20, 2025
Courts are Pumping the Brakes on Trump’s Anti-Trans Crusade
Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School
In response to the Trump administration’s efforts to deny the existence of transgender people and erase them from public life, many brave transgender people and their allies went to court. Those lawsuits are already starting to pay dividends as judges recognize what is all too plain: Trump’s efforts to scapegoat transgender people are rooted in nothing more than a discriminatory bare desire to harm and, if implemented, will inflict irreparable injury on transgender people.
Earlier this month, a federal court in Maryland enjoined the Trump administration’s attempts to revoke federal funding for any entity that provides gender-affirming care to people under the age of nineteen. In addition to concluding that the President lacked the unilateral authority to impose new conditions on congressionally-approved funding and therefore usurped Congress’s power, the court concluded that the attempt to ban gender-affirming care discriminated against people on the basis of their transgender status and likely violated the equal protection clause as a result. The court observed that denying children needed medical care would not help the children, as the government conjectured, but instead would cause them to suffer.
The Maryland decision builds off one out of Washington. In Washington v. Trump, another federal court concluded that the funding revocation related to gender-affirming care was both beyond the scope of Trump’s power and infringed individual freedom. The court pulled no punches, concluding that the government was “deny[ing] the very existence of transgender people and instead seek[ing] to erase them from the federal vocabulary altogether and eliminate medical care for gender dysphoria at federally funded medical institutions.” As the Supreme Court has recognized, such “[a] bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest.”
In a series of cases filed by incarcerated transgender people, another federal court enjoined Trump’s order that all federal inmates be housed according to their sex assigned at birth (what the order refers to as their purportedly binary “immutable biological classification as either male or female”) and denied critical medical care. The Reagan-appointed judge reasoned that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their Eighth Amendment claims for deliberate indifference because housing plaintiffs in a facility inconsistent with their gender identity would exacerbate their gender dysphoria, as would denying them their medical care. This, the court concluded, would result in irreparable harm to the plaintiffs justifying the injunction.
In one of the cases challenging the Trump administration’s effort to ban transgender people from serving in the military, the presiding judge gave an unvarnished assessment of the Trump administration’s discrimination during a hearing. According to Judge Ana C. Reyes, the animus motivating the trans military ban is in the very text of the ban itself. The Executive Order’s text calls all trans people selfish liars: “A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.” Judge Reyes suggested that calling “an entire category of people dishonest, dishonorable, undisciplined, immodest” was evidence of unconstitutional animus, particularly when talking about “people who have taken an oath to defend this country, people who have been under fire, people who have received medals for taking fire for this country.” Consequently, Judge Reyes granted a preliminary injunction against the military ban, concluding that the ban “is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact,” while also concluding that the ban was an improper form of sex discrimination.
The reasoning of these courts builds off decades of jurisprudence protecting transgender people from intentional discrimination—including the Supreme Court’s own decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, protecting transgender people from employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Of course, there is a long road ahead and lower courts have yet to reach decisions in several pending cases regarding the Trump administration’s anti-transgender orders, including the ban on passports and participation in women’s sports. And there is no guarantee that the current Supreme Court will ultimately agree that the anti-trans executive orders are just that—anti-trans. But early indications suggest that federal courts are going to be an import bulwark—even if not ultimately a panacea—for protecting transgender rights and recognizing the humanity of transgender lives.