This is the first part of a three-part series. Part two examines the history of how minorities are unmade by law and rhetoric, asks why personal defense matters, and why it won’t be enough. Part three turns to what our community has built, why it is worth defending, and what defense looks like. We ask for your patience and your attention.
This series was inspired by and coincides with the release of our Idaho guide. You can find it here.
Beauty and brutality.
The last decade changed what it means to be queer in America and few under that umbrella felt that as intensely as the trans community. Some of that change was hard-won and beautiful. Some of it arrived like a door slamming shut. We saw marriage equality, acceptance many of us hadn’t dared to dream of, visibility in media, and a cultural presence we couldn’t have predicted.
Nearly two decades ago the Democratic President couldn’t openly support marriage equality. Last year, a record 20,000 people filled the streets of San Francisco for Trans March. The largest crowd in the march’s history was drawn in the middle of the most sustained assault on trans rights this country has ever seen.
The isolation and stress of the pandemic saw our population increase rapidly as tough times and introspection led so many of us to question our own inner status quo. This has led to a historic renaissance within our queer culture. Throughout the country, our communities have been thriving, growing, and creating something truly beautiful.
We built chosen families to share our joy with when those assigned to us failed. An entire generation of trans youth grew up for the first time seeing media representation that wasn’t mocking or derisive. Trans actresses star in moving, major roles while trans directors forge entire cultural zeitgeists.
Where society has failed us, we have naturally built powerful systems of support. At the core of our identity is an understanding of privilege, struggle, and community – each of us imbued with an intense strength of will.
At the same time, the politics of fear have expanded rapidly. Our beauty has been met with the brutality of hate.
We went from a part of the political fringe to the political football of the moment. The battles we thought we had won came back. They came back harder.
Bathroom bans resoundingly defeated over a decade ago became the daily legislative agenda across red states. What the public had once rejected became the legislation politicians couldn’t pass fast enough.
We had fought passionately and successfully to give our youth the childhoods we were never allowed. For the first time they had the care they deserved, and found the camaraderie of playing sports alongside their friends. They were Prom Queens and Kings. They were wrestlers and volleyball players. They were themselves.
Legal recognition of trans identities had long existed without incident across the Red and Blue states of America. Our gender markers harmed no one, allowing us to move throughout the world without a scarlet letter. This too had to be taken from us. Passports, driver’s licenses, any official documentation would now mark us as suspect, in every interaction, with every stranger, for the rest of our lives. Every time we reach for our ID, the state’s declaration of our deviancy is right there with us. The pain that causes is the entire point.
Our fight to keep what we have won can feel endless. Just as we are mounting our defenses against one attack, the next has already begun. They would have us embrace hopelessness. We will not gift them that.
The weight of the forces against us have a momentum we must recognize. There are those among our supposed allies who have begun to calculate whether our rights are worth the political cost. This calculation happens in the face of polls which consistently show that trans rights are not a daily concern for most Americans, only for those who have made hatred of us the center of their political identity.
Each of our victories became their next target. A movement of hate groups masquerading as medical organizations emerged almost overnight, eagerly providing the justifications the politicians required. What began with segregation from sports, from bathrooms and from public life became the withdrawal of lifesaving healthcare. The children our community celebrated were turned into targets, their parents and doctors into criminals.
According to a poll from the Movement Advancement Project and NORC, an estimated 400,000 transgender people have already fled their home states since the 2024 election. We are witnessing an unparalleled refugee crisis that exists entirely within the borders of the United States, met with near complete silence from the media.
This is not a crisis that establishment media has chosen to cover. These are not refugees the political establishment has chosen to see. They are our people, and they are largely on their own, their plight chronicled almost entirely by our community’s journalists.
It is into this world that this website was born. The world for queer people in the US changed drastically following the 2024 election. No member of our community has been unaffected. The trans community has been at the forefront of this battle, as we have been since Stonewall. We carry that legacy. We intend to honor it.
This project was started in October of 2025, born from the conviction that enough was enough, that knowledge is power, and that our community deserves both.
In the 7 months that have passed since then, the legal landscape for our people has rapidly deteriorated.
Every time the calendar turns over into a new year, we see a whole slate of anti-trans legislation. This year, 740 bills are under consideration across 42 states and at the federal level. Those hard at work with the Trans Legislation Tracker, which has documented this assault since its beginning, note that 2025 was the sixth consecutive record-breaking year. Each year now becomes a record-breaking year.
What we are watching can no longer be viewed as a cynical political cycle. It is an escalation. It is an attempt to legislate our people out of existence.
There are those among the queer community and our political allies that attempt to paint these assaults on our existence as a distraction. This is a dangerous mistake that we must reject.
It is accurate to say that the Republican party’s ambitions extend far beyond the elimination of trans people. But their commitment to the anti-trans project is passionate, methodical, and ideological.
This is not a distraction from their agenda. This is not hyperbole. Our elimination from society is their agenda. Their malice betrays their intent.
Idaho State Senator Brandon Shippy, during passage of his state’s bathroom ban, looked directly at a room full of trans people and said: “There is no oppressed community that we’re dealing with here, because there is only male and female.” Trans people, he continued, are “a myth.” We do not exist. Therefore we cannot be harmed.
You cannot oppress a myth. You cannot harm what does not exist. This is not a new idea. It is one of the oldest tools in the history of persecution. It is the language of genocide.
For the record, in the face of silence.
Across the country we see a legal war being waged against our people.
Kansas passes the “worst anti-trans bill” ever, only for Idaho to outdo it in short order, and then Tennessee. Each legislature competing to be the most authoritarian, the most regressive, and the most cruel. The pace is almost as oppressive as the legislation itself.
These are not abstractions. These are not just bills and laws written on paper. These are weapons.
Kansas: Identity revoked. In the early hours of February 26th, 2026, approximately 1,700 transgender Kansans woke up to find that their driver’s licenses were no longer valid. No warning. No grace period. They went to sleep recognized by their state. They woke up in violation.
SB244 didn’t just restrict trans Kansans. The bill erased them administratively, overnight, by design. The law invalidated existing driver’s licenses and birth certificates whose gender markers reflected the holder’s identity rather than their sex assigned at birth. It banned future changes. It criminalized bathroom use in government buildings and handed any private citizen the right to sue a trans person for $1,000 for non-compliance.
Trans Kansans had held the right to change gender markers on their licenses for nearly two decades. That right was lost overnight, without cause, to the enthusiasm of those who wish us gone. The courts had affirmed our community’s right to accurate and affirming identification as recently as October 2025. Four months later they took it anyway.
Idaho: Criminalizing existence. On March 31st, 2026, Idaho Governor Brad Little signed House Bill 752 into law. He did it in the afternoon, while trans people and their allies rallied on the Capitol steps outside for Transgender Day of Visibility. That same morning he had signed a separate bill fining cities for flying the LGBTQ+ pride flag. By evening, the city of Boise had taken theirs down.
They sought to tear us down on the day we celebrate all that we have built up.
HB752 makes it a criminal offense for a transgender person to use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. This isn’t just in government buildings as we’ve seen in so many previous laws, but in every private business, every restaurant, every hospital, every gas station in the state. A first offense carries up to a year in jail. A second offense within five years is a felony, carrying up to five years in prison. Under Idaho’s three strikes law, a third felony conviction can extend to life.
Read that again. The potential of life imprisonment for using the bathroom.
This is brazenly eliminationist, and they are unapologetic about it. The timing tells you everything. Signed on the one day set aside to celebrate trans existence, on the same afternoon a separate law forced Boise to take down its pride flag. That is not coincidence. That is a message.
We are not welcome in public life. We are not welcome in Idaho.
Tennessee: Weaponizing healthcare. Other states moved to erase trans identity, criminalize trans presence, or make trans existence a financial liability. Tennessee chose a different instrument. It chose the medical record. It will wield the very instrument of our wellbeing, the care that saves our lives, and turn it against us.
HB0754 requires gender clinics to report detailed information on every patient receiving gender-affirming care to the Tennessee Department of Health. Age, sex, specific medications and dosages, surgical procedure codes, and a full accounting of every mental health diagnosis the patient has received must be submitted to the state. No comparable reporting requirement exists for any other category of medical care in Tennessee. The singling out is not administrative. It is political.
Supporters invoke the language of public health: social contagion, crisis, protecting children. Yet mandatory reporting has never been used to track a population the state simply disapproves of. Reporting during the AIDS epidemic at least tracked a communicable disease. Tennessee is tracking an identity.
The sponsors were not subtle about the distinction. Faison compared gender-affirming care to lobotomies. Taylor called transition “nonsense.” These are not the words of a public health intervention. They are the words of persecution being prepared.
Healthcare for trans adolescents has already been banned. Our enemies in the Tennessee Legislature are building a case, the verdict already spoken but not yet law. This bill will construct the justification for the elimination of all trans healthcare in the state.
Ohio: The architecture complete? While Kansas erased identity, Idaho criminalized presence, and Tennessee built its surveillance apparatus, Ohio’s House Bill 798 arrived on March 31st, 2026 with a different ambition entirely. It didn’t target one dimension of trans existence. It comprehensively targeted all of them simultaneously.
HB798 locks birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, and driver’s licenses to sex assigned at birth. It bans trans people from bathrooms and facilities across government buildings, every school, every university, and every place of employment and public accommodation in the state. It protects the right of government employees, teachers, and university staff to misgender trans people and prohibits any professional consequence for doing so. It allows students to refuse to use correct names and pronouns for their peers without disciplinary action.
Every dimension of transgender life, targeted simultaneously. They had the audacity to call it the Privacy Protection Act.
Every door that might have been open to the trans community becomes a liability. The enforcement mechanism doesn’t target trans people directly. It targets every institution, public and private, that might otherwise welcome them.
Any person who encounters a trans person in a designated facility can sue. Not the trans person. The business, the school, the employer. We’ve seen these bounty laws before. The private right of action mechanism was first deployed against abortion rights. Now it has found a new target. Ohio extends this methodology to every private business and place of employment in the state. Every institution that does not actively exclude trans people from their spaces takes significant financial risks.
The law doesn’t need to ban trans people explicitly. It makes their existence a financial threat to every institution in civil society.
This is what the work of unmaking looks like when it matures. Every state that came before was a proof of concept. Ohio is the product. And somewhere, right now, someone is reading it the way Ohio read the ones before it. Looking for what was left undone. Planning what comes next.
Every year. Every week. The systems of oppression grow and expand. We are forced into a series of escalating and desperate reactions. We have reached a point of crisis met with silence.
Not panic. Defiance.
We are acutely aware of the impact this constant escalation is having on our community. We’ve seen and felt the same anxieties that keep our people awake at night. The relentless pace of this assault and the resulting reactions within our own media threaten to keep us in a state of fear which serves only our enemies. Doomerism is a temptation that must be denied.
This series will make the case that the qualities inherent in our identities and foundational within our community are our greatest strengths. The internal battles which all trans people have faced have forged a people of enviable strength.
We have thrived in resistance as long as we have existed. In both society’s plain sight and its shadows we have built systems of knowledge, support, and survival. The history of trans existence is one of struggle, but it is also one of staggering beauty and resilience.
We have fought these fights before and won. We will win again.
What this moment calls for is clarity. History provides lessons for those with unflinching eyes. The methods of persecution rhyme, and the evidence before us convicts itself. We need not embellish or catastrophize. It simply requires recognition.
The stakes for a young trans girl in Idaho are as high as our people have ever faced, and if anything we have witnessed firsthand what we have to lose. In understanding the reality of the architecture being built against us we must take note of the distinction between fear and awareness. The former paralyzes, the latter prepares. In that preparation we must find our calling.
This website was created because we understand personal self-defense must be an important priority. Personal defense is a necessary right and yet is not sufficient on its own. Firearms are instrumental to systems of community defense, but those who keep us safe are not necessarily those who build.
Our people have already found each other in spite of the barriers society puts before us. Organizers among us have enriched our lives hosting queer raves, starting trans roller skating clubs, and fostering the community connections we hold dear. So too have we embraced the difficult, unglamorous, and survival-critical callings. We’ve already created underground healthcare networks, mutual aid funds, and emergency housing chains. Countless other systems of survival are being built silently and thanklessly this very moment.
What we have built is undeniably beautiful and yet there is much more work to be done. The challenges we recognize every day are an opportunity. They are a calling. Each and every one of us witnesses unmet needs. The threats we face demand more than identifying problems. We need those with the resolve to be the change, to take the lead, to take all that we have built and reach further still.
Over the last decade we were allowed to behold what we only dared to imagine. The glimpse we were given was imperfect and yet overflowing with possibility.
They assault our beauty with their brutality. What we will build in response will be more defiant, even more luminous still. We will fight not out of fear. We will fight for everything we have made, and everything we have yet to make. We will fight because we are worth it.
The joy we have found, the families we have chosen, the identities and futures we took control of. These are not things we are willing to surrender.
We are proud of what we’ve won and will protect those victories with the same passion that made us their target.
They should have left us alone.