What we are witnessing now is not a legislative trend — it’s a coordinated nationwide campaign.
Over the past five years, Republican lawmakers have turned anti-trans legislation into a full-blown political obsession. What began as a handful of bills targeting sports participation and so-called religious exemptions has metastasized into a sweeping campaign against nearly every facet of transgender life — bathroom access, IDs, medical care, even the legality of one’s identity. In 2020, there were just over 100 bills aimed at LGBTQ+ people. In 2025, that number has ballooned to more than 850, the vast majority singling out transgender Americans. What we are witnessing now is not a legislative trend — it’s a coordinated nationwide crusade.
In 2020, most anti-trans legislation centered on banning transgender youth from sports — a proposal that, at the time, was considered extreme. The political optics of attacking LGBTQ+ people so soon after the Obergefell ruling were poor, and the memory of North Carolina’s disastrous bathroom ban was still fresh. That law, which forced trans people to use restrooms that didn’t align with their gender identity, backfired spectacularly and was widely credited with helping sink Republican prospects in the 2018 midterms in the state.
Nevertheless, some Republicans had identified sports as a way to get their foot in the door to further discrimination. The president of the American Principles Project, Terry Schilling, detailed how this was the case: “The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues.”
In the years that followed, the volume and severity of anti-trans legislation escalated dramatically. Over 200 bills were proposed in 2022, and more than 500 in 2023, with each legislative session raising the ceiling on what Republicans considered politically palatable. Sports bans, once fringe, became boilerplate by 2021. The next year, states that had passed sports bans moved swiftly to criminalize gender-affirming care, and drag bans and bathroom restrictions emerged as the new line of attack. Today, those once-extreme measures are commonplace, and Republicans are setting their sights on even broader targets: bans on ID changes, adult healthcare restrictions, and increasingly punitive measures that chip away at the basic legal recognition of trans lives. Some bills have even been proposed to criminalize transgender identities altogether.
As of 2025, a staggering 867 bills have been introduced targeting transgender people across the United States. Of these, 122 would ban gender-affirming care for some segment of the trans population. Another 77 seek to bar transgender people from certain bathrooms — a threat made more tangible as arrests for alleged “wrong bathroom” usage have begun to mount. Seventy-three bills aim to eliminate legal recognition of transgender people entirely, often by revoking updated driver’s licenses, stripping correct gender markers, and invalidating identification documents. Others target drag (and transgender people dressed in the “wrong clothes”) or require schools to forcibly out transgender students. A newer, especially chilling category would classify gender-affirming care or even social transition as child abuse, opening the door for state-sanctioned removal of trans youth from supportive homes. So far, 51 anti-trans bills have been signed into law this year, with many more advancing through state legislatures.
As state legislatures escalate their assault on transgender rights, the federal government under Trump has doubled down — punishing blue states for protective laws, banning transgender people from military service, investigating teachers for affirming trans students, defunding hospitals that provide care, and targeting organizations simply for acknowledging the word “transgender.” In scope and intensity, 2025 has become the most punishing year yet for transgender people in America. The goal is unmistakable: to make it nearly impossible for transgender people to live openly, safely, and with dignity in public life.
This piece was republished with permission from Erin In The Morning.
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