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The American Anti-Trans Risk Assessment Map, March 2025 Edition

Erin Reed has provided an updated American "Anti-Trans National Risk Assessment Map".

She highlights the sharp rise in anti-transgender legislation in the United States. The map categorizes states based on their legislative risks for transgender adults and youth, ranging from "Do Not Travel" to "Most Protective States."

Reed notes a troubling national trend of intensified legal and executive actions against transgender individuals, including bans on gender-affirming care, bathroom restrictions, erasure of transgender recognition, and forced detransition mandates for youth.

Reed writes:

The risk level for transgender youth and adults has significantly deteriorated in the latest update. Most notably, the United States has now been designated “Do Not Travel” for foreign citizens—a designation I do not make lightly. But recent developments, including Marco Rubio’s visa directive targeting transgender applicants and the detention of lawful visa holders and resident immigrants, demand such a warning.

More here!

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New York joins 20 other states against federal trans military ban

New York Attorney General Letitia James, along with 20 other state attorneys general, has filed an amicus curiae brief to support a lawsuit against President Donald Trump's executive order banning transgender individuals from serving in the military.

The brief argues that the ban would weaken the military, harm public safety, and force states like New York to choose between fairness and security.

The lawsuit, which includes six transgender service members as plaintiffs, claims that Trump's order unjustly declares all transgender people unfit to serve, insults and demeans them, and disregards their sacrifices.

The executive order, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” was signed on January 27 and directs the Defense Department, Coast Guard, and Homeland Security to update their policies based on perceived threats to unit cohesion.

News10 has more.

Photo: Camrocker

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volodymyr zelenskyy is the strongest man alive for sitting through this utter bullshit without swearing or punching the fuckers or angry crying. fuck trump and fuck everyone who did not vote for harris and fuck russia.

like i can’t even read this bit of news without feeling humiliated and i’m not even fucking there.

i am terrified that i will have to sit back and watch the loss of ukraine in front of my eyes.

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An 11-year-old girl took her own life in Texas after she was tormented by classmates who threatened to call ICE authorities and have her family deported from the US. She fought for her life five days in the hospital but succumbed to her injuries. She was taunted with deportation threats for weeks by sixth-grade classmates at Gainesville Intermediate School.

Classmates allegedly harassed the young girl by telling her she would be left alone without her family once they were deported. Despite reportedly informing school officials on numerous occasions, no action was taken to stop it. In the aftermath, Gainesville Independent School District did not acknowledge Carranza’s death but rather issued a statement pointing to its strict anti-bullying code.

I can't imagine her family's pain. Her name was Jocelynn Rojo Carranza. She was an 11 year old child harassed into committing suicide over fearing for her family and their immigration status.

Rant/emotional ramble below, not relaying news.

A death purely from hatred, making a child, a fellow classmate feel so othered, dehumanized, alone without other way to get help. Attacking what the good she had left, her family. I can't imagine how terrified she felt from bullies older than her convinced her that her parents were going to be forcibly deported. That she'd be placed with a different family, or in a fostercare, alone with people who thought similarly to them. Be forced to put up with raw hatred and racism for what seemed infinite, all while being without her family. Without ever knowing or hearing of them again, alone. She'd go to school hearing of the escalated narratives, elaboration of details to further scare and cement that in her, with constant reminders of what life would be like alone in this country from school. This made me cry.

The school had been contacted multiple times, reports had been made, the kid was going to the guidance counselor multiple times a week.

The fact her school cited their anti bullying policy and didn't say a word about the bullying they had tolerated repulses and infuriates me.

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Reminder that hermaphrodite ORIGINALLY referred to intersex human beings and is in fact never a neutral biological term. It's a slur. Stop saying it.

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Lemkin Institute Publishes Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has issued a Red Flag Alert warning against the anti-trans policies of the second Trump administration, arguing that they align with a larger genocidal process.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (LIGP), or Lemkin Institute, is a multinational non-governmental organization based in the United States.

Genocidal process

In the declaration the institute writes:

The Lemkin Institute believes that current anti-trans hysteria within the government is meant to serve three purposes within a wider genocidal process. First, the Executive Orders constitute the paper marginalization and 'paper persecution' of an identity group that has recently gained rights and greater acceptance in order to lock in evangelical support for the Trump administration. Second, the executive orders create a fictitious 'cosmic enemy' that will justify radicalization of government in general, leading to ever-more power for the executive branch; and third, the executive orders, over time, aim to normalize the destruction of identity groups by desensitizing the public to state-sponsored persecution of people based solely on their identities.

The document draws parallels between Trump's rhetoric and other historical instances of identity denial, comparing it to Russian policies against Ukrainians and Israeli policies against Palestinians. It warns that such identity erasure tactics often lead to mass atrocities.

Pseudo-science

The institute also refutes common anti-trans arguments, emphasizing that trans individuals are a small, natural part of human diversity. While the executive orders targeting trans and non-binary people appear legally sophisticated, they lack scientific validity and rely on "junk science," the institute argues.

These policies stem from long-standing conservative attacks on trans individuals, including from certain self-identified "feminists" [TERFs] who embrace a strict gender binary. The report warns that such initiatives endanger not only trans people but also all women by undermining privacy, bodily autonomy, and gender-based protections.

Furthermore, the institute argues that the administration's focus on transgender women as threats distracts from addressing real structural issues of gender-based violence.

You can read "Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States" here.

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I saw a clip on Tiktok but when looking it up on the Google I found no major news organization talking about it. Edit: Someone told me I misconstrued what he ment so I'm just gonna let this sit here and yall can make up yalls own mind 🤷🏾‍♀️

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Another angle for y'all 👌 with some refreshing commentary lmao

Elon: "[...] this one really mattered, and i just wanna say thank you for making it happen, thank you" *does nazi salute*

person behind camera: "that was weird as shit...yeah that - yo, that motherfucker just did the heil Hitler joint"

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The National Park Service has removed "TQ+" from LGBTQ+ and all mention of transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument. (February 13) Trans women and gender-nonconforming people were some of the most influential activists behind the Stonewall movement and what followed. 3 articles of clothing laws were why raids happened.

This is erasure.

Article

On Wednesday, according to a version of the Park Service website saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the introductory text on the monument’s main page said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.” By Thursday afternoon, the word “transgender” and the letter T in the abbreviation had been removed from the page.

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I am deeply struck by the idea of what it means to be American. For centuries, the defining premise of our nation has been religious freedom—an America not bound by a single faith, but a land where all beliefs, and the right to hold none, are protected. Yet, we find ourselves at a critical crossroads where governance by the Constitution is being dangerously replaced by White Christian leadership, as though one particular religious interpretation should dictate law for a pluralistic society.

The United States was never meant to be a theocracy. The Founders, many of whom were deists, sought to establish a country free from religious rule—one that ensured that no singular faith could exert dominance over governance. Yet today, we see White Christian Nationalism increasingly shaping our policies, eroding the very foundation of our democracy.

Religious freedom in America was designed to protect the people from government-imposed religion, not to weaponize religion as a tool of control. And yet, here we are: Supreme Court rulings shaped by sectarian doctrine, legislative priorities dictated by religious ideologies rather than constitutional principles, and political leaders proudly proclaiming their religious texts as the guiding law of the land rather than the actual law of the land—the Constitution.

What does it mean to be American? It means upholding the ideals that have long defined us—liberty, justice, and equality under the law. It means rejecting the notion that governance should be reserved for one race, one religion, one worldview. It means pushing back against efforts to replace constitutional governance with a religious ideology that seeks to limit freedoms rather than expand them.

To those who argue that America is moving away from its "Christian foundations," I say: America’s foundation is the freedom to worship or not worship at all. It is the protection of conscience, not the enforcement of dogma.

This fight is not just about policy—it is about the soul of this country. Will we allow a narrow, exclusionary ideology to redefine what it means to be American? Or will we reclaim the true essence of this nation: a democracy governed by its people, guided by the Constitution, and committed to protecting freedom for all?

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I’m a queer author. Words I never thought would define me—queer or author. And I haven’t taken book banning seriously. It’s been on the back burner... pun intended. What about deportation? What about Musk? What about teenagers controlling our digital lives, mining our data, and reshaping economies with unchecked power? And here is book banning, quietly burning in the background, smoldering under our noses while we’re distracted by the next catastrophe.

I took my eye off it. And now that I look back, it’s not just bad—it’s a fucking wildfire. How can this be happening? Now. Here. In a country that claims to be free?

Why have I not taken this seriously? I’ve assumed—hard part to own—it’s not that big of a deal because I can still buy those books. I can still read them. So really, what is the big deal? But here’s the truth: book bans are about access. They are about who gets to read, who gets to learn, and who gets to decide what stories are told. Yes, I can still buy banned books. But what about the kids who can’t? What about the students who rely on school libraries, the readers who don’t have the money, the access, or even the knowledge that these stories exist?

Why the hell aren’t we more concerned about teaching our kids to think critically, to discern, to question, to sift out the truth from the noise? A generation raised on one sanitized, whitewashed, state-approved narrative is dangerous. How will they recognize truth if we’re too afraid to even let them see the whole picture? How will they wrestle with it if we cut off half of the conversation?

Faith isn’t downloaded. You don’t just wake up brave. Courage isn’t a gift from the sky—it’s a muscle built by facing fear head-on. You find truth by fighting through the lies. You find balance by falling, by failing, by standing up again. Hiding, deleting, or burning uncomfortable realities doesn’t bring us closer to truth—it buries it.

God is found on the margins. In the outcasts. In the voices they want to silence. Scripture tells us this again and again: Jesus didn’t sit at the table with the powerful—he sat with the rejected, the hated, the erased. And yet here we are, snuffing out voices, erasing stories, tightening the leash around what our children are allowed to read, think, question.

Book bans aren’t about protecting children. They’re about controlling them. Keeping them compliant. Keeping them in line. Keeping them from growing into people who question, who push back, who demand more. And history has screamed this lesson at us—when you erase stories, you don’t just erase words. You erase people.

So how do we stop this? We fight back. We read banned books. We buy them for others. We donate them to libraries and free book programs. We show up at school board meetings. We vote for leaders who believe in free thought, in intellectual freedom, in education that doesn’t shy away from hard truths. We refuse to be silent.

I will not be erased. And neither will the stories that terrify them so much they try to burn them out of existence.

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Major changes at Google today: Pride month has been removed from the Google Calendar, as well as many other cultural heritage days such as Holocaust Remembrance, Indigenous People’s Month, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Women’s History, and more.

I’m not seeing TDOV on the calendar today either.

They have, however, changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

The Gulf of Mexico is named after the Aztecs, particularly Mexico is derived from Mexica which was their self-designated name in Nahautl. The Gulf of Mexico has had its namesake since the 16 century Spanish conquistadors.

Google notably receives federal contracts and appears to be complying (over complying) with Trump’s illegal EO targeting anyone that is not a white, straight, Christian male.

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Hey. International people.

Keep calling it the Gulf of Mexico or whatever your term is for it. Do not allow the Republican regime to label that body of water the Gulf of America to the world. The name came from a the term Mexica, what the Aztecs called themselves. It’s been called the Gulf of Mexico since the 1600s.

Keep calling it Mount Denali. The original name before it was Mount McKinley. Don’t let the First Nations be erased.

It may sound stupid and petty. But it is an attempt to rewrite history and make us forget the origins. It is a literal white washing of history. This type of censorship is a beginning to greater evils.

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You probably know this at some level, but this is an ignorant take. You ignore how interconnected white colonialism is with modern gender roles and this transphobia you're putting out. This transman is privileged in skin, background, the mere ability to immigrate but you use him to ignore the millions of others who are none of those things. You yourself don't see him as a man, imagine where that leads in conservative areas with less privileged individuals? Forced pregnancies, arranged marriages, having the ability to obtain privilege such as college stomped out by your father to force you into their idea of a woman, s/a to force you "into" being a woman, preventing you from graduating or working to fix you. You don't understand. That is fine, but I must point out the hypocrisy in your beliefs as you "care" about women.

If you respond, it would likely be in a way unproductive for both of us, I won't respond. People are not ideologies they are human lives.

Escaping from the US to Europe. A Transgender Man's Story.

James S tells the story about his journey from Alaska to California and then to the Netherlands in search of a safe place to live. He reflects on the way transphobia and anti-trans policies affect transgender Americans.

By James S.

In Summer of 2024, I decided to move back to the Bay Area. Before that, I’d been living in my hometown of Kodiak for the previous two years, living pretty comfortably in my first one bedroom apartment.

I worked as a special ed aide at the same school I had attended for kindergarten and first grade, and I had a pretty decent support network considering the remoteness of a little town on an island in Alaska.

There had of course been some struggles, because I’m a trans man and for quite a few years now trans people and our lives have been a hot button issue to say the least.

Kodiak religious transphobia

I had been on a committee of educators and medical professionals to review and help update the school district’s health curriculum since 2022, because the whole process had been started, stopped, and slowed as community members and some committee members complained about anything that so much as resembled an acknowledgement of trans people’s existence in the presence of children (an incredibly surreal and painful thing to witness over and over again as a trans person who made my living helping my community raise and care for their children).

Early on, a petition from a local new apostolic reformation church to stop the ‘indoctrination’ of children was passed around in many local venues over the health curriculum committee meetings, which along with direct complaints to the superintendent, caused the review process to be shelved for almost a year.

An ‘incident report’ was even posted on the Parents Defending Education’s IndoctriNation Map (in the tradition of maps targeting abortion providers, often for terroristic threats) over the committee's first meeting, where I brought up the importance of gender neutral, medically accurate language when discussing anatomy.

After the process of making decisions and then attending every school board meeting to hear and provide my own public comment, I began to feel anxious.

I watched the church’s services out of morbid curiosity and observed the pastor’s sermons grow increasingly hateful and arguably quite violent. He repeated at every opportunity that trans people were not real and alarmingly, aggressively (but very much in line with the new apostolic reformation) pushing the idea of ‘taking Kodiak for Jesus’.

Moving to San Francisco, but is California safe?

All of this, along with what I saw when I read the Project 2025 Mandate For Leadership led me to decide that maybe I should move somewhere more welcoming for a trans person.

I found an elementary special education aide position in San Francisco and a room to rent in Emeryville and was on my way.

In the back of my mind I held on to the understanding that this might not last. I remember having arguments with friends who insisted that California would be just fine despite the very clear intention laid out by Project 2025 to overhaul everything on a federal level.

Part of me had believed that California would somehow be safe as well though, which was the whole reason I’d moved. I knew that given everything that was probably untrue. But I felt desperate. 

Trump & Co wants to ban "transgender ideology"

In the Mandate For Leadership document (which is now being put into action largely by way of executive orders), says  “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” (read: media or information about trans people, likely including trans influencers and people publicly talking about their experiences) “has no claim to First Amendment protection” and claims that “it’s purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women”.

This idea of misogyny and harm to women especially is heavily reflected in the title and text of the first executive order to be signed by Donald Trump during this term.

The conflation of transgender people with pornography and child exploitation is alarming, because it would mean that anyone who talks about trans people around children could be classified as a sex offender.

I personally worry that this could extend to simply existing as an openly trans person around children, which is the biggest reason I decided to leave. I fear that this will be part of another executive order eventually, and that having just done my job would make me a criminal.

The 2024 election

When Kamala Harris ran for president, I let myself feel a little bit hopeful that maybe I would be okay and able to settle down safely and permanently in California. I got comfortable for that small window of time, and then it was election day.

I went to a friend’s apartment and we watched some shows together to keep our attention off of the results, but of course we gave in and occasionally checked our phones, nervously watching the numbers move in a very foreboding direction. I told myself that the full count would probably be done in a matter of days rather than overnight, and did my best to relax and enjoy myself. 

Things didn’t pan out the way I’d hoped. Now it was time to decide what to do.

Going to Europe

My initial plan was to try to go to Norway and go to college and maybe get a foothold there, because I’d heard long ago that Norwegian colleges didn’t charge tuition for foreign students. They do now, and there was no way that I was going to be able to raise tens of thousands of dollars by January.

I discussed with coworkers what to do and where to go, because I was not the only trans person working at the school who wanted to get out of the country. 

Eventually, a friend sent me a tumblr post about the Dutch American Friendship Treaty visa. It ended up being pretty inaccurate and I really wonder whether the person who wrote it actually got that visa, but it led me to look further into it and find factual information.

I already had been taking art commissions for both commercial and private clients since I’d graduated high school, so all I had to do now was save money and get ready to really commit to what had once been a side hustle.

 I started crowdfunding to raise money for my required business deposit of 4,500€, and before I knew it it was January 18th and I was on my first ever flight off of the continent.

In the days leading up to my departure I had started to seriously doubt my decision, had stayed up for days at a time panicking and shaking, said very tearful goodbyes to friends, and even considered canceling everything, refunding all of the money and staying put. 

That sense of having made the wrong decision turned abruptly on its heel the day after my arrival when Trump signed an executive order titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT”.

This order aimed to enshrine in federal law the idea that there are only two genders (assigned, according to the order, ‘at conception’ which if you know anything about fetal development is nonsense on its face), make it impossible to get an X as a gender marker on passports and other documents, and that such documents could only use an M or F marker reflecting what a person was assigned at birth. 

Passport worries

I became very anxious about the status of my own passport, which says Male. I legally changed my name and gender markers all the way back in 2013. If I was sent home would I be detained? How much harder would it be now for other trans people to leave the US? Would my passport be taken away? Everything was now terrifying and uncertain.

Since then I have learned that, supposedly, I would only have an issue if I tried to renew my passport. Unfortunately I will have to renew mine during this administration, and I really don’t know what will happen. In all likelihood, I will have to have an F on it until I can get Dutch citizenship and a new passport. 

I have heard of at least one trans person being denied a new passport at all, although negative attention and a lawyer were enough to move her passport office to give her one. It seems like the processes of renewing and getting new identification documents as a trans person is now very up in the air and ambiguous.

Living in the Netherlands

Now that I am in the Netherlands, I’ve made many friends who are also here on the DAFT visa as well as folks who were born and raised here.

It is a very small, accessible country with wonderful public transportation and it would be very easy to create a support network of trans and queer people looking for safety.

Right now the main obstacles are money and the requirement that you have your own business, as well as an inability to receive any government assistance on the DAFT visa, which have kept my closest friends from being able to escape with me.

I hope that soon they will have a clear road to safety and the ability to imagine a happy, secure future that they deserve, and that the current president is violently ripping away from them. 

This is our first follow up article to "Let us make Europe a safe haven for American transgender refugees."

Illustration photo of passport: goodmoments

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