gofilipa/aclu_transgender · Datasets at Hugging Face

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Though the fight for legal recognition of marriage for same-sex couples spanned decades, the final stages of progress seemed lightning fast for many people outside of the LGBTQ legal movement.
In June of 2013, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Windsor that the federal law defining marriage as between one man and one woman violated the Constitution's equal protection and due process guarantees.
That decision opened the door to immediate constitutional challenges to the remaining state-level bans on marriage for same-sex couples.
Two years later, in 2015, the Supreme Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that excluding same-sex couples from marriage violated the Constitution.
The Obergefell ruling was a defining moment in our country’s legal history that came after decades of hard work and setbacks.
Today, my child’s generation cannot even fathom that same-sex couples could not marry in many states when they were born.
That transformation in law and culture has been met with fierce backlash from opponents of LGBTQ equality.
Immediately following the court’s decision in Obergefell, the aggressive movement to prevent marriage equality trained its financial resources and advocacy efforts on curtailing legal equality for LGBTQ people under local, state and federal civil rights statutes.
In November 2015, a ballot campaign in Houston, Texas became the testing ground for new anti-LGBT messaging.
Houston voters were voting on a repeal of a municipal non-discrimination ordinance, HERO, that would have extended local civil rights protections to fifteen classes of people, including veterans, people of color, disabled people, women and LGBTQ people.
The campaign in favor of repealing the ordinance focused its messaging entirely on the false claim that passing the ordinance would allow men to enter women’s bathrooms and harm women and girls.
Campaign ads depicted shadowy figures looming over young girls and the refrain “no men in women’s restrooms” became the tagline that ultimately drove voters to repeal the ordinance at the ballot that November.
Hoping to redirect voters towards the many groups the ordinance would protect, the pro-HERO campaign did not engage with the opposition’s messaging directly.
The strategy failed.
Whether we wanted to or not, LGBTQ advocates needed to face our opposition’s messaging head-on, particularly when, in the months that followed, dozens of bills were introduced across the country to ban transgender people from using restrooms that aligned with their gender identity.
We did not pick a fight over bathrooms, the fact that we exist and go to the bathroom became the focal point of efforts to undermine legal gains for all LGBTQ people.
Between 2016 and 2019, efforts to enact anti-trans legislation largely stalled.
Ballot measures seeking to roll back trans-inclusive laws or codify anti-trans ones also failed.
It was not until the introduction of the Equality Act in Congress, a bill that would add explicit protections for LGBT people into federal civil rights statutes, that a new anti-trans strategy gained momentum.
As with previous efforts to stall local non-discrimination ordinances in 2015 and 2016, efforts to kill the Equality Act claimed that protecting transgender people would threaten others.
This time, our opponents focused on sports.
Once again, transgender people did not pick the fight, we just existed and became the focal point of efforts to stop civil rights legislation.
Just as equality opponents were building momentum coalescing around sports, in June 2020 the Supreme Court issued a decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, confirming that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applied to LGBTQ people.
In a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court found three LGBTQ workers fired because they were either gay or transgender – including American Civil Liberties Union client and transgender woman Aimee Stephens – were discriminated against on the basis of their sex in violation of the law.
The court concluded that it is inherently a form of sex discrimination to discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation or transgender status.
This confirmed that LGBTQ workers were federally protected under our nation’s civil rights statutes.
Like Obergefell, Bostock sparked a fierce backlash from anti-equality advocates.
Limiting the decision’s scope immediately became a top priority for anti-LGBTQ legislators.
Between 2021 and 2023, lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills targeting LGBTQ people, the majority of which sought to limit rights for transgender adolescents.
At first, these bills focused on the very small number of transgender students participating in school sports, but soon lawmakers escalated their attacks and began to introduce bills targeting medical care.
When the first categorical ban on medical care for transgender adolescents passed in Arkansas in 2021, then-Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill concerned that it allowed for vast government overreach into the private and vulnerable decisions of adolescents, their parents and their doctors.
That measured resistance to usurping the careful and aligned judgment of youth, their parents and their doctors quickly gave way to copycat legislation across the country that sought to categorically ban evidence-based medical care for transgender adolescents.
In February 2022, Texas even threatened to investigate families for child abuse for simply following the advice of medical providers to treat their adolescent transgender children with gender affirming medical care.
All of a sudden, families began to fear that they could lose custody of their children by following best practice medicine.
While transgender youth and their families desperately sought refuge from fights that kept arriving at their doorstep, the ACLU and other LGBTQ legal groups immediately went to court to try to stop the escalating harms of the health bans.
Our timing was critical; each day these bans were allowed to be enforced was another day transgender youth were going without needed care.
Thankfully, we were largely successful at first and, until July 2023, stopped every law from going into effect.
District court judges ruled that, because these bans discriminated against transgender people on the basis of their sex and transgender status, as well as infringed upon the rights of parents to direct the medical care of their minor children, they were likely unconstitutional.
These district court orders protected vulnerable adolescents from losing the medical care that had allowed them to thrive.
This protection changed when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed Tennessee’s ban to go into effect.
That decision set off a chain reaction in the appellate courts and soon nearly every medical care ban went into effect, forcing families to uproot their lives to try to preserve care for their adolescent children.
Compelled by the severity of harms facing our clients and transgender adolescents across the country, the ACLU and Lambda Legal asked the Supreme Court to review the Sixth Circuit’s harmful decision in November 2023.
Not only did the appellate court’s decision upend the state of health care for transgender youth, it also began to undermine critical constitutional protections for everyone.
For those of us who have dedicated our lives to fighting for our community, it was clear that the stakes were only getting higher and bringing our fight to the Supreme Court was a necessary step to slow catastrophic erosion of medical care and legal rights.
Ultimately, the LGBTQ movement did not pick a fight over restrooms or sports or health care for minors.
Rather, opponents of LGBTQ equality strategically positioned transgender people as a threat to others as part of their decades-long goal to undermine LGBTQ equality movements overall.
For the people who now tell transgender people that instead of fighting these bills targeting our health care, our education, our history, we should have waited for a more opportune time to defend our rights and survival, the question is: what should we have done?
Just accepted our wholesale exclusion from public life?
Who would that have helped?
Certainly not cisgender women in sports, or LGB people seeking to learn about their histories, or people hoping to form families with IVF.
We did not pick this fight, we simply existed.
But not fighting to exist was never an option.
Last week, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to trans youth, their families and the communities that support them.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in Skrmetti v. U.S. that SB1— Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors —does not illegally discriminate against individuals on the basis of sex or transgender status.
This allows Tennessee, and any other states that may choose to follow its discriminatory lead, to ban medically-necessary health care for minors.
As one of the Tennessee parents challenging this ban put it, “the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday will make it even harder for our daughter to get lifesaving health care.
It will harm the lawsuit’s unnamed families and those that come after us, with younger kids just starting to understand and express themselves.”
This is a blow for trans youth who simply want to grow up healthy, supported, and seen.
It is not, however, where the legal battle ends.
Importantly, the Supreme Court limited its ruling to just Tennessee’s law.
It did not decide on the broader questions about the legality of discrimination against transgender people in other areas.
Below, the American Civil Liberties Union breaks down what the court’s ruling means for trans youth across the nation, how we can all fight back, and how we can best support ourselves and our communities in this moment.
What Does the Court’s Ruling Mean For Trans Youth?
The Supreme Court’s ruling does not impact youth in states that have not passed gender-affirming care bans.
For young people in Tennessee and Kentucky, however, this ruling means that access to medical care that has been deemed essential by every major medical organization will be denied.
In states like Indiana, Alabama, and Florida, where courts have upheld similar bans, this ruling may embolden lawmakers and courts to let those bans stay in place.
Does Skrmetti Limit Care for Trans Adults?
No.
This case was specifically about minors in two states – Kentucky and Tennessee.
The ruling didn’t address an equally powerful claim raised in Skrmetti and other cases: that these bans violate the rights of parents to direct their children’s medical care.
In this case parents, who are legal adults, can challenge whether denying their minor child health care is a violation of their rights.
That fight continues in lower courts, including a major case in Arkansas where four transgender youth and their families are challenging a similar ban.
What Can State Courts Do to Protect Trans Rights?
Though the Supreme Court did not provide federal-level security for trans individuals to seek care, at the state-level, bans can still be challenged under state constitutions and laws, which in some cases offer stronger protections than federal law.
This work is already happening in states like Montana, where state courts have blocked gender-affirming care bans under state law, and medical care is still accessible.
Kansas and Ohio are also challenging bans on gender-affirming care in their court systems.
Does the Skrmetti Ruling Impact
Any of Trump's Anti-Trans Executive Orders?
No. U.S. v. Skrmetti does not resolve challenges to anti-trans executive orders from the Trump administration.
This case was about medical care for transgender minors in two states—it does not speak to broader attacks on transgender rights.
The ACLU, our nationwide affiliate network, and other LGBTQ rights organizations are challenging many of Trump’s attacks on transgender people’s rights and health care, including his orders restricting our ability to update passports and his order attempting to coerce doctors to drop their transgender patients.
How Can We Support the Trans Community Today?
Transgender youth deserve to be safe, loved, and respected—everywhere.
You can help by taking action: Connect with your state ACLU affiliate, PFLAG, or local LGBTQ organizations.
Support the Trans Youth Emergency Project, a nationwide effort by the Campaign for Southern Equality helping families access the care their children need.
Contact your members of Congress and demand they stand with transgender people and families—rejecting laws that let politicians dictate our personal health care decisions.
Every action, every voice, every ally matters.
The fight for trans lives isn’t over—and it needs you.
In 2023, Kansas enacted a law attempting to define “transgender” out of existence by restricting the definition of a “woman” to the biological function of producing ova.
Not only does this definition negate the experiences of trans women and girls, but it also excludes entire categories of women who are not transgender, such as post-menopausal women, women experiencing reproductive challenges, and intersex women.
Despite being passed under the dubious title “Women’s Bill of Rights,” this law has not been used to create any new protections for women, nor improve support for women’s initiatives or resources.
Instead, the law has been used to incite fear among transgender Kansans and limit their ability to live freely in our state.
Kansas v. Harper Five transgender Kansans are challenging an effort by Kansas Attorney General Kobach to require the state to issue driver’s licenses with a...
Source: American Civil Liberties Union Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach has claimed the new law restricts trans Kansans from updating the gender marker on their state IDs.
For years, Kansas had allowed transgender residents and those born here to change the gender marker on their driver’s licenses and birth certificates.
Despite having these affirming policies without any identified administrative, public safety, or other concerns, the attorney general took to the courts to pressure state agencies into removing these policies.
In response, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced a policy change banning trans Kansans from updating the gender marker on their birth certificates.
The Kansas Department of Revenue, which issues driver’s licenses, declined to change its policy — prompting Kobach to sue KDOR to force a policy change in Kansas v. Harper.
The ACLU of Kansas, along with ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project and local partners, intervened in that lawsuit on behalf of five transgender Kansans to assert their right to a driver’s license that does not forcibly out them.
Unfortunately, three days after the suit was filed and prior to our intervention, the judge issued a temporary order blocking trans Kansans from changing their license’s gender marker.

Though the fight for legal recognition of marriage for same-sex couples spanned decades, the final stages of progress seemed lightning fast for many people outside of the LGBTQ legal movement.

In June of 2013, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Windsor that the federal law defining marriage as between one man and one woman violated the Constitution's equal protection and due process guarantees.

That decision opened the door to immediate constitutional challenges to the remaining state-level bans on marriage for same-sex couples.

Two years later, in 2015, the Supreme Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that excluding same-sex couples from marriage violated the Constitution.

The Obergefell ruling was a defining moment in our country’s legal history that came after decades of hard work and setbacks.

Today, my child’s generation cannot even fathom that same-sex couples could not marry in many states when they were born.

That transformation in law and culture has been met with fierce backlash from opponents of LGBTQ equality.

Immediately following the court’s decision in Obergefell, the aggressive movement to prevent marriage equality trained its financial resources and advocacy efforts on curtailing legal equality for LGBTQ people under local, state and federal civil rights statutes.

In November 2015, a ballot campaign in Houston, Texas became the testing ground for new anti-LGBT messaging.

Houston voters were voting on a repeal of a municipal non-discrimination ordinance, HERO, that would have extended local civil rights protections to fifteen classes of people, including veterans, people of color, disabled people, women and LGBTQ people.

The campaign in favor of repealing the ordinance focused its messaging entirely on the false claim that passing the ordinance would allow men to enter women’s bathrooms and harm women and girls.

Campaign ads depicted shadowy figures looming over young girls and the refrain “no men in women’s restrooms” became the tagline that ultimately drove voters to repeal the ordinance at the ballot that November.

Hoping to redirect voters towards the many groups the ordinance would protect, the pro-HERO campaign did not engage with the opposition’s messaging directly.

The strategy failed.

Whether we wanted to or not, LGBTQ advocates needed to face our opposition’s messaging head-on, particularly when, in the months that followed, dozens of bills were introduced across the country to ban transgender people from using restrooms that aligned with their gender identity.

We did not pick a fight over bathrooms, the fact that we exist and go to the bathroom became the focal point of efforts to undermine legal gains for all LGBTQ people.

Between 2016 and 2019, efforts to enact anti-trans legislation largely stalled.

Ballot measures seeking to roll back trans-inclusive laws or codify anti-trans ones also failed.

It was not until the introduction of the Equality Act in Congress, a bill that would add explicit protections for LGBT people into federal civil rights statutes, that a new anti-trans strategy gained momentum.

As with previous efforts to stall local non-discrimination ordinances in 2015 and 2016, efforts to kill the Equality Act claimed that protecting transgender people would threaten others.

This time, our opponents focused on sports.

Once again, transgender people did not pick the fight, we just existed and became the focal point of efforts to stop civil rights legislation.

Just as equality opponents were building momentum coalescing around sports, in June 2020 the Supreme Court issued a decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, confirming that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applied to LGBTQ people.

In a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court found three LGBTQ workers fired because they were either gay or transgender – including American Civil Liberties Union client and transgender woman Aimee Stephens – were discriminated against on the basis of their sex in violation of the law.

The court concluded that it is inherently a form of sex discrimination to discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation or transgender status.

This confirmed that LGBTQ workers were federally protected under our nation’s civil rights statutes.

Like Obergefell, Bostock sparked a fierce backlash from anti-equality advocates.

Limiting the decision’s scope immediately became a top priority for anti-LGBTQ legislators.

Between 2021 and 2023, lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills targeting LGBTQ people, the majority of which sought to limit rights for transgender adolescents.

At first, these bills focused on the very small number of transgender students participating in school sports, but soon lawmakers escalated their attacks and began to introduce bills targeting medical care.

When the first categorical ban on medical care for transgender adolescents passed in Arkansas in 2021, then-Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill concerned that it allowed for vast government overreach into the private and vulnerable decisions of adolescents, their parents and their doctors.

That measured resistance to usurping the careful and aligned judgment of youth, their parents and their doctors quickly gave way to copycat legislation across the country that sought to categorically ban evidence-based medical care for transgender adolescents.

In February 2022, Texas even threatened to investigate families for child abuse for simply following the advice of medical providers to treat their adolescent transgender children with gender affirming medical care.

All of a sudden, families began to fear that they could lose custody of their children by following best practice medicine.

While transgender youth and their families desperately sought refuge from fights that kept arriving at their doorstep, the ACLU and other LGBTQ legal groups immediately went to court to try to stop the escalating harms of the health bans.

Our timing was critical; each day these bans were allowed to be enforced was another day transgender youth were going without needed care.

Thankfully, we were largely successful at first and, until July 2023, stopped every law from going into effect.

District court judges ruled that, because these bans discriminated against transgender people on the basis of their sex and transgender status, as well as infringed upon the rights of parents to direct the medical care of their minor children, they were likely unconstitutional.

These district court orders protected vulnerable adolescents from losing the medical care that had allowed them to thrive.

This protection changed when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed Tennessee’s ban to go into effect.

That decision set off a chain reaction in the appellate courts and soon nearly every medical care ban went into effect, forcing families to uproot their lives to try to preserve care for their adolescent children.

Compelled by the severity of harms facing our clients and transgender adolescents across the country, the ACLU and Lambda Legal asked the Supreme Court to review the Sixth Circuit’s harmful decision in November 2023.

Not only did the appellate court’s decision upend the state of health care for transgender youth, it also began to undermine critical constitutional protections for everyone.

For those of us who have dedicated our lives to fighting for our community, it was clear that the stakes were only getting higher and bringing our fight to the Supreme Court was a necessary step to slow catastrophic erosion of medical care and legal rights.

Ultimately, the LGBTQ movement did not pick a fight over restrooms or sports or health care for minors.

Rather, opponents of LGBTQ equality strategically positioned transgender people as a threat to others as part of their decades-long goal to undermine LGBTQ equality movements overall.

For the people who now tell transgender people that instead of fighting these bills targeting our health care, our education, our history, we should have waited for a more opportune time to defend our rights and survival, the question is: what should we have done?

Just accepted our wholesale exclusion from public life?

Who would that have helped?

Certainly not cisgender women in sports, or LGB people seeking to learn about their histories, or people hoping to form families with IVF.

We did not pick this fight, we simply existed.

But not fighting to exist was never an option.

Last week, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to trans youth, their families and the communities that support them.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in Skrmetti v. U.S. that SB1— Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors —does not illegally discriminate against individuals on the basis of sex or transgender status.

This allows Tennessee, and any other states that may choose to follow its discriminatory lead, to ban medically-necessary health care for minors.

As one of the Tennessee parents challenging this ban put it, “the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday will make it even harder for our daughter to get lifesaving health care.

It will harm the lawsuit’s unnamed families and those that come after us, with younger kids just starting to understand and express themselves.”

This is a blow for trans youth who simply want to grow up healthy, supported, and seen.

It is not, however, where the legal battle ends.

Importantly, the Supreme Court limited its ruling to just Tennessee’s law.

It did not decide on the broader questions about the legality of discrimination against transgender people in other areas.

Below, the American Civil Liberties Union breaks down what the court’s ruling means for trans youth across the nation, how we can all fight back, and how we can best support ourselves and our communities in this moment.

What Does the Court’s Ruling Mean For Trans Youth?

The Supreme Court’s ruling does not impact youth in states that have not passed gender-affirming care bans.

For young people in Tennessee and Kentucky, however, this ruling means that access to medical care that has been deemed essential by every major medical organization will be denied.

In states like Indiana, Alabama, and Florida, where courts have upheld similar bans, this ruling may embolden lawmakers and courts to let those bans stay in place.

Does Skrmetti Limit Care for Trans Adults?

No.

This case was specifically about minors in two states – Kentucky and Tennessee.

The ruling didn’t address an equally powerful claim raised in Skrmetti and other cases: that these bans violate the rights of parents to direct their children’s medical care.

In this case parents, who are legal adults, can challenge whether denying their minor child health care is a violation of their rights.

That fight continues in lower courts, including a major case in Arkansas where four transgender youth and their families are challenging a similar ban.

What Can State Courts Do to Protect Trans Rights?

Though the Supreme Court did not provide federal-level security for trans individuals to seek care, at the state-level, bans can still be challenged under state constitutions and laws, which in some cases offer stronger protections than federal law.

This work is already happening in states like Montana, where state courts have blocked gender-affirming care bans under state law, and medical care is still accessible.

Kansas and Ohio are also challenging bans on gender-affirming care in their court systems.

Does the Skrmetti Ruling Impact

Any of Trump's Anti-Trans Executive Orders?

No. U.S. v. Skrmetti does not resolve challenges to anti-trans executive orders from the Trump administration.

This case was about medical care for transgender minors in two states—it does not speak to broader attacks on transgender rights.

The ACLU, our nationwide affiliate network, and other LGBTQ rights organizations are challenging many of Trump’s attacks on transgender people’s rights and health care, including his orders restricting our ability to update passports and his order attempting to coerce doctors to drop their transgender patients.

How Can We Support the Trans Community Today?

Transgender youth deserve to be safe, loved, and respected—everywhere.

You can help by taking action: Connect with your state ACLU affiliate, PFLAG, or local LGBTQ organizations.

Support the Trans Youth Emergency Project, a nationwide effort by the Campaign for Southern Equality helping families access the care their children need.

Contact your members of Congress and demand they stand with transgender people and families—rejecting laws that let politicians dictate our personal health care decisions.

Every action, every voice, every ally matters.

The fight for trans lives isn’t over—and it needs you.

In 2023, Kansas enacted a law attempting to define “transgender” out of existence by restricting the definition of a “woman” to the biological function of producing ova.

Not only does this definition negate the experiences of trans women and girls, but it also excludes entire categories of women who are not transgender, such as post-menopausal women, women experiencing reproductive challenges, and intersex women.

Despite being passed under the dubious title “Women’s Bill of Rights,” this law has not been used to create any new protections for women, nor improve support for women’s initiatives or resources.

Instead, the law has been used to incite fear among transgender Kansans and limit their ability to live freely in our state.

Kansas v. Harper Five transgender Kansans are challenging an effort by Kansas Attorney General Kobach to require the state to issue driver’s licenses with a...

Source: American Civil Liberties Union Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach has claimed the new law restricts trans Kansans from updating the gender marker on their state IDs.

For years, Kansas had allowed transgender residents and those born here to change the gender marker on their driver’s licenses and birth certificates.

Despite having these affirming policies without any identified administrative, public safety, or other concerns, the attorney general took to the courts to pressure state agencies into removing these policies.

In response, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced a policy change banning trans Kansans from updating the gender marker on their birth certificates.

The Kansas Department of Revenue, which issues driver’s licenses, declined to change its policy — prompting Kobach to sue KDOR to force a policy change in Kansas v. Harper.

The ACLU of Kansas, along with ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project and local partners, intervened in that lawsuit on behalf of five transgender Kansans to assert their right to a driver’s license that does not forcibly out them.

Unfortunately, three days after the suit was filed and prior to our intervention, the judge issued a temporary order blocking trans Kansans from changing their license’s gender marker.