WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has cleared the way for President Trump to remove transgender markers from new passports and to require applicants to designate they were male or female at birth.
By a 6-3 vote, the justices granted another emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers and put on hold a Boston judge’s order that prevented the president’s new passport policy from taking effect.
“Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth,” the court said in an unsigned order. “In both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
She said there was no emergency, and the change in the passport policy would pose a danger for transgender travelers.
“The current record demonstrates that transgender people who use gender-incongruent passports are exposed to increased violence, harassment, and discrimination,” she wrote. “Airport checkpoints are stressful and invasive for travelers under typical circumstances—even without the added friction of being forced to present government-issued identification documents that do not reflect one’s identity.
“Thus, by preventing transgender Americans from obtaining gender-congruent passports, the Government is doing more than just making a statement about its belief that transgender identity is ‘false.’ The Passport Policy also invites the probing, and at times humiliating, additional scrutiny these plaintiffs have experienced.”
Upon taking office in January, Trump ordered the military to remove transgender troops from its ranks and told agencies to remove references to “gender identity” or transgender persons from government documents, including passports.
The Supreme Court has put both policies into effect by setting aside orders from judges who temporarily blocked the changes as discriminatory and unconstitutional.
U.S. passports did not have sex markers until the 1970s. For most of time since then, passport holders have had two choices: “M” for male and “F” for female. Beginning in 1992, the State Department allowed applicants to designate a sex marker that differed from their sex at birth.
In 2021, the Biden administration added an “X” marker as an option for transgender and non-binary persons.
Trump sought a return to the earlier era. He issued an executive order on “gender ideology extremism” and said his administration would “recognize two sexes, male and female.” He required “government-issued identification documents, including passports” to “accurately reflect the holder’s sex” assigned at birth.
The ACLU sued on behalf of transgender individuals who would be affected by the new policy. They won a ruling in June from U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick who blocked the new policy from taking effect.
The transgender plaintiffs “seek the same thing millions of Americans take for granted: passports that allow them to travel without fear of misidentification, harassment, or violence,” the ACLU attorneys said in an appeal to Supreme Court last month.
They said the administration’s new policy would undercut the usefulness of passports for identification.
“By classifying people based on sex assigned at birth and exclusively issuing sex markers on passports based on that sex classification, the State Department deprives plaintiffs of a usable identification document and the ability to travel safely…{It} undermines the very purpose of passports as identity documents that officials check against the bearer’s appearance,” they wrote.
But Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer argued the plaintiffs had no authority over official documents. He said the justices should set aside the judge’s order and allow the new policy to take effect.
“Private citizens cannot force the government to use inaccurate sex designations on identification documents that fail to reflect the person’s biological sex — especially not on identification documents that are government property and an exercise of the President’s constitutional and statutory power to communicate with foreign governments,” he wrote.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom this week signed a suite of privacy protection bills for transgender patients amid continuing threats by the Trump administration.
But there was one glaring omission that LGBTQ+ advocates and political strategists say is part of an increasingly complex dance the Democrat faces as he curates a more centrist profile for a potential presidential bid.
Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required insurers to cover, and pharmacists to dispense, 12 months of hormone therapy at one time to transgender patients and others. The proposal was a top priority for trans rights leaders, who said it was crucial to preserve care as clinics close or limit gender-affirming services under White House pressure.
Political experts say Newsom’s veto highlights how charged trans care has become for Democrats nationally and, in particular, for Newsom, who as San Francisco mayor engaged in civil disobedience by allowing gay couples to marry at City Hall. The veto, along with his lukewarm response to anti-trans rhetoric, they argue, is part of an alarming pattern that could damage his credibility with key voters in his base.
“Even if there were no political motivations whatsoever under Newsom’s decision, there are certainly political ramifications of which he is very aware,” said Dan Schnur, a former GOP political strategist who is now a politics lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley. “He is smart enough to know that this is an issue that’s going to anger his base, but in return, may make him more acceptable to large numbers of swing voters.”
Earlier this year on Newsom’s podcast, the governor told the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk that trans athletes competing in women’s sports was “deeply unfair,” triggering a backlash among his party’s base and LGBTQ+ leaders. And he has described trans issues as a “major problem for the Democratic Party,” saying Donald Trump’s trans-focused campaign ads were “devastating” for his party in 2024.
Still, in a conversation with YouTube streamer ConnorEatsPants this month, Newsom defended himself “as a guy who’s literally put my political life on the line for the community for decades, has been a champion and a leader.”
“He doesn’t want to face the criticism as someone who, I’m sure, is trying to line himself up for the presidency, when the current anti-trans rhetoric is so loud,” said Ariela Cuellar, a spokesperson for the California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network.
Caroline Menjivar, the state senator who introduced the measure, described her bill as “the most tangible and effective” measure this year to help trans people at a time when they are being singled out for what she described as “targeted discrimination.”
In a legislature in which Democrats hold supermajorities in both houses, lawmakers sent the bill to Newsom on a party-line vote. Earlier this year, Washington became the first to enact a state law extending hormone therapy coverage to a 12-month supply.
In a veto message on the California bill, Newsom cited its potential to drive up health care costs, impacts that an independent analysis found would be negligible.
“At a time when individuals are facing double-digit rate increases in their health care premiums across the nation, we must take great care to not enact policies that further drive up the cost of health care, no matter how well-intended,” Newsom wrote.
Under the Trump administration, federal agencies have been directed to limit access to gender-affirming care for children, which Trump has referred to as “chemical and surgical mutilation,” and demanded documents from or threatened investigations of institutions that provide it.
In recent months, Stanford Medicine, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and Kaiser Permanente have reduced or eliminated gender-affirming care for patients under 19, a sign of the chilling effect Trump’s executive orders have had on health care, even in one of the nation’s most progressive states.
California already mandates wide coverage of gender-affirming health care, including hormone therapy, but pharmacists can currently dispense only a 90-day supply. Menjivar’s bill would have allowed 12-month supplies, modeled after a 2016 law that allowed women to receive an annual supply of birth control.
Luke Healy, who told legislators at an April hearing that he was “a 24-year-old detransitioner” and no longer believed he was a woman, criticized the attempt to increase coverage of services he thought were “irreversibly harmful” to him.
“I believe that bills like this are forcing doctors to turn healthy bodies into perpetual medical problems in the name of an ideology,” Healy testified.
The California Association of Health Plans opposed the bill over provisions that would limit the use of certain practices such as prior authorization and step therapy, which require insurer approval before care is provided and force patients and doctors to try other therapies first.
“These safeguards are essential for applying evidence-based prescribing standards and responsibly managing costs — ensuring patients receive appropriate care while keeping premiums in check,” said spokesperson Mary Ellen Grant.
An analysis by the California Health Benefits Review Program, which independently reviews bills relating to health insurance, concluded that annual premium increases resulting from the bill’s implementation would be negligible and that “no long-term impacts on utilization or cost” were expected.
Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, said Newsom’s economic argument was “not plausible.” Although he said he considers Newsom a strong ally of the transgender community, Minter noted he was “deeply disappointed” to see the governor’s veto.
“I understand he’s trying to respond to this political moment, and I wish he would respond to it by modeling language and policies that can genuinely bring people along.”
Newsom’s press office declined to comment further.
Following the podcast interview with Kirk, Cuellar said, advocacy groups backing SB 418 grew concerned about a potential veto and made a point to highlight voices of other patients who would benefit, including menopausal women and cancer patients. It was a starkly different strategy than what they might have done before Trump took office.
“Had we run this bill in 2022-2023, the messaging would have been totally different,” said another proponent who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.
“We could have been very loud and proud. In 2023, we might have gotten a signing ceremony.”
Advocates for trans rights were so wary of the current political climate that some also felt the need to steer clear of promoting a separate bill that would have expanded coverage of hormone therapy and other treatments for menopause and perimenopause. That bill, authored by Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, who has spoken movingly about her struggles with health care for perimenopause, was also vetoed.
In the meantime, said Jovan Wolf, a trans man and military veteran, patients like him will be left to suffer. Wolf, who had taken testosterone for more than 15 years, tried to restart hormone therapy in March, following a two-year hiatus in which he contemplated having children.
Doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs told him it was too late. Days earlier, the Trump administration had announced it would phase out hormone therapy and other treatments for gender dysphoria.
“Having estrogen pumping through my body, it’s just not a good feeling for me, physically, mentally. And when I’m on testosterone, I feel balanced,” said Wolf, who eventually received care elsewhere. “It should be my decision and my decision only.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed legislation to study inequalities in youth sports, a move likely to draw ire from Republicans who believe the measure is intended to support transgender athletes.
The legislation, Assembly Bill 749, creates a commission to examine whether a new state board or department is needed to improve access to sports regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, income or geographic location.
In an open letter last month to the governor, Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R-Santee) zeroed in on the term “gender identity.”
“The author and supporters of [this legislation] know if they were upfront and put forth a straightforward bill allowing biological males to compete against young women and girls, it would be easily defeated,” Jones wrote on Sept. 26. “So instead they are trying to establish a stacked commission to indirectly rig the issue in their favor.”
Jones urged Newsom to veto the bill and referenced the governor’s previous remarks about transgender athletes. During the first episode of his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom,” the governor — a longtime ally of the LGBTQ+ community — acknowledged the struggle faced by transgender people but called transgender women’s participation in women’s sports “deeply unfair” and warned it was hurting Democrats at the polls.
Assemblymember Tina S. McKinnor, who introduced the bill, said Jones should keep his focus on Washington.
“Senator Brian Jones’ time would be better spent writing to the Republican controlled Congress to end the Trump Shutdown and reopen the federal government, rather than attacking trans students,” McKinnor (D-Hawthorne) wrote in an email to The Times.
Legislation referencing gender identity tends to be a lightning rod for controversy nationwide, with opinion polls suggesting Americans hold complex views on transgender issues.
A survey conducted this year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found 66% of U.S. adults favor laws requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth. At the same time, 56% of adults supported policies protecting transgender people from discrimination in jobs and public spaces.
During legislative committee hearings on the bill, McKinnor focused on the legislation’s potential racial impact. She said last year’s Play Equity Report found 59% of white youth participated in structured sports programs, compared with 47% of Black youth and 45% of Latino youth.
“Participation in youth sports remains unequal despite the well-documented physical, mental and academic benefits,” McKinnor told the Senate Health Committee in July. “These disparities stem from systemic barriers such as financial limitations, uneven program quality, outdated physical education standards and the lack of a coordinated statewide strategy.”
More than two dozen organizations endorsed the bill, including the Los Angeles Rams, city of San Diego, USC Schwarzenegger Institute, YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles and the Boys and Girls Clubs of West San Gabriel Valley and Eastside.
The legislation directs the state public health officer to convene the commission, which will be composed of 10 members appointed by the governor and three appointed by each the speaker of the Assembly and the Senate Committee on Rules. The health officer will also sit on the panel, or appoint their own designee.
Newsom did not issue a statement when his office announced a slate of bills he signed on Monday.
In March, Newsom infuriated the progressive wing of his party when, while hosting conservatives commentator Charlie Kirk on the governor’s podcast, he broke away from many Democrats on the issue of transgender athletes. Newsom, an outspoken champion of LGBTQ+ rights since he was mayor of San Francisco, publicly criticized the “unfairness” of transgender athletes participating in women’s sports.
Sept. 23 (UPI) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has signed legislation banning transgender people from accessing restrooms and other facilities, including domestic violence shelters and prisons, that align with their gender identity.
Abbott, a Republican, signed the legislation Monday, sharing a video of it on X.
“This is just common sense,” he said, while holding up the signed document, showing it to the camera.
Abbott signed Senate Bill 8 after the Texas House passed it 86-45 on Aug. 28.
The bill, which takes effect Dec. 4, requires people to use facilities, such as bathrooms and restrooms, in government-owned buildings, including schools and universities, that align with their gender assigned at birth.
Other facilities affected include family violence shelters, prisons and jails.
Organizations that violate the law can face a $25,000 fine for a first offense and $125,000 for a second.
“Let’s hope more states follow suit,” state Rep. Angelia Orr, a sponsor of SB 8, said in a statement after Abbott announced her bill had been signed. “This is common sense policy to protect the women and girls of Texas!”
Texas passed the bill amid a larger conservative push to pass legislation affecting the rights and healthcare of LGBTQ Americans, though specifically targeting transgender Americans.
The Lone Star State GOP lawmakers have been trying to pass a so-called bathroom ban since 2017, but were unable to get it through the House until this summer.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas was swift in rebuking Abbott fpr signing S.B. 8 into law, saying it will encourage gender policing by those who seek to attack transgender people, or simply those who don’t adhere to stereotypical gender roles.
“This law puts anyone at risk who doesn’t seem masculine or feminine enough to a random stranger, including the cisgender girls and women this bill purports to protect,” Ash Hall, policy and advocacy strategist on LGBTQIA+ rights at the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement.
“This bill is bad for trans and intersex people, bad for cisgender people, bad for business, bad for public health and safety and bad for Texas,” they added. “Transgender people have always been here and always will be.”
According to Every Texan, a nonprofit that researches equitable policy solutions, there are an estimated 122,700 transgender people in Texas, including nearly 30,000 youth.
The Movement Advancement Project states there are 19 states with some form of bathroom ban, including two states that make it a criminal offense.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to let it enforce a passport policy for transgender and nonbinary people that requires male or female sex designations based on birth certificates.
The Justice Department appealed a lower-court order allowing people use the gender or “X” identification marker that lines up with their gender identity.
It’s the latest in a series of emergency appeals from the Trump administration, many of which have resulted in victories amid litigation, including on banning transgender people from the military.
The government argues it can’t be required to use sex designations it considers inaccurate on official documents. The plaintiffs, meanwhile, say the policy violates the rights of transgender and nonbinary Americans.
The State Department changed its passport rules after Trump handed down an executive order in January declaring the United States would “recognize two sexes, male and female,” based on what it called “an individual’s immutable biological classification.”
Transgender actor Hunter Schafer, for example, said in February that her new passport had been issued with a male gender marker, even though she submitted the application with the female gender marker she has used for years on her driver’s license and passport.
A judge blocked the Trump administration policy in June after a lawsuit from nonbinary and transgender people, some of whom said they were afraid to submit applications. An appeals court left the judge’s order in place.
The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to put the order on hold while the lawsuit plays out.
“The Constitution does not prohibit the government from defining sex in terms of an individual’s biological classification,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer wrote.
He pointed to the high court’s recent ruling upholding a ban on transition-related health care for transgender minors. The courts conservative majority found that law doesn’t discriminate on the basis of sex, and Sauer argued that finding also supports the Trump administration’s decision to change passport rules issued in 2021.
An attorney for the plaintiffs, on the other hand, said the passport rules are discriminatory.
“This administration has taken escalating steps to limit transgender people’s health care, speech, and other rights under the Constitution, and we are committed to defending those rights,” said Jon Davidson, senior counsel for the LGBTQ & HIV Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Marc Seawright took pride in his job at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where he worked for more than eight years and most recently oversaw technology policy to support the agency’s mission of combating workplace harassment and discrimination.
But then President Trump began targeting transgender and nonbinary people within hours of returning to the White House by issuing a series of executive orders — including one declaring the existence of two unchangeable sexes. Seawright was ordered to develop technology to scrub any mention of LGBTQ+ identities from all EEOC outreach materials, which had been created to help employers understand their obligations under civil rights law.
Suddenly, his tech expertise “was being leveraged to perpetuate discrimination against people like me,” said Seawright, 41, who served as the EEOC’s director of information governance and strategy before he quit in June, citing a hostile work environment. “It became overwhelming. It felt insurmountable.”
A San Francisco-based Army veteran, Seawright is one of 10 transgender and gender nonconforming government employees across federal agencies who spoke with the Associated Press about their workplace experiences since Trump regained office, describing their fear, grief, frustration and distress working for an employer that rejects their identity — often with no clear path for recourse or support. Several requested anonymity for fear of retaliation; some, including Seawright, have filed formal discrimination complaints.
Since January, the Trump administration has reversed years of legal and policy gains for transgender Americans, including stripping government websites of “gender ideology” and reinstituting a ban on transgender service members in the military.
The White House and the EEOC declined to respond to allegations that the president’s policies created a hostile workplace for transgender federal employees. But his executive order, which defines sex as strictly male or female, states that its goal is to protect spaces designated for women and girls.
“Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being,” the order says.
Independent Women, a nonprofit that advocates for legislation defining sex as male and female, supports Trump’s executive order.
“Women’s rights can get erased if men can just self-identify to women’s spaces,” said the organization’s senior legal advisor Beth Parlato.
Brad Sears, senior scholar at UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, which researches policy impacting LGBTQ+ people, points to “a sweeping, government-wide initiative to really erase transgender people from public life,” including adults in the workplace.
“The federal workplace is increasingly an inhospitable place for the transgender employees who remain,” Sears said.
Compared with private sector workers, transgender federal employees are especially vulnerable because many ultimately answer to the president, said Olivia Hunt, director of federal policy at Advocates for Trans Equality, which seeks legal and political rights for transgender people in the United States.
“In the absence of an ability to impose their will directly on employers throughout the country, this administration is going to use the tools that they have to attack the trans people who are in close proximity to them, and that includes federal workers,” Hunt said.
Withrow visits armories across Illinois for her job, sometimes in remote areas. But Trump’s executive order directing agencies to take “appropriate action” to ensure that intimate spaces “are designated by sex and not identity” created a major hurdle for Withrow when her supervisors informed her that she was no longer allowed to use the women’s restroom at work.
“I don’t use men’s spaces because I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” the 34-year-old said.
At locations without single-occupancy options, a simple bathroom break can mean a 45-minute round trip to a nearby gas station or McDonald’s.
Represented by the ACLU, Withrow filed a class action complaint in May challenging the Trump administration’s policy on the basis of sex discrimination.
A spokesperson for the Illinois National Guard declined to comment on the pending lawsuit but said the agency is “committed to treating all of our employees with dignity and respect.” The Department of Defense also declined to comment, citing policy, but affirmed its commitment to enforcing relevant laws and implementing the gender executive order.
For Seawright at the EEOC, he feels like his skill set was being wielded against the agency’s mission, not to support it. Following Trump’s signing of his executive order, Acting EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, a Republican, quickly began reshaping policy and, among other things, removed the agency’s “pronoun app,” which allowed employees to display their pronouns in their profiles. It was a tool that was created — then dismantled — by Seawright.
He had spent two years developing the app to support a nonbinary employee at the agency.
“For it to be just kind of yanked away summarily with none of the thoughtfulness and planning that went into implementing the tool … that became really frustrating,” Seawright said.
His mental health suffered, and he requested extended personal leave shortly after he completed the project scrubbing references to gender identity. When he returned in late February, the situation continued to deteriorate.
He hired lawyers at Katz Banks Kumin and filed a formal discrimination complaint. In June, Seawright resigned, citing “significant distress, anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, anger, and sadness” caused daily by Lucas’ “anti-transgender actions.”
Withrow, meanwhile, still works in her role while navigating similar challenges.
“I do feel as though there is at least an implied threat for trans folks in federal service,” she said. “We’ll just continue to meet the objectives and focus on the mission, and hope that that is enough proof that we belong.”
California and a coalition of other liberal-led states sued the Trump administration Friday over efforts to end gender-affirming care for transgender, intersex and nonbinary children and young adults nationwide — calling them an unconstitutional attack on LGBTQ+ patients, healthcare providers and states’ rights.
The lawsuit was brought by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and officials from 15 other states and the District of Columbia. It challenges a Jan. 28 executive order by President Trump that denounced gender-affirming care as “mutilation” and called on U.S. Justice Department officials to effectively enforce a ban, including by launching investigations into healthcare providers.
The lawsuit notes the Justice Department last month sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that have provided such care nationwide, with justice officials suggesting they may face criminal prosecution.
Bonta’s office, in a statement, said such efforts “have no legal basis and are intended to discourage providers from offering lifesaving healthcare that is lawful under state law.” The lawsuit asks a federal court in Massachusetts to vacate Trump’s order in its entirety for exceeding federal authority and undermining state laws that guarantee equal access to healthcare.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Trump made reining in transgender rights a key promise of his presidential campaign. Upon taking office, he moved swiftly to do so through executive orders, funding cuts and litigation. And in many ways, it has worked — particularly when it comes gender-affirming care for minors.
Clinics across the country that had provided such care have closed their doors in response to the threats and funding cuts. That includes the renowned Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, one of the largest and oldest pediatric gender clinics in the U.S.
The clinic told thousands of its patients and their families that it was shuttering last month. Other clinics have similarly closed nationwide, radically reducing the availability of such care in the U.S.
Republicans and other Trump supporters have cheered the closures as a major win, and they praised the president for protecting impressionable and confused children from so-called woke medical professionals pushing what they allege to be dangerous and irreversible treatments.
Bonta said in the Friday statement that Trump and his administration’s “relentless attacks” on such care were “cruel and irresponsible” and endangered “already vulnerable adolescents whose health and well-being are at risk.”
“These actions have created a chilling effect in which providers are pressured to scale back on their care for fear of prosecution, leaving countless individuals without the critical care they need and are entitled to under law,” Bonta said.
Mainstream U.S. medical associations have supported gender-affirming care for minors experiencing gender dysphoria for years. They and LGBTQ+ rights organizations have accused Trump and his supporters of mischaracterizing that care, which includes therapy, counseling and support for social transitioning, and can include puberty blockers, hormone treatment and, in rarer circumstances, mastectomies.
Queer advocates, many patients and their families say such care is life-saving, alleviating intense distress — and suicidal thoughts — in transgender and other gender-nonconforming youth. They and many mainstream medical experts acknowledge that gender-affirming care for young people is still a developing field, but say it is also based on decades of solid research by medical professionals who are far better equipped than politicians to help families make difficult medical decisions.
However, as the number of children who identify as transgender or nonbinary has rapidly increased in recent years, that argument has failed to take hold in many parts of the country. Conservatives and Republican leaders have grown increasingly alarmed by such care, pointing to young people who changed their minds about transitioning and now regret the care they received.
“Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding,” Trump’s executive order stated.
Trump and others have escalated tensions further by spreading misinformation about kids being whisked away from school to have their gentials mutilated without their parents’ knowledge — which is not happening.
The battle has played out in the courts, in part as a state’s rights issue. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that conservative states may ban puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender teens, with the court’s conservative majority finding that states are generally free to set their own standards of medical care.
The Trump administration, however, has not taken the same view. Instead, it has aggressively tried to eradicate gender-affirming care nationwide, regardless of state laws — like those in California — that protect it.
Trump’s Jan. 28 executive order, titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” claimed that “medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.”
It defined children as anyone under the age of 19, and said that moving forward, the U.S. wouldn’t “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” but would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
The states’ lawsuit focuses on one particular section of that order, which directed Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to convene state attorneys general and other law enforcement officials nationwide to begin investigating gender-affirming care providers and other groups that “may be misleading the public about long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilation.”
The section suggested those investigations could be based on laws against “female genital mutilation,” or even around a 1938 law known as the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which authorizes the Food and Drug Administration to regulate food, drugs, medical devices and cosmetics.
On July 9, Bondi announced the Justice Department’s subpoenas to healthcare providers, saying doctors and hospitals “that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable.”
On July 25, The Times reported that Bill Essayli, the Trump administration’s controversial pick for U.S. attorney in L.A., had floated the idea of criminally charging doctors and hospitals for providing gender-affirming care, according to two federal law enforcement sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
The targeting of gender-affirming care is part of a wider effort by the administration to eliminate transgender rights more broadly, in part on the premise that transgender people do not exist. On his first day in office, Trump issued another executive order declaring there are only two sexes and denouncing what he called the “gender ideology” of the left.
His administration has sought to limit the options transgender people have to get passports that reflect their identities, and the Justice Department has sued California over its policies allowing transgender girls to compete against other girls in youth sports. Many transgender Americans are looking for ways to flee the country.
Still, many in the LGBTQ+ community fear the attacks are only going to get worse. Among those who are most scared are the parents and families of transgender kids — including those who believe their health records may have been collected under the Justice Department’s subpoenas.
One mother of a Children’s Hospital patient told The Times last month that she is terrified the Justice Department is “going to come after parents and use the female genital mutilation law … to prosecute parents and separate me from my child.”
Bonta is leading the lawsuit along with the attorneys general of Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York. Joining them are Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the attorneys general of Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.
When Children’s Hospital Los Angeles first told thousands of patients it was shuttering its pediatric gender clinic last month, Jesse Thorn was distraught but confident he could quickly find a new local care team for his kids.
But by the time the Center for Transyouth Health and Development officially closed its doors on Tuesday, the father of three was making plans to flee the country.
“They’re targeting whoever they can,” Thorn said. “[I’m afraid] the police will show up at my door because I took my child to see their doctor.”
Until this week, Children’s was among the largest and oldest pediatric gender clinics in the United States — and one of few providing puberty blockers, hormones and surgical procedures for trans youth on public insurance.
The closure of the renowned program signals a wider unraveling in the availability of care across the country, experts said. That includes in former safe havens such as California, New York and Illinois, where state laws protecting trans-specific healthcare are crumbling under mounting legal pressure and bureaucratic arm-twisting by the Trump administration.
In the last week, University of Chicago Medicine and Children’s National in D.C. announced they will end or dramatically scale back services for trans youth, following similar moves by Stanford Medicine, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Children’s Hospital of Orange County.
“There’s a rapid collapse of the provision of this care in blue states,” said Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney and legal instructor at Harvard. “By end of 2025, most care will effectively be banned.”
Some parents in L.A. say they fear the Department of Justice will use private medical data subpoenaed from California’s largest pediatric safety-net hospital to take their children away from them.
“It’s absolutely terrifying,” said Maxine, the mother of a Children’s Hospital patient, who declined to give her last name for fear of attacks on her son.
“I’m very afraid that the DOJ and this acting Attorney General are going to come after parents and use the female genital mutilation law … to prosecute parents and separate me from my child,” she said.
On July 9, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi announced the Department of Justice was subpoenaing patient medical records from more than 20 doctors and clinics, the latest in a cavalcade of legal and technical maneuvers against providers who care for trans youth.
“Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice,” Bondi said in a news release announcing the move.
Children’s would not say whether it had been subpoenaed or if it had turned over records responsive to the government’s demand.
The Justice Department was already investigating pediatric specialists for a litany of alleged crimes, from deceptive trade practices to billing fraud. Federal health agencies have vowed to withhold funding from institutions that continue to provide affirming care.
“These threats are no longer theoretical,” Children’s Hospital executives wrote to staff in an internal email announcing the closure June 12. “[They are] threatening our ability to serve the hundreds of thousands of patients who depend on CHLA for lifesaving care.”
Advocates say gender-affirming care is also lifesaving. They point to statistics — contested by the federal government and some experts — showing high rates of suicide among trans youth.
In June, the decision to shutter the clinic was widely condemned. Advocates said Children’s Hospital L.A. had “thrown trans kids under the bus” in disregard of state law.
Few are saying that now.
“You could see kids with leukemia being cut off their chemo therapy unless these hospitals stop provide care to trans people,” Caraballo said. “If one of the biggest children’s hospitals in the country couldn’t shoulder that burden, I don’t see many others being able to do so.”
Others agreed.
“No matter what California or any other state has done to say, ‘We want to protect these kids,’ unless they can write checks that equal the amount of money that’s being lost, [programs close],” said Dara E. Purvis, a law professor at Temple University.
So far, the Trump administration has painted parents as victims of “radical gender ideology.”
Some experts warned that as the government tightens the screws on doctors and hospitals, trans teens and their families are likely to seek hormones outside the medical system, including through gray market channels.
“We’ve seen this with abortion,” Caraballo said. “People are going to go about getting it whichever way they can.”
There are fears that families could face prosecution for continuing to seek medications, similar to charges being filed against mothers who have secured abortion pills for their teenagers.
“We’re working with Congress on existing criminal laws related to female genital mutilation to more robustly protect children,” Justice Department Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle said during a Federal Trade Commission workshop entitled “The Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors.”
“We are using all of the tools at the Department of Justice to address this issue,” Mizelle said.
For now, dozens of hospitals across California still provide gender-affirming care, including hormone therapy and surgical procedures.
But the list changes almost day to day.
“Even programs that may have been operating a month ago are not operating now,” said Terra Russell-Slavin, chief impact officer at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. “There’s a lot of concern about even being public about offering care because those agencies become targets.”
With the medical care their children rely on under threat and few promised protections from the state, some families are unsure what the coming months will bring.
For one Orange County father, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation against his trans son, plans for future travel are suddenly in jeopardy.
He said only about half of his son’s identity documents match his gender, and they’ve been warned not to try to change others.
“He won’t be able to leave the country because he can’t get a matching passport,” the father said.
For Maxine, the L.A. mom, balancing the banal with the existential is a daily strain.
“My kid is just living their life. They want to go to concerts, they want to go shopping for back to school — they don’t know any of this is happening,” the mother said. “You have to experience this intense fear while maintaining a normal household for everybody else.”
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Thursday to weigh in on the growing controversy over transgender athletes and decide if federal law bars transgender girls from women’s school sports teams.
“Biological boys should not compete on girls’ athletics teams,” West Virginia Atty. Gen. JB McCusky said in an appeal the court voted to hear.
The appeal had the backing of 26 other Republican-led states as well as President Trump.
Four years ago, West Virginia adopted its Save Women’s Sports Act but the measure has been blocked as discriminatory by the 4th Circuit Court in 2-1 decision.
Idaho filed a similar appeal after its law was blocked by the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco. The court said it would hear that case together with the West Virginia case.
At issue is the meaning of Title IX, the federal education law that has been credited with opening the door for the vast expansion of women’s sports. Schools and colleges were told they must give girls equal opportunities in athletics by providing them with separate sports teams.
In the past decade, however, states and their schools divided on the question of who can participate on the girls team. Is it only those who were girls at birth or can it also include those whose gender identity is female?
West Virginia told the court its “legislature concluded that biological boys should compete on boys’ and co-ed teams but not girls’ teams. This separation made sense, the legislature found, because of the ‘inherent physical differences between biological males and biological females’.”
California and most Democratic states allow transgender girls to compete in sports competitions for women.
In 2013, the Legislature said a student “shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions…consistent with his or her gender identity.”
The Supreme Court had put off a decision on this issue while the divide among the states grew.
McCusky, West Virginia’s attorney general, said he was confident the court would uphold the state’s law. “It is time to return girls’ sports to the girls and stop this misguided gender ideology once and for all,” he said in a statement.
Lawyers for Lambda Legal and the ACLU said the court should not uphold exclusionary laws.
“Our client just wants to play sports with her friends and peers,” said Sasha Buchert, director of Non-Binary and Transgender Rights Project at Lambda Legal.
“Categorically excluding kids from school sports just because they are transgender will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth,” said Joshua Block, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. “We believe the lower courts were right to block these discriminatory laws, and we will continue to defend the freedom of all kids to play.”
Becky Pepper-Jackson and her mother sued after the school principal said she was barred by the state’s law from competing on the girls’ teams at her middle school in Bridgeport, W. Va.
She “has lived as a girl in all aspects of her life for years and receives puberty-delaying treatment and estrogen hormone therapy, so has not experienced (and will not experience) endogenous puberty,” her mother said in support of their lawsuit.
ACLU lawyers said then the court should stand aside. They said B.P.J. was eager to participate in sports but was “too slow to compete in the track events” on the girls team.
Last year, West Virginia tried again and urged the Supreme Court to review the 4th Circuit’s decision and uphold its restrictions on transgender athletes.
The state attorneys also claimed the would-be middle school athlete had become a track star.
“This spring, B.P.J. placed top three in every track event B.P.J. competed in, winning most. B.P.J. beat over 100 girls, displacing them over 250 times while denying multiple girls spots and medals in the conference championship. B.P.J. won the shot put by more than three feet while placing second in discus,” they told the court.
Last year, the court opted to rule first in a Tennessee case to decide if states may prohibit puberty blockers, hormones and other medical treatments for young teens who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
On June 18, the court’s conservative majority said state lawmakers had the authority to restrict medical treatments for adolescents who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, noting the ongoing debate over the long-term risks and benefits. The ruling turned aside the contention that law reflected unconstitutional sex discrimination.
On Thursday, the justices released their final orders list before their summer recess granting review of new cases to be heard in the fall. Included were the cases of West Virginia vs. BJP and Little vs. Hecox.
In response to the appeals, ACLU lawyers accused the state of seeking to “create a false sense of national emergency” based on a legal “challenge by one transgender girl.”
The lawsuit said the state measure was “part of a concerted nationwide effort to target transgender youth for unequal treatment.” The suit contended the law violated Title IX and was unconstitutional because it discriminated against student athletes based on their gender identity.
West Virginia’s lawyers saw a threat to Title IX and women’s sports.
They said the rulings upholding transgender rights “took a law designed to ensure meaningful competitive opportunities for women and girls—based on biological differences — and fashioned it into a lever for males to force their way onto girls’ sports teams based on identity, destroying the very opportunities Title IX was meant to protect.”
DES MOINES — Iowa became the first state to remove gender identity from its civil rights code under a law that took effect Tuesday, meaning transgender and nonbinary residents are no longer protected from discrimination in their job, housing and other aspects of life.
The law also explicitly defines female and male based on reproductive organs at birth and removes the ability for people to change the sex designation on their birth certificate.
An unprecedented take-back of legal rights after nearly two decades in Iowa code leaves transgender, nonbinary and potentially even intersex Iowans more vulnerable now than they were before. It’s a governing doctrine now widely adopted by President Trump and Republican-led states despite the mainstream medical view that sex and gender are better understood as a spectrum than as an either-or definition.
When Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed Iowa’s new law, she said the state’s previous civil rights code “blurred the biological line between the sexes.”
“It’s common sense to acknowledge the obvious biological differences between men and women. In fact, it’s necessary to secure genuine equal protection for women and girls,” she said in a video statement.
Also taking effect Tuesday are provisions in the state’s health and human services budget that say Medicaid recipients are no longer covered for gender-affirming surgery or hormone therapy.
A national movement
Iowa’s state Capitol filled with protesters as the law went through the Republican-controlled Legislature and to Reynolds’ desk in just one week in February. Iowa Republicans said laws passed in recent years to restrict transgender students’ use of bathrooms and locker rooms, and their participation on sports teams, could not coexist with a civil rights code that includes gender identity protections.
About two dozen other states and the Trump administration have advanced restrictions on transgender people. Republicans say such laws and executive actions protect spaces for women, rejecting the idea that people can transition to another gender. Many face court challenges.
About two-thirds of U.S. adults believe that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by biological characteristics at birth, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in May found. But there’s less consensus on policies that target transgender and nonbinary people.
Transgender people say those kinds of policies deny their existence and capitalize on prejudice for political gain.
In a major setback for transgender rights nationwide, the U.S. Supreme Court last month upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors. The court’s conservative majority said it doesn’t violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same.
Not every state includes gender identity in their civil rights code, but Iowa was the first to remove nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ+ rights think tank.
Incidents of discrimination in Iowa, before and after July 1
Iowans will still have time to file a complaint with the state Office of Civil Rights about discrimination based on gender identity that occurred before the law took effect.
State law requires a complaint to be submitted within 300 days after the most recent incident of alleged discrimination. That means people have until April 27 to file a complaint about discrimination based on gender identity, according to Kristen Stiffler, the office’s executive director.
Sixty-five such complaints were filed and accepted for investigation from July 2023 through the end of June 2024, according to Stiffler. Forty-three were filed and accepted from July 1, 2024, through June 19 of this year.
Iowa state Rep. Aime Wichtendahl, a Democrat and the state’s first openly transgender lawmaker, fears the law will lead to an increase in discrimination for transgender Iowans.
“Anytime someone has to check your ID and they see that the gender marker doesn’t match the appearance, then that opens up hostility, discrimination as possibilities,” Wichtendahl said, naming examples such as applying for a job, going through the airport, buying beer or getting pulled over in a traffic stop. “That instantly outs you. That instantly puts you on the spot.”
About half of U.S. states include gender identity in their civil rights code to protect against discrimination in housing and public places, such as stores or restaurants, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Some additional states do not explicitly protect against such discrimination, but it is included in legal interpretations of statutes.
Five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled LGBTQ+ people are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace. But Iowa’s Supreme Court has expressly rejected the argument that discrimination based on sex includes discrimination based on gender identity.
Changing Iowa birth certificates before the law took effect
The months between when the bill was signed into law and when it took effect gave transgender Iowans time to pursue amended birth certificates before that option was eliminated.
Keenan Crow, with LGBTQ+ advocacy group One Iowa, said the group has long co-sponsored legal clinics to assist with that process.
“The last one that we had was by far the biggest,” Crow said.
Iowa’s Department of Transportation still has a process by which people can change the gender designation on their license or identification card, but has proposed administrative rules to eliminate that option.
Wichtendahl also said she has talked to some families who are looking to move out of state as a result of the new law.
“It’s heartbreaking because this is people’s lives we’re talking about,” Wichtendahl added. “These are families that have trans loved ones and it’s keeping their loved ones away, it’s putting their loved ones into uncertain future, putting their health and safety at risk.”
June 18 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday welcomed members of the Italian Juventus Club World Cup team to the Oval Office as he spoke about a range of topics, including transgender athletes.
The team, which includes Americans Timothy Weah and Weston McKennie, appeared in the White House before playing Al Ain of the United Arab Emrites at Washington, D.C.’s, Audi Field on Wednesday night. Thirty-two teams are competing from last Saturday to July 13 in the United States.
Also on hand were FIFA president Gianni Infantino, Juventus club executives, former player Giorgio Chiellini and head coach Igor Tudor.
They stood behind the president.
Trump turned around and asked them: “Could a woman make your team, fellas.”
They smiled nervously and didn’t respond.
Juventus’ general manager Damien Comolli finally said: “We have a very good women’s team.” They are the reigning Serie A champions.
“But they should be playing with women,” Trump said as Comolli looked at the floor and chose not to answer.
“But they should be playing with women,” Trump replied. “He’s being very diplomatic.”
Transgender athletes have been allowed to compete in the Olympics, including soccer, since 2004 if they meet the eligibility criteria set by their sport’s International Federation. It wasn’t until 2021 that the first openly transgender athletes competed in the Games.
Trump’s executive order that bans transgender participants from women’s sports directs the Secretary of State’s office to pressure the International Olympic to amend standards governing Olympic sporting events “to promote fairness, safety and the best interests of female athletes by ensuring that eligibility for participation in women’s sporting events is determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction.”
During the signing ceremony in February, Trump said he wants the International Olympic Committee to “change everything having to do with the Olympics and having to do with this absolutely ridiculous subject” ahead of the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.
Of the more than 500,000 NCAA athletes, only about 40 are known to be transgender, according to Anna Baeth, director of research at research at Athlete Ally, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ equality in sports.
The NCAA later adhered to Trump’s executive order.
Trans people appear to have no advantage in sports, according to an October 2023 review of 2017 research published in the journal Sports Medicine.
Earlier Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Tennessee state law banning gender-affirming care for minors can stand.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that states may ban hormone treatments for transgender teens, rejecting the claim that such gender-based discrimination is unconstitutional.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices said states are generally free to decide on proper standards of medical care, particularly when health experts are divided.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, writing for the court, said the state decides on medical regulations. “We leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process,” he said.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the law “plainly discriminates on the basis of sex… By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.” Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed.
The ruling upholds laws in Tennessee and 23 other Republican-led states, all of them adopted in the past four years.
Tennessee lawmakers said the number of minors being diagnosed with gender dysphoria had “exploded” in recent years, leading to a “surge in unproven and risky medical interventions for these underage patients.”
California and other Democratic-led states do not prohibit doctors from prescribing puberty blockers or hormones for those under age 18 who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
While the court’s ruling in the Tennessee case should not directly affect California’s law, the Trump administration seeks to prevent the use of federal funds to pay for gender affirming care.
This could affect patients who rely on Medicaid and also restrict hospitals and other medical clinics from providing hormones and other medical treatments for minors.
Wednesday’s decision highlights the sharp turn in the past year on trans rights and “gender affirming” care.
Solicitor Gen. Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, had appealed to the Supreme Court in November, 2023, and urged the justices to strike down the red state laws.
She spoke of a broad consensus in favor of gender affirming care. It was unconstitutional, she argued, for states to ban “evidence-based treatments supported by the overwhelming consensus of the medical community.”
But Republican lawmakers voiced doubt about the long-term effect of these hormone treatments for adolescents.
Their skepticism was reinforced by the Cass Report from Britain, which concluded there were not long-term studies or reliable evidence in support of the treatments.
In his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order condemning “gender ideology extremism.”
He said his administration would “recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
His administration later said its ban on gender affirming care for minors would extend to medical facilities receiving federal funds.
Under mounting pressure from the Trump administration, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles will shutter its longstanding healthcare program for trans children and young adults this summer, according to emails reviewed by The Times.
The Center for Transyouth Health and Development began telling its nearly 3,000 patient families of the closure on Thursday, saying there was “no viable alternative” that would allow the safety-net hospital to continue specialized care.
“There is no doubt that this is a painful and significant change to our organization and a challenge to CHLA’s mission, vision, and values,” hospital executives wrote to staff in a Thursday morning email.
The email said the decision to close the center on July 22 “follows a lengthy and thorough assessment of the increasingly severe impacts of federal administrative actions and proposed policies” that have emerged since the hospital briefly paused the initiation of care for some patients this winter.
The note sent shock waves through the tight-knit patient community, members of which had recently breathed a sigh of relief after CHLA reversed its brief ban on some care for new patients in February.
“We’re just disappointed and scared and enraged” said Maxine, the mother of a current patient, who declined to give her last name for fear of attacks on her son. “The challenge is how we break news to this kid who has had such a positive experience with everybody at Children’s.”
In the email, executives said that continuing to operate the center would jeopardize the hospital’s ability to care for “hundreds of thousands” of other children, noting that federal agencies including the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had warned of dire consequences for doctors and hospitals providing care opposed by the administration — including threat of prosecutions for doctors.
“These threats are no longer theoretical,” the note said. “Taken together, the Attorney General memo, HHS review, and the recent solicitation of tips from the FBI to report hospitals and providers of GAC strongly signal this Administration’s intent to take swift and decisive action, both criminal and civil, against any entity it views as being in violation of the executive order.”
The hospital’s Transyouth center is among the oldest and largest programs in the country, and among the only facilities that provides puberty blockers, hormones and surgical procedures for trans youth on public insurance.
But the hospital is also significantly more reliant on public funding than any other pediatric medical center in California — a situation that leaves it particularly exposed to the Trump administration. Roughly 40% of pediatric beds in Los Angeles are at Children’s.
“CHLA has a responsibility to navigate this complex and uncertain regulatory environment in a way that allows us to remain open as much as possible for as many as possible,” executives wrote. “In the end, this painful and difficult decision was driven by the need to safeguard CHLA’s ability to operate amid significant external pressures beyond our control.”
Protests erupted in February after the hospital briefly paused hormone therapy for some patients under 19, in response to President Trump’s executive order.
That move was reversed a few weeks later, amid pressure from patient families, LGBTQ+ civil rights groups and the state Department of Justice.
“Let me be clear: California law has not changed, and hospitals and clinics have a legal obligation to provide equal access to healthcare services,” Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta wrote on Feb. 5, days into the pause.
The California Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Thursday’s internal email from Children’s leadership notes the pressure from the federal government has risen at the same time that support from the state has ebbed.
“Over the past several months, California’s deepening budget crisis, President Trump’s executive orders, proposed federal legislation and rulemaking, and growing economic uncertainty have made the situation even more dire,” the email said.
Activists say the closure sets a dangerous precedent.
“CHLA needs to be a leader in this and stand up to the Trump administration, because other hospitals are taking note of what they’re doing,” said Maebe Pudlow, a trans nonbinary activist and Silverlake Neighborhood Council member who helped lead the protests when care was paused this winter.
“It feels very conveniently timed when everybody’s focus is on ICE raids happening in Los Angeles,” the activist went on. “I think it’s despicable.”
Maxine, the mom, was more measured.
“We’re slowly going underground, underground, underground,” the mother said. “You put one thing in place, and then you have to prepare for when that gets taken away. We’re just trying to stay a couple of steps ahead, sticking together with other parents, knowing who our allies are.”
WASHINGTON — After the raucous rainbow-hued festivities of Saturday’s parade, the final day of World Pride 2025 in the nation’s capital kicked off on a more downbeat note.
More than 1,000 people gathered under gray skies Sunday morning at the Lincoln Memorial for a rally that will lead into a protest march, as the community gathers its strength for a looming fight under President Trump’s second administration.
“This is not just a party,” Ashley Smith, board president of Capital Pride Alliance. “This is a rally for our lives.”
Smith acknowledged that international attendance numbers for the biannual World Pride were measurably down, with many potential attendees avoiding travel to the U.S. because of either fear of harassment or in protest of Trump’s policies.
“That should disturb us and mobilize us,” Smith said.
More than 1,000 people cheered on LGBTQ+ activists taking the stage while waving traditional Pride flags and flags representing transgender, bisexual, intersex and other communities. Many had rainbow glitter and rhinestones adorning their faces. They held signs declaring, “Fight back,” “Gay is good,” “Ban bombs not bathrooms” and “We will not be erased.”
Trump’s campaign against transgender protections and oft-stated antipathy for drag shows have set the community on edge, with some hoping to see a renewed wave of street politics in response.
“Trans people just want to be loved. Everybody wants to live their own lives and I don’t understand the problem with it all,” said Tyler Cargill, who came wearing an elaborate costume with a hat topped by a replica of the U.S. Capitol building.
Wes Kincaid drove roughly six hours from Charlotte, N.C., to attend this year. Sitting on a park bench near the reflecting pond, Kincaid said he made a point of attending this year, “because it’s more important than ever to show up for our community.”
Drag dancer Violeta puts on a show for visitors to Beaches Pride Paradise at the WeHo Pride Street Fair along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood on May 31.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Reminders of the cuts to federal government programs were on full display Sunday. One attendee waved a massive rainbow flag affixed on the same staff as a large USAID flag; another held a “Proud gay federal worker” sign; and a third held an umbrella with the logos of various federal programs facing cuts — including the PBS logo.
Trump’s anti-trans rhetoric had fueled fears of violence or protests targeting World Pride participants; at one point earlier this spring, rumors circulated that the Proud Boys were planning to disrupt this weekend’s celebrations. Those concerns prompted organizers to install security fencing around the entire two-day street party on a multi-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue.
But so far, the only clear act of aggression has been the vandalizing of a queer bar last week. Late Saturday night, there was a pair of violent incidents near Dupont Circle — one of the epicenters of the World Pride celebrations. Two juveniles were stabbed and a man was shot in the foot in separate incidents. The Metropolitan Police Department says it is not clear if either incident was directly related to World Pride.
Fernando, Hussein, Martin and Pesoli write for the Associated Press.
When Michele Kaemmerer showed up at firehouses in the 1990s, she sometimes encountered firefighters who didn’t want to work with her and would ask to go home sick.
Los Angeles fire officials supported Kaemmerer, the city’s first transgender fire captain, by denying the requests.
If the slights hurt her, she didn’t let it show.
“She really let things roll off her back pretty well. Some of the stuff was really hurtful, but she always had a good attitude,” said Janis Walworth, Kaemmerer’s widow. “She never took that out on anybody else. She was never bitter or angry.”
Kaemmerer, an early leader for transgender and women’s rights at a department not known for its warm welcome to women and minorities, died May 21 at age 80 of heart disease at her home in Bellingham, Wash. She is survived by Walworth and two children.
Michele Kaemmerer wears a shirt to show pride in her trans and lesbian identity in an undated photo.
(Courtesy of Janis Walworth)
A Buddhist, a Democrat, a feminist and a lesbian transgender woman, Kaemmerer busted stereotypes of what a firefighter was. She joined the LAFD in 1969 — long before she transitioned in 1991 — and became a captain 10 years later.
“Being in a fire, inside of a building on fire, at a brush fire … it’s adrenaline-producing and it’s great,” Kaemmerer said in a 1999 episode of the PBS show “In The Life,” which documented issues facing the LGBTQ+ community. The episode featured Kaemmerer when she was captain of Engine 63 in Marina del Rey.
“The men and women here feel very stressed out having a gay and lesbian captain,” Savitri Carlson, a paramedic at the firehouse, said in the episode. “You have to realize, this is not just a job. We live, sleep, shower, eat together, change together.”
But Kaemmerer brushed off the snubs.
“They’re forced to live with a lesbian, yes,” she said, laughing as she prepared a meal at the firehouse. “And it doesn’t rub off.”
Those close to her said that Kaemmerer, who retired in 2003, was able to deal with the scrutiny and snide remarks because she was an optimist who saw the best in people.
“She really didn’t dwell on that stuff,” said Brenda Berkman, one of the first women in the New York City Fire Department, who met Kaemmerer in the 1990s through their work for Women in the Fire Service, now known as Women in Fire, which supports female firefighters across the world.
The suspicion sometimes came from other women. When Kaemmerer joined Women in the Fire Service, some members didn’t want her to go with them on a days-long bike trip.
Some argued that Kaemmerer was “not a real woman,” wondering what bathroom she would use and where she would sleep.
“She made clear she would have her own tent,” Berkman recalled. “I said to my group, ‘We can’t be discriminating against Michele — not after all we’ve fought for to be recognized and treated equally in the fire service. She has to be allowed to come.’”
Kaemmerer joined the trip.
Michele Kaemmerer fights a brush fire in an undated photo.
(Courtesy of Janis Walworth)
Born in 1945, Kaemmerer knew from an early age that she identified as a woman but hid it out of fear of being beaten or shamed. She cross-dressed secretly and followed a traditional life path, marrying her high school sweetheart (whom she later divorced), joining the Navy and having two children.
“I was very proud of her [when she came out],” said Kaemmerer’s daughter, who asked not to be identified for privacy reasons. “It takes incredible courage to do what she did, especially in a particularly macho, male-driven career.”
When she came out as transgender, Kaemmerer was captain of a small team at the LAFD, with three men working under her.
“It was very difficult for them,” she said in the PBS interview.
Kaemmerer focused on her work. During the 1992 L.A. riots, her fire truck was shot at as she responded to fires, Berkman said.
In the PBS interview, Kaemmerer said that some firefighters who knew her before she transitioned still refused to work with her.
Some women who shared a locker room with her worried that she might make a sexual advance. Most firefighters sleep in the same room, but Kaemmerer sometimes didn’t, so others would feel comfortable.
“Sometimes I will get my bedding and I will put it on the floor in the workout room or the weight room and sleep in there,” she said in the PBS interview.
As she was talking to PBS about her experience as a transgender woman in the fire department, the bell sounded.
“That’s an alarm coming in,” she said, standing up and walking out of the interview.
WASHINGTON — The federal Bureau of Prisons must continue providing hormone therapy and social accommodations to hundreds of transgender inmates following an executive order signed by President Trump that led to a disruption in medical treatment, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said a federal law prohibits prison officials from arbitrarily depriving inmates of medications and other lifestyle accommodations that its own medical staff has deemed to be appropriate.
The judge said the transgender inmates who sued to block Trump’s executive order are trying to lessen the personal anguish caused by their gender dysphoria, which is the distress that a person feels because their assigned gender and gender identity don’t match.
“In light of the plaintiffs’ largely personal motives for undergoing gender-affirming care, neither the BOP nor the Executive Order provides any serious explanation as to why the treatment modalities covered by the Executive Order or implementing memoranda should be handled differently than any other mental health intervention,” he wrote.
The Bureau of Prisons is providing hormone therapy to more than 600 inmates diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The bureau doesn’t dispute that gender dysphoria can cause severe side effects, including depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, the judge said.
The Republican president’s executive order required the bureau to revise its medical care policies so that federal funds aren’t spent “for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
Lamberth’s ruling isn’t limited to the plaintiffs named in the lawsuit. He agreed to certify a class of plaintiffs consisting of anyone who is or will be incarcerated in federal prisons.
Trump’s order also directed the federal Bureau of Prisons to ensure that “males are not detained in women’s prisons.” In February, however, Lamberth agreed to temporarily block prison officials from transferring three incarcerated transgender women to men’s facilities and terminating their access to hormone therapy.
The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from the Transgender Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Lamberth, a senior judge, was nominated to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987.
CLOVIS, Calif. — Overcoming intense pressure to quit from President Trump, dozens of local protesters and other prominent critics of transgender athletes in girls’ sports, 16-year-old AB Hernandez bounded past many of her peers to win multiple gold medals at California’s high school track and field championships Saturday.
The transgender junior from Jurupa Valley High School — who competed despite a directive from Trump that she be barred from doing so — won state titles in the girls’ triple jump and the girl’s high jump and took second place in the girls’ long jump.
Hernandez’s success at the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships in Clovis came amid high heat — with temperatures above 100 degrees for much of the day — and under an intense spotlight.
Earlier in the week, Trump had said on social media that he was “ordering local authorities, if necessary, to not allow” Hernandez to compete, wrongly alleging she had won “everything” in a prior meet and calling her “practically unbeatable.” Protesters gathered outside the meet both Friday and Saturday to denounce her inclusion and the LGBTQ+-friendly state laws allowing it.
Despite all that, Hernandez appeared calm and focused as she competed. When her name was announced for the long jump, she waved to the crowd. When she was announced for the high jump, she smiled.
Hernandez beat out all other competitors in the triple jump, though the runner-up was also awarded 1st place under new rules established by the California Interscholastic Federation after Trump issued his threats.
Hernandez tied with two other girls in the high jump, with the three of them all clearing the same height and sharing the gold.
Hernandez’s mother, Nereyda Hernandez, heaped praise on her after the events in a statement provided to The Times, saying, “As your mother, I cannot fully express how PROUD I am of you.”
“Watching you rise above months of being targeted, misunderstood, and judged not by peers, but by adults who should’ve known better, has left me in awe of your strength,” her mother said. “Despite it all, you stayed focused. You kept training, you kept showing up, and now you’re bringing THE GOLD HOME!!!
During some of Hernandez’s jumps, a protester could be heard on a bullhorn from outside the Buchanan High School stadium chanting “No boys in girls’ sports!” California Interscholastic Federation officials banned protest signs inside the facility, but outside protesters held a range of them — including ones that read “No Child Is Born in the Wrong Body,” “Trans Girls Are Boys: CIF Do Better,” and “She Trains to Win. He takes the trophy?”
Josh Fulfer, a 46-year-old father and conservative online influencer who lives near the stadium, said he was the protester on the bullhorn. He said Hernandez should not have been competing — regardless of how she placed — because her presence in the competition had a negative “psychological effect” on her cisgender competitors.
“I stand with truth,” he said. “Males should not be pretending to be females, and they shouldn’t be competing against female athletes.”
Loren Webster, a senior from Wilson High School in Long Beach who beat Hernandez in the long jump, said she wasn’t giving Hernandez much thought — instead, she was focused on her own performance.
“It wasn’t any other person I was worried about. I knew what I was capable of,” Webster said. “I can’t control the uncontrollable.”
A child holds a protest sign alongside a family member and others opposed to transgender athlete AB Hernandez competing in the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships, at Veterans Memorial Stadium at Buchanan High School in Clovis.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
The intense focus on Hernandez over two days of competition Friday and Saturday reflected a broad rise in conservative outrage over transgender girls competing in sporting events nationwide, despite their representing a tiny fraction of competitors. It also reflected a concerted effort by Trump and other prominent conservative figures to single out Hernandez, individually, as an unwitting poster child for such concerns.
Recent polls, including one conducted by The Times last year, have shown that many Americans support transgender rights, but a majority oppose transgender girls participating in youth sports. California has long defended transgender kids and their right to participate in youth athletics, but other states have increasingly moved to limit or remove such rights entirely.
Marci Strange supports protestors as they protest against transgender athlete AB Hernandez competing In the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships, at Veterans Memorial Stadium In the campus of Buchanan High School in Clovis.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
Trump first latched onto transgender issues with fervor during his presidential campaign, spending millions of dollars on anti-transgender political ads. Since being elected, he has issued a wave of executive orders and other policies aimed at rolling back transgender rights and protections.
Again and again, Hernandez has been singled out in that discussion.
Earlier this week, Trump referenced Hernandez in a social media post in which he said his administration would cut federal funding to California if it didn’t block her from competing in this weekend’s state finals and more broadly get in line with his executive order purporting to ban transgender youth from participating in school sports nationwide.
The following day, U.S. Justice Department officials referenced Hernandez again, announcing the launch of an investigation into whether California, its interscholastic sports federation and the Jurupa Unified School District are violating the civil rights of cisgender girls by allowing transgender students such as Hernandez to compete in sports.
Transgender athlete AB Hernandez competed for Jurupa Valley High School in the high jump at the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships at Buchanan High School in Clovis.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
At the meet Friday and Saturday, Hernandez often blended in with the hundreds of other athletes, hardly drawing attention. She was less conspicuous by far than the protesters there to denounce her for competing.
Hernandez’s mother has pleaded with Trump and other adults in recent days to show her daughter compassion, calling it heartbreaking “every time I see my child being attacked, not for a wrongdoing, but simply for being who they are.”
She has said her daughter “is not a threat,” while the harassment directed at her is “not just cruel, it’s dangerous.”
Local protesters — some with ties to national conservative organizations — cast Hernandez’s competing in girls’ events in starkly different terms.
Before being escorted out by police, Sophia Lorey, outreach director for the conservative California Family Council, walked around the stadium Saturday wearing a hat reading, “Women’s Sports, Women Only.” She told members of the crowd that Hernandez was a boy and handed out pink “Save Girls’ Sports” bracelets and fliers directing people to an online petition calling on the California Interscholastic Federation to change its policies to bar transgender athletes from competition.
Trump administration officials have taken a similar stance.
In a letter Wednesday to interscholastic federation executive director Ronald W. Nocetti, Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who was appointed by Trump to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, called Hernandez’s success in recent track and field events “alarming.” And she said the California policies allowing Hernandez to compete are a potential violation of Title IX, the 1972 federal civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs and other activities that receive federal funding.
Transgender athlete AB Hernandez competed in three events including the high jump, triple jump and long jump at the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships at Buchanan High School in Clovis.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
The remark came in a conversation on Newsom’s podcast in March, in which Hernandez was also singled out.
Kirk, a co-founder of the conservative organization Turning Point USA, asked Newsom whether he would voice his opposition to Hernandez competing in girls’ track and field events. Newsom said he agreed such situations were “unfair” but that he also took issue with “the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities,” including transgender people.
When Kirk suggested Newsom could say that he has “a heart for” Hernandez but still thinks her competing is unfair, Newsom again said he agreed.
Newsom has issued no such statement since. But, the playing field has shifted in California for transgender athletes since Trump started talking about Hernandez.
On Wednesday, the CIF announced a change in its rules for this weekend’s championships. Under the new rules, a cisgender girl who is bumped from qualifying for an event final by a transgender athlete will still advance to compete in the finals. In addition, the federation said, any cisgender girl who is beaten by a transgender competitor will be awarded whichever medal she would have claimed had the transgender athlete not been competing.
Transgender athlete AB Hernandez competed for Jurupa Valley High School in the high jump at the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships at Buchanan High School in Clovis.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
The CIF did not mention Hernandez by name in announcing its policy change, but it did make direct reference to the high jump, triple jump and long jump — the three events in which she was to compete.
Under the new rules, Hernandez shared her place on each of the event podiums with other girls.
The CIF did not respond to a list of questions about its new policy. A spokesman for Newsom applauded the change, but others were unimpressed.
Critics of transgender athletes rejected it as insufficient and demanded a full ban on transgender athletes. Fulfer, the protester on the bullhorn, said the CIF was “admitting that they’ve got it wrong for a long time” while still not doing enough to fix it — which Trump would see clearly.
“I hope Donald Trump sees what happens this weekend, and I hope he pulls the funding away from California,” Fulfer said.
LGBTQ+ advocates also criticized the rule change, but for different reasons, calling it a crass capitulation that singled out a teenager to appease a crowd of bullies picking a political fight.
“The fact that these same political players continue to bully and harass one child, even after CIF changed its policy, shows this was never about sports or fairness,” said Kristi Hirst, co-founder of the public education advocacy group Our Schools USA.
“It was simply about using a child, while compromising their personal safety on a national scale, to score political points and distract from the serious issues families and communities in this country are actually concerned about,” Hirst said, “affording groceries, the loss of health care, and access to quality teachers and resources in their public schools.”
Transgender athlete AB Hernandez competed for Jurupa Valley High School in the long jump at the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships at Buchanan High School in Clovis.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
Nereyda Hernandez said she hoped AB’s wins would serve as inspiration for other kids who feel “unseen.”
“To every young person watching, especially those who feel unseen or unheard, let AB be your reminder that authenticity, courage, and resilience shine BRIGHTER than hate,” she said. “It won’t be easy, but definitely worth it.”
By contrast, about six out of 10 LGBTQ adults said gay and lesbian people are generally accepted in the US.
A new poll by the Pew Research Centre has found that transgender people experience less social acceptance in the United States than those who are lesbian, gay or bisexual, according to LGBTQ adults.
About six out of 10 LGBTQ adult participants in the poll said there is “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of social acceptance in the US for gay and lesbian people, according to “The Experiences of LGBTQ Americans Today” report released on Thursday.
Only about one in 10 said the same for non-binary and transgender people — and about half said there was “not much” or no acceptance at all for transgender people.
The survey of 3,959 LGBTQ adults was conducted in January, after US President Donald Trump’s election, but just before his return to office when he set into motion a series of policies that question transgender people’s existence and their place in society.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order calling on the government to recognise people as male or female based on the “biological truth” of their future cells at conception, rejecting evidence and scientific arguments that gender is a spectrum.
A poll conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in May found that about half of US adults approve of the way Trump is handling transgender issues.
Transgender people are less likely than gay or lesbian adults to say they are accepted by all their family members, according to the Pew poll. The majority of LGBTQ people said their siblings and friends accepted them, though the rates were slightly higher among gay or lesbian people.
About half of gay and lesbian people said their parents did, compared with about one-third of transgender people. Only about one in 10 transgender people reported feeling accepted by their extended family, compared with about three in 10 for gay or lesbian people.
According to the Pew poll, about two-thirds of LGBTQ adults said the landmark US Supreme Court ruling that legalised same-sex marriage nationally on June 26, 2015, increased acceptance of same-sex couples “a lot more” or “somewhat more”.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule in the coming weeks on whether Tennessee can enforce a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in what is seen as a major case for the transgender community.
The U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether California, its interscholastic sports federation and the Jurupa Unified School District are violating the civil rights of cisgender girls by allowing transgender students to compete in school sports, federal officials announced Wednesday.
The Justice Department is also throwing its support behind a pending lawsuit alleging similar violations of girls’ rights in the Riverside Unified School District, said U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, who oversees much of the Los Angeles region, and Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Transgender track athletes have come under intense scrutiny in recent months in both Jurupa Valley and Riverside, with anti-LGBTQ+ activists attacking them on social media and screaming opposition to their competing at school meets.
Essayli and Dhillon, both Californians appointed under President Trump, have long fought against transgender rights in the state. Their announcements came one day after Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from California for allowing transgender youth to participate in sports.
The legal actions are just the latest attempts by the Trump administration to scale back transgender rights nationwide, including by bringing the fight to California — which has the nation’s largest queer population and some of its most robust LGBTQ+ legal protections — and targeting individual student athletes in the state.
Both Trump in his threats Tuesday and Essayli and Dhillon in their announcement of the investigation Wednesday appeared to reference the recent success of a 16-year-old transgender track athlete at Jurupa Valley High School named AB Hernandez. Trump wrongly suggested that Hernandez had won “everything” at a recent meet — which Hernandez didn’t do.
In a comment to The Times on Wednesday, Hernandez’s mother, Nereyda Hernandez, said it was heartbreaking to see her child being attacked “simply for being who they are,” and despite following all California laws and policies for competing.
“My child is a transgender student-athlete, a hardworking, disciplined, and passionate young person who just wants to play sports, continue to build friendships, and grow into their fullest potential like any other child,” her mother said.
The mother of another transgender high school track athlete in Riverside County who is the subject of the pending lawsuit the Justice Department is now backing declined to comment Wednesday.
The Justice Department said it had sent letters of legal notice to California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, the California Interscholastic Federation and Jurupa Unified.
The U.S. Department of Education had previously announced in February that it was investigating the CIF for allowing transgender athletes to compete. Dhillon said the two federal departments would coordinate their investigations.
Bonta has defended state laws protecting transgender youth, students and athletes, and advised school systems and other institutions in the state, such as hospitals, to adhere to state LGBTQ+ laws — even in the face of various Trump executive orders aimed at curtailing the rights of and healthcare for transgender youth. On Wednesday, his office said it remained “committed to defending and upholding California laws.”
Scott Roark, a spokesman for the California Department of Education, said his agency could not comment. Jacquie Paul, a spokesperson for Jurupa Unified, said the school system had yet to receive the letter Wednesday, and “without further information” could not comment. A spokesperson for the Riverside Unified School District also declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
The CIF, in a statement, said it “values all of our student-athletes and we will continue to uphold our mission of providing students with the opportunity to belong, connect, and compete while complying with California law and Education Code.”
However, the sports federation also changed its rules for the upcoming 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships, saying a cisgender girl who is bumped from qualifying for event finals by a transgender athlete would still be allowed to compete and would also be awarded the medal for whichever place they would have claimed were the transgender athlete not competing.
The changes brought renewed criticism from advocates on both sides of the political issue, including Chino Valley Unified school board President Sonja Shaw. Shaw is a Trump supporter running for state schools superintendent who has challenged pro-LGBTQ+ laws statewide and supports the latest investigation. She said that, in making the changes, CIF was “admitting” that girls “are being pushed out of their own sports.”
Dhillon said her office’s “pattern or practice” investigation will consider whether California’s laws and the CIF policies violate Title IX, a 1972 federal civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding.
Title IX has been used in the past to win rights for transgender people, but the Trump administration has taken a strikingly different view of the law — and cited it as a reason transgender rights must be rolled back.
Dhillon said the law “exists to protect women and girls in education,” that it is “perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies,” and that her division would “aggressively defend women’s hard-fought rights to equal educational opportunities.”
Essayli said in a statement that his office would “work tirelessly to protect girls’ sports and stop anyone — public officials included — from violating women’s civil rights.”
LGBTQ+ advocates, civic institutions in California and many Democratic lawmakers in the state have denounced the framing of transgender inclusion in sports as diminishing the rights of women and girls and accused Trump and other Republicans of attacking transgender people — about 1% of the U.S. population — simply because they make for an easy and vulnerable political target.
Kristi Hirst, co-founder of the public education advocacy group Our Schools USA, said the Justice Department’s actions amounted to “bullying minors and using taxpayer resources to do so,” and that a “better use of public dollars would be for the Justice Department to affirm that all kids possess civil rights, and protect the very students being targeted today.”
The “pattern or practice” investigation is the second such investigation that Dhillon’s office has launched in the L.A. region in as many months. It’s also investigating Los Angeles County over its process for issuing gun permits.
Essayli’s separate decision to back the Riverside lawsuit adds another wrinkle to an already complicated case.
The group Save Girls’ Sports is suing over the inclusion of a transgender athlete in a girls’ track meet in October, a decision they allege unfairly bumped a cisgender girl from competition, and over a decision by high school officials to block students from wearing shirts that read, “IT’S COMMON SENSE. XX [does not equal] XY,” a reference to the different chromosome pairings of biological females and males.
Julianne Fleischer, an attorney with Advocates for Faith & Freedom who is representing Save Girls’ Sports, said Wednesday that Essayli’s decision to weigh in on behalf of the group was welcome.
“This case has always been about common sense, fairness, and the plain meaning of the law,” Fleischer said in a statement. “Girls’ sports were never meant to be a social experiment. They exist so that girls can win, lead and thrive on a level playing field.”
It was unclear how the case would be affected by Essayli’s interest.
The state and school district are asking for the lawsuit to be dismissed. A hearing is scheduled next month.
Essayli, formerly a state Assembly member from Riverside County, made his name in politics in part by attacking what he has called the “woke” policies of California’s liberal majority in Sacramento. Shortly before he was appointed as U.S. attorney last month, other California lawmakers blocked a bill he introduced that would have banned transgender athletes from female sports.
Hernandez, the mother of the targeted Jurupa Valley athlete, said Trump and other officials were bullying children by “weaponizing misinformation and fear instead of embracing truth, compassion and respect,” and asked Trump to reconsider.
“I respectfully request you to open your heart and mind to learn about the LGBTQ+ community,” she said, “not from the voices of fear or division, but from the people living these lives with courage, love and dignity.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to cut federal funding to California if the state continues allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.
Trump blasted Gov. Gavin Newsom in an early morning post on Truth Social saying the state under his leadership “continues to ILLEGALLY allow MEN TO PLAY IN WOMEN’S SPORTS.”
“I will speak to him today to find out which way he wants to go???” Trump said of Newsom. “In the meantime I am ordering local authorities, if necessary, to not allow the transitioned person to compete in the State Finals. This is a totally ridiculous situation!!!”
The president’s post appeared to reference a California high school junior who won the women’s long jump and triple jump during the California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section Masters Meet over the weekend.
California is the second state to enter Trump’s cross-hairs over transgender athletes participation in youth sports. Last month, Trump began the process of stripping Maine of federal education dollars in a battle over the issue between the president and Maine Gov. Janet Mills. The dispute immediately landed in court.
Unlike the governor of Maine, Newsom recently said it was “deeply unfair” for people born as biological men to compete in women’s sports. He has not responded to Trump’s post.
When asked at a press conference in April if California should adopt a law restricting transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, the governor said he’s open to the discussion.
“You’re talking about a very small number of people, a very small number of athletes, and my responsibility is to address the pressing issues of our time,” Newsom said, before adding that the conversation has been weaponized by conservatives.
“And to the extent that someone could find that right balance, I would embrace those conversations and the dignity that hopefully presents themselves in that conversation, meaning the humanity around that conversation, not the politics around that conversation.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has threatened to cut funding, particularly education dollars, to California.
In an April letter to Newsom, the Trump-appointed head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture conditioned its aid to abiding by Trump directives — and cited a federal investigation into a state law that prohibits schools from automatically notifying families about student gender-identity changes and shields teachers from retaliation for supporting transgender student rights.
California also joined other states in April when it defied a Trump administration order to certify that the state’s 1,000 school districts have ended all diversity, equity and inclusion programs. That Trump order, too, arrived with federal threats to cut billions of dollars in education funding if the state did not comply.
One uncertainty in Trump’s latest social media post was whether he was referring to education funding alone or additional federal support for California — which could include, for example, disaster relief, food aid for the poor and dollars to support low-income housing.
California has long sent more money to Washington, D.C. in federal tax revenue than it receives in federal support, according to Newsom. Regardless, the funding that California relies on is significant.
While it’s difficult to calculate the total dollar amount California receives from the federal government in education funding, some tallies have put the annual figure at $16.3 billion — or about $2,750 per K-12 student. That money includes funding for school meals, students with disabilities and early education Head Start programs.
The state also receives more than $2.1 billion in Title I grants to counteract the effects of poverty — more than any other state — with about $417 million provided to Los Angeles Unified, according to the California Department of Education.
