For transgender Americans, Trump's win after a campaign targeting them is terrifying

Avery Poznanski was excited for a new chapter.

The nonbinary transgender senior at UCLA had decided last month, after years of personal discovery and long discussions with their family and doctors, to start testosterone therapy. The first few weeks felt exciting, fulfilling.

Then Donald Trump, after running a virulently anti-transgender campaign, won the presidential election Tuesday — which felt “really frightening” and “disheartening,” Poznanski said.

“I’m sort of still stunned about how big of an issue trans expression and rights became on Trump’s side, and how hard they campaigned on it,” the 21-year-old Murrietta native said Wednesday. “I’m just feeling scared, honestly.”

Across the U.S., transgender and other queer people are grappling with the fact that Americans voted in large numbers for a candidate who openly ridiculed them on the campaign trail, and a political party that spent millions on anti-LGBTQ+ attack ads.

For many, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump is not just upsetting but deeply threatening. They are looking for reasons to be optimistic, such as Sarah McBride’s election in Delaware, which will make her the first out transgender member of Congress. But most just feel gutted — in part because they believe Trump will carry through on his promises to strip away their rights.

“It’s a scary time to be a trans person, and to hear so much really unfounded and startling rhetoric from that side, and to think that that may be pushed into actual legislation,” Poznanski said.

Trump’s election follows years of increasing political hostility toward transgender people and a wave of state laws aimed at curtailing the rights of this tiny subset of the American population. But it also marked a new escalation.

Trump denigrated transgender people from the start of the race. In one of his first campaign videos — part of his “Agenda 47” policy platform — he said “left-wing gender insanity [was] being pushed on our children” and amounted to “child abuse.”

He said he would sign an executive order upon taking office “instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age”; block federal funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care; ensure “severe consequences” for teachers who acknowledge transgender children; and push schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique.”

Trump also routinely disparaged transgender people on the campaign trail. He cast them as a threat to women and girls, including in sports, and told absurd lies to drum up additional fear — including his claim that American children were being whisked out of schools to have genital surgeries without their parents’ consent.

In September, Trump’s campaign started running an attack ad that hammered Harris over a policy of providing gender-affirming healthcare to federal inmates, using the line, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” And when that appeared to resonate with voters, the campaign doubled down, airing anti-transgender ads during sports games and across the swing states. One recent estimate put Republican spending on anti-transgender ads on network television alone at $215 million.

Trans rights supporters protested at the Indiana Statehouse last year before passage of a ban on gender-affirming treatment for minors.

(Darron Cummings / Associated Press)

LGBTQ+ rights organizations have challenged the notion that voters found Trump’s anti-transgender message appealing, and polls have shown that many Americans support transgender rights. Still, the fact that such a message was so core to Trump’s winning campaign says something about the American electorate, according to transgender people and their family members.

“I think it was very popular with his base, and with the folks who were throwing money at him,” said Amber Easley, a mother in San Bernardino County whose 17-year-old son, Milo, is transgender. “It was a direct contributor to [Trump’s] success, which is kind of devastating.”

Jaymes Black, chief executive of the Trevor Project, which operates phone, text and chat lines for queer youth experiencing suicidal thoughts or otherwise needing to talk, said the group’s services had seen demand increase about 125% on election day through Wednesday morning, compared to normal days.

“The Trevor Project wants LGBTQ+ young people to know that we are here for you, no matter the outcome of any election, and we will continue to fight for every LGBTQ+ young person to have access to safe, affirming spaces — especially during challenging times,” Black said. “LGBTQ+ young people: your life matters, and you were born to live it.”

Erin Reed, a transgender activist and independent journalist who has written extensively about the trans community, said there is “a lot of despair” out there among queer people.

Trans rights activist and journalist Erin Reed, right, and her fiancee, Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, in 2023.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it: I had to talk three or four people down from suicide,” Reed said of conversations she‘d had on election night. “That’s the reality that people are facing right now.”

Many transgender people are already “very unsafe” living in Republican-controlled states that have passed sweeping anti-trans measures in recent years, Reed said, including bans on gender-affirming healthcare, on transgender people using bathrooms that match their identities, on queer-affirming books, and on processes that allow transgender people to update state documents such as driver’s licenses.

Now, Reed said, transgender people around across the country — including in blue states — are wondering whether Trump and his newly empowered Republican colleagues in the upcoming Congress will be able to pass similar measures at the federal level.

Those in the trans community are also worried that Democrats will abandon them now based on a perception that defending them is too costly politically, Reed said; they’re wondering, “How do we manage to not get thrown under the bus?”

Many Democrats have voiced solidarity with the queer community, and queer leaders and organizations are doing outreach to make sure queer people are OK and to push back against Republican narratives that dehumanize transgender people — which is all vital, but not enough, said Honey Mahogany, executive director of the San Francisco Office of Transgender Initiatives.

“I would like to see solidarity from other communities, assurances that we are all in this together and then collective organizing,” she said.

Both she and Reed said transgender voices are too often left out of the discussion about transgender lives, and said that must stop.

Milo Easley, a senior at Redlands High School, agrees. He wants more people to talk about transgender issues — just not in the way Trump does, with “so much negativity” and “a lot of fearmongering.”

Milo Easley, a transgender high school student, at home in Redlands last year.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Milo said he finds some comfort living in California, which has laws that protect transgender people and gender-affirming care — but he’s still scared by Trump’s win and worried about queer friends in other states.

“They are already dealing with anti-trans policies, and the risk of having more under Trump is a serious concern,” Milo said. “A lot of them tell me how they are afraid for the future with Trump in office.”

He is trying to stay positive — including about the future, where he sees “a lot of room for improvement” — but it’s tough.

Poznanski also feels lucky to live in California, and to be receiving gender-affirming healthcare, but worries about young people in less-friendly states who don’t have access to such treatment.

But Poznanski is also hopeful and determined to live.

“Our existences are politicized,” they said. “But just living is an act of resistance.”