Analysis
Cutting Through the Noise: An Overview of the President’s First 100 Days
In the first 100 days of this new presidential administration, the LGBTQ community, along with many other minority communities, has been bombarded with rapid attacks via executive orders, rule changes, policy rescissions, and hateful rhetoric. This strategy of chaos and confusion is meant to create fear while overwhelming individuals’ and communities’ abilities to understand and respond to everything that’s happening.
As we reflect on the past 100 days, we will try to take a step back and cut through the noise, offering a digestible overview of the key actions and resulting policy changes that affect the everyday lives of LGBTQ people in the United States.
The bottom line is that this administration has moved quickly to dismantle and disrupt the hard work over decades to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, to provide safe and supportive environments for LGBTQ youth, and to ensure that transgender people can live their lives with safety and joy.
Many of the actions this administration has taken — through executive orders or agency directives — come directly from the Project 2025 playbook. It is also important to note that although executive orders represent a clear anti-LGBTQ sentiment from the federal government and have rapid and immediate impacts on many people, executive orders do not have the authority to override the United States Constitution, federal or state statutes, or establish legal precedent.
Health Care
What Happened
On inauguration day, this administration moved rapidly to attack transgender people through a Day 1 executive order that had wide sweeping implications. Alongside a second executive order focused on healthcare for transgender youth, these actions have created confusion, fear, preemptive scaling back of care, and the loss of care for some people. For example, the administration quickly moved to limit access to health care for transgender people in federal prisons, immigration detention, and for people serving in the military or accessing care through the Department of Veterans Affairs. And only hours ago, the Department of Health and Human Services published a report promoting the same dangerous, discredited conversion therapy agenda that fringe therapists have been pushing on gay youth for decades. In response to these EOs, various medical providers across the country immediately reacted by restricting care to transgender patients of all ages. However, national LGBTQ and civil rights organizations worked quickly to respond with multiple lawsuits challenging the order. A preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the order currently stands, and at least some of the providers that limited care have reversed course.
Why It Matters
As we await a decision from the Supreme Court of the United States in the landmark U.S. v. Skrmetti case, challenging healthcare discrimination for transgender youth, the EOs attempt to initiate new administrative rules to restrict federal funding for health care for transgender people of all ages. By regulating gender by defining “sex” throughout all federal law and limiting or excluding protections on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, these EOs threaten to withhold medically necessary, evidence-based care to the most vulnerable among us.
Access to Accurate Identity Documents
What Happened
A primary component of the Day 1 anti-trans EO lies within its attempt to define “sex” as either male or female and mandate that federal government-issued identity documents reflect sex “at conception.” This includes a directive barring transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people from updating their sex designation on their U.S. passports or obtaining renewed passports that accurately reflect who they are. The disruption and chaos caused by this policy change was immediate, with the State Department freezing all applications for passports with “X” sex markers or changes to gender identity. There are currently three lawsuits pending against the Trump Administration challenging the State Department’s new passport policy.
Why It Matters
Identity documents, in general, are vital keys necessary to participate in so many parts of everyday life, and having identification that matches who you are is a matter of basic safety and dignity. As transgender, nonbinary and intersex people are already forced to navigate a complicated patchwork of state policies in order to obtain a name change or update their gender marker on most government-issued IDs, this EO amplifies that discrimination by unlawfully restricting their right to travel. In addition, if Congress passes the SAVE Act, due to its proof of citizenship requirement, many transgender people may be entirely prevented from registering to vote.
Nondiscrimination Protections
What Happened
Project 2025’s extreme position against equal rights for LGBTQ people is made clear in its strategy to eliminate federal protections for queer people while promoting traditional understandings of how men and women are expected to behave, act and present themselves. In accordance with that effort, the EO defining “sex” in exclusionary ways attempts to reinterpret nondiscrimination protections and undermine Supreme Court rulings protecting both LGBTQ people and women.
Through staffing changes at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for example, the administration has sought to roll back vital employment nondiscrimination protections for transgender employees, despite the landmark 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling finding they are protected by federal employment laws. These efforts also have dangerous implications for decades of precedent protecting women in the workplace.
This administration has also moved to restrict access to school facilities and programs for transgender youth, including playing on sports teams and using restrooms that match their gender identity. For example, under pressure from the White House, the NCAA halted transgender inclusion policies, and the Department of Justice has initiated investigations into school districts and states like Maine — as well as threatened to withhold federal funding — if they continue to enforce state and federal laws protecting transgender students.
Why It Matters
As with other efforts to regulate gender, these actions will have implications for everyone, not only transgender youth. While formal rule-making procedures exist that may slow down or block these changes, along with the fact that nearly half of states explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, these actions reinforce the message that discrimination against LGBTQ people is acceptable. It also flags for state legislatures, the types of anti-LGBTQ policy proposals that will fuel Project 2025’s aim to erase transgender people.
Data Collection & Research
What Happened
The impact of the Day 1 anti-transgender EO extends well beyond access to best practice medical care, IDs and nondiscrimination protections. Consistent with plans detailed in Project 2025 to “stop all research related to gender identity unless the purpose is conformity to one’s sex assigned at birth,” this EO seeks to erase the lived experiences of transgender people. Alongside an anti-DEI EO, this administration has swiftly moved to strip gender identity variables from existing datasets, remove gender identity measures from federal surveys going into the field, terminate federal funding for research projects that include or study transgender people, and censor research projects at federal data centers.
Why It Matters
One key purpose of the federal research infrastructure is to ensure the accurate and comprehensive collection of data on the true diversity of this nation. These actions are based on an idea that if transgender people don’t exist in data and in research, the federal government can claim transgender people don’t exist at all — and further, the government can claim there is no data to support that their policies are actively harming transgender people. Although there have been efforts by non-government entities to collect and store previously collected data prior to the purges, the impact of these actions on future research and policy development will be felt for years to come.
LGBTQ Youth
What Happened
No fewer than three EOs have targeted transgender youth, attacking their ability to access medical care, to safely attend school, and to participate in school activities including sports. These orders all align with extremist claims from Project 2025 that “allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse” — sentiments repeated in a recent internal memo from the Department of Justice to its employees. LGBTQ advocacy organizations immediately responded with lawsuits to block discriminatory mandates related to access to medical care and the ability to participate in school sports consistent with a student’s gender identity. And advocates are similarly preparing to respond to future federal attacks on LGBTQ youth and their families.
Why It Matters
Research shows that the political landscape can profoundly impact the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ young people. Despite the fact that LGBTQ young people living in states with more inclusive LGBTQ+ policies reported that recent politics were less likely to negatively impact their well-being, the national political landscape is uniquely hostile, particularly for transgender and nonbinary young people no matter where they live.
Marriage Equality
What Happened
Although there are no executive orders that speak directly to challenging same-sex marriage, efforts to undermine marriage equality at the state level has likely been emboldened by the sweeping anti-LGBTQ attacks at the federal level. Calls for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges have resulted in renewed attention in the states with legislatures in 10 states introducing nonbinding resolutions criticizing marriage equality or legislation to create a special, heterosexual-only category of marriage. Yet, marriage equality continues to be the law of the land and all state bans on marriage equality remain unenforceable.
Why It Matters
Marriage is a critical legal component for establishing parenting ties to and protections for children, accessing vital benefits, being able to make medical decisions for loved ones, and more. Although the U.S. Supreme Court can only revisit Obergefell if a case where the issue of same-sex marriage is raised to the Court, the anti-equality sentiment of these proposals and intent to treat LGBTQ people’s marriages as inferior is still harmful. If in the unlikely event that Obergefell were weakened or overturned, state law would again play a dominant role in the ability of same-sex couples to marry. It’s also important to note that even if the Court were to overturn Obergefell, marriages legally entered by same-sex couples prior to such an overturning would still be valid. In addition, the federal Respect for Marriage Act (2022) now requires that states recognize and treat legal marriages from other states as equally legally valid.
MAP’s Commitment
This Administration has chosen to target our community with a combination of discriminatory policy and harmful rhetoric meant to deceive people into believing that LGBTQ people are second-class citizens. Despite these threats, our community continues to fight back with thoughtfulness and solidarity.
We at MAP will maintain our commitment to follow developments that impact LGBTQ people at the federal, state, and local levels. Our policy analysis, communication tools, and focus on creating collaborations that power the movement are especially critical in moments like this.
