Stirring Animus, Facts Be Damned: For Trump, Fomenting Bias Is Only Goal
Leading Off: Trump ousts trans service members as his party mainstreams hate. Cass is called “unreliable” and unsupported by evidence. The top story lines as the week begins.
by Billie Jean Sweeney
Republican lawmakers nationwide have come to believe the mere introduction of anti-trans measures is a politically powerful tactic, even if most are doomed to failure. At least 886 anti-trans bills have been introduced thus far in 2025, a roughly tenfold increase over five years, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker.
While most of these bills have been turned back, NPR reported, extremist measures have been passed this year in Iowa, where lawmakers stripped trans people of protections under its Civil Right Act; in Wyoming, where the legislature endorsed the dead-naming of public employees; and in Alabama, where the assembly found time to effectively define trans people out of existence.
These broad discriminatory efforts, led by the White House and fanned by disinformation in right-wing media and in some mainstream outlets like The New York Times, came to a head again in Maine late last week. The state has been a focal point in the Trump administration’s assault on trans people.
Maine’s Democratic-controlled assembly heard testimony on a series of bills that would not only bar trans athletes from sports, but also strip protections under the state's anti-discrimination law, remove protections for people getting or providing gender-affirming care, and bar trans people from bathrooms.
"These are bills that are saying, essentially, trans people don't exist. They can't use facilities at school. They can't live as who they are," said Mary Bonauto, an attorney for GLAD Law.
Trump has threatened the unilateral withdrawal of federal funding to retaliate against states like Maine that have resisted his discriminatory demands. Maine has won early injunctions that block Trump from making good on his threats, and the case will be heard in federal court in December.
Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, has called Trump’s anti-trans obsession a “sad and cruel distraction,” but some Democrats in the legislature may still go along with a sports ban, the Bangor Daily News reported.
“Sad and cruel” also applies to the administration’s campaign to drive trans people out of the military. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, whose personal and professional failings have been well documented, leapt on the Supreme Court’s decision last week not to stand in Trump’s way even though appeals are still being heard in federal courts.
Hegseth issued a decree saying that trans personnel on active duty have a month and reservists 60 days to voluntarily leave. After that, he said, they will be subject to involuntary separation. More than 4,000 service members have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a senior defense official told The Washington Post.
“The haste with which the military is moving reflects a callous disregard for the brave troops who have put their lives on the line for this country,” said Jennifer Levi, the lead attorney in one of the cases still pending in the courts. “It is a disgrace.”
Bree Fram, a colonel in the U.S. Space Force who came out nearly a decade ago, told MSNBC: “When I or anyone else shows up and we do our duty, we wear our uniform. And the first thing that anyone notices about any of us when we walk into the room are the credentials and the responsibility and the capability that uniform shows. … They do not see a transgender person. And then we have the conversation that follows from that about the mission that we have and accomplishing what this nation needs of us."
Trump avoided the draft as a young man and has made a point of saying members of the military are “suckers.”
“Soaked in animus,” one federal judge called his ban.
Animus is the animating force behind right-wing efforts led by Trump to eradicate trans people from public life and erase us from scientific research. In Utah, the Department of Health and Human Services removed all links to data on the mental health condition of transgender students even as all other demographic data remains available, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Previous data showed that trans teens in Utah were three and a half times more likely than peers to consider suicide, and four and a half times more likely to suffer depression. Utah officials refused to explain the erasure initially, then used the disingenuous claim that the data, collected anonymously, was censored out of “privacy concerns.”
A damning peer-reviewed analysis of the UK’s Cass report, published Saturday, found “significant methodological problems” that “undermine the validity” of its discriminatory recommendations. The Cass report, harshly criticized by the British Medical Association and a host of medical professionals as a political document with a preordained outcome when it was released last year, was nonetheless lavishly praised by much of the UK media and by The New York Times and became an inflection point in anti-trans campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic.
The new analysis, published in BMC Medical Research Methodology, found “insufficient statistical rigor, unreliable datasets, claims presented without evidence, and misrepresentation of quotes from primary research participants.”
It goes on to say: “These flaws highlight a potential double standard present throughout the review and its subsequent recommendations, where evidence for gender-affirming care is held to a higher standard than the evidence used to support many of the report’s recommendations. Considering this, and the Cass report’s poor understanding of transgender identities and experiences, it is vital to question the integrity and validity of the review’s recommendations and the appropriateness of basing health policy on them.”
The Cass report was not peer-reviewed research, but rather a thrown-together hodgepodge of discriminatory claims. As unprofessional as Cass was, the Trump administration, led by the anti-science zealot and anti-vaccine campaigner Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, has compiled a document that emulates its bias.
The Trump-Kennedy report “misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said. “As we have seen with immunizations, bypassing medical expertise and scientific evidence has real consequences for the health of America's children. AAP was not consulted in the development of this report, yet our policy and intentions behind our recommendations were cited throughout in inaccurate and misleading ways. The report prioritizes opinions over dispassionate reviews of evidence.”
As you can see throughout today’s roundup, that’s been the hallmark of anti-trans campaigners in government and the media on both sides of the Atlantic: Misrepresenting facts in service of pushing bigoted opinions.