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Journalism of Courage
A week after conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was fatally shot at a college event in Utah, authorities charged Tyler Robinson, the alleged suspect in his murder, with seven counts, including aggravated murder.
Their case hinges on the purported texts sent by Robinson to his roommate, whom authorities have claimed is “transitioning from male to female” and was romantically involved with Robinson.
This development has fuelled popular speculation on the shooter’s motivation, especially since Kirk was shot moments after claiming that “too many” transgender people had committed mass shootings in the US. Kirk had long been a critic of gay and transgender rights, once calling a trans person an “abomination to god”.
In recent years, the issue of identity, specifically the rights of transgender or trans persons, has become a political flashpoint, despite less than 1 per cent of American adults identifying thus. Who are trans persons, and what has propelled transgender rights to the centre of political discourse? We explain.
Firstly, who is a transgender person?
According to the American Psychological Association, transgender is an umbrella term for those who have a gender identity that “does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth”.
It is important to note that sex refers to one’s biological status as male or female based on their anatomy, chromosomes, and hormone prevalence. Individuals can also be categorised as intersex if they are born with sex characteristics that don’t fit into typical binary notions of male or female, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights adds.
Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct that determines roles, behaviours, and attributes that society deems acceptable for men and women. Hence, one’s ‘gender identity’, or a person’s sense of self and their gender, may or may not correlate with the sex assigned at birth.
In the Indian context, a transgender person is defined as an individual whose “gender does not match the gender assigned at birth”, according to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019. The term may refer to trans men and trans women, persons with intersex variations, genderqueers, and persons with sociocultural identities, such as kinnar and hijra. This followed the landmark Supreme Court verdict in April 2014 that legally recognised transgender persons as the “third gender”, affirming the community’s Constitutional rights.
The fight for transgender rights in the US goes back centuries. In 1969, the LGBT community rioted at the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in New York City, against frequent raids by police officers. The protest is widely credited as a catalyst for the LGBT rights movement. But it wasn’t until 1975 that lawmakers recognised the need to protect the transgender community. The first piece of legislation came from the city of Minneapolis, which passed a law to prohibit discrimination against transgender people. This became a state law in Minnesota in 1993.
At the time, prevailing science diagnosed trans identity as an “illness”. In 1980, transsexualism (an outdated term today) was entered into the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). In 1994, the term was replaced by “gender identity disorder”. Nearly 20 years later, in 2013, the DSM-5 called it “gender dysphoria”, no longer treating gender non-conformity as a mental illness itself, but focusing the diagnosis instead on gender identity-related distress.
The 2010s also marked a rise in transgender representation. In 2010, Phyllis R Frye became the nation’s first openly transgender judge. Laverne Cox, star of Orange Is the New Black, made history in 2014 as the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine. The following year, Transparent, a series about a father coming out as transgender to his family, won the Golden Globe Award for Best TV Series – Comedy or Musical. In another landmark moment, athlete-turned-influencer Caitlyn Jenner publicly shared her transition in a Vanity Fair feature, bringing unprecedented visibility to the transgender community.
At the same time, a series of affirmative government actions gave protection to the transgender community. In 2014, the US Department of Justice extended the protections under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to transgender people. The provision prohibits discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin in workplaces. The Department of Health also allowed gender-affirming surgeries to be covered under the federal health insurance program.
2015 proved to be a watershed year for trans advocacy: The Obama administration decided to lift the ban on transgender people from serving in the military. That year, the Supreme Court also legalised same sex marriage in a watershed moment for LGBTQ+ history.
According to an analysis in The New York Times, the decision left Republicans without a unifying issue to rally their conservative, Catholic base. The party soon turned its focus to transgender rights, an area that aligned with broader denunciations of “wokeism” and scepticism toward medical science, from gender-affirming care to childhood vaccines.
Many conservatives viewed transgender identities as a direct challenge to the traditional family structure. This translated into heated debates over gender identity in school curriculum, access to bathrooms, and participation in women’s sports.
In 2016, North Carolina became the first state to introduce legislation that would mandate transgender people to access bathrooms based on their sex assigned at birth. The law was overturned next year, but it introduced the concept, commonly referred to as the ‘bathroom bill’ in public discourse.
Increased acceptance of restrictions
In the last two years, there has been a rise in anti-trans Bills in the US. In 2023, at least 20 states enacted bans on gender-transition care for minors. Florida and Missouri also introduced restrictions for adults by removing gender transition care from insurance coverage. Twenty-one states introduced laws banning transgender women from playing on women’s sports teams. The bathroom bill also made a comeback in at least six states, following the footsteps of Tennessee and Oklahoma, which had introduced these laws in 2021 and 2022, respectively. The Trans Legislation Tracker, an independent research organisation, said it was tracking 92 anti-trans Bills across the US in 2025.
These have corresponded with an increased public acceptance of restricting transgender rights. A February 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center found that only 56 per cent of the adults surveyed favour laws or policies that protect trans people from discrimination, a decline from 64 per cent in 2022.
US President Donald Trump’s stance on the subject has also evolved over the past decade. Before his first term, his stance was generally ambivalent, but not outright negative. As owner of the Miss Universe Organization, he overturned a decision that disqualified a transgender candidate from competing in the beauty pageant. As the Presidential candidate in 2016, he had criticised North Carolina’s bathroom law as “unnecessary”.
However, after he was elected as President in 2017, Trump took a more restrictive view of transgender rights. He revoked an Obama-era guidance to public schools to let transgender children use the bathroom of their choice. His ban on transgender service personnel in the military became effective in 2019.
He has doubled down on this stance in his second term, declaring this February: “America categorically rejects transgender lunacy.” Within days of entering office, he signed an executive order mandating that the US government recognise two genders only: male and female. He also repealed several Biden-era directives, which prevented government discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. He has reinstated bans on access from his first term, while his proposal to move transgender women to men’s prisons has been challenged in court.
