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- In Huge Lawsuit, Six CHLA Families Successfully Prevented The Trump Admin From Obtaining Info Of 3,000 Trans Kids

- Trump Pressures International Orgs To Disavow Trans Care, Social Transition Globally "At Any Age" With Funding Ban

- Nebraska Bills on Trans Bathroom Bans and Health Care Restrictions Scheduled For Hearings

- From Pharmacists to Therapists, Florida Could Prosecute “Aiding And Abetting” Trans Youth Care If New Bill Passes

- Trans Girl Scouts On Cookie List Sell 71,000 Boxes Of Cookies And Growing

- Lurie Children’s Rolls Back Trans Youth Care

- Is The Trump Administration Attempting A Backdoor Gun Ban For Trans Americans?

- Democrats Successfully Strip All Anti-Trans Riders From Final Appropriations Bills

- Dept. of Education Attacks Middle School For Supposedly Letting Trans Student Onto Co-Ed Cheer Squad

- Judge Kacsmaryk Compares Drag To Blackface, Allows College Campus Drag Ban In Texas

- GOP Congressman Calls McBride "Gentleman" During Her Tribute to Women—Including a Cancer Victim's Memory

- Even Barrett Seemed Alarmed by the Implications of Anti-Trans Arguments at SCOTUS

- "No Investigation Will Stop Us From Taking Care Of Our Kids": School Districts Respond To Latest Anti-Trans Threats From Trump Admin

- New Jersey Remains Among Last Blue States Without Trans Shield Law As Democrats Punt To Next Session

In Huge Lawsuit, Six CHLA Families Successfully Prevented The Trump Admin From Obtaining Info Of 3,000 Trans Kids

S. BAUM | JAN 27, 2026, 5:24 PM EST | SOURCE

Legal documents outline the impossible choices faced by families attacked by the Trump regime and stonewalled by CHLA&#8212;and how lawyers stepped up to stop them.

CHLA // Wikimedia Commons

When the federal government came knocking, the parents of six young, transgender patients who had received gender-affirming care at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles held the line alongside their lawyers. In doing so, they successfully kept the Trump regime from accessing sensitive medical information, including names, social security numbers, and addresses of over 3,000 transgender children.

The Department of Justice subpoenaed CHLA on July 9, 2025, court filings reviewed by Erin in the Morning reveal. The documents elucidate the novel ways lawyers and parents are waging legal battles against a hostile federal government; the minefield that parents of and providers for trans youth must constantly navigate; and how, while CHLA may not have handed over the records, they also left patients, parents and providers in the dark about the future of their own health and safety.

Most of all, however, the settlement lawyers achieved in this case help construct a blueprint that activists and advocates can use in other states, too. The Department has sent out more than 20 administrative subpoenas to health care institutions that provide or have provided some form of gender-affirming care to youth, including the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at CHLA.

The DOJ claims these institutions were targeted over supposed “healthcare fraud,” but this is widely seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to intimidate health care institutions serving trans people. A judge in a Massachusetts court struck down a similar subpoena against Boston Children’s Hospital in September 2025, declaring it was “issued for an improper purpose, motivated only by bad faith.”

The lawsuit against the federal government was filed in November on behalf of six families of trans youth patients who have at some point sought gender-affirming care at CHLA. They were represented by Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG), Western Center on Law and Poverty, and Impact Fund.

The subpoena was seemingly unprecedented in its sheer size and scope, but so was the settlement attorneys reached with the government. “This was a first-of-its-kind, historic class action motion to quash a subpoena,” Khadijah M. Silver, Director of Gender Justice and Health Equity at Lawyers for Good Government, told Erin in the Morning.

Class action lawsuits are typically retroactive. Using one to stop government overreach in the form of an investigation in-progress for thousands of people was practically “unheard of.”

“We had to think creatively,” Silver said.

“This ruling protects sensitive medical records [and] upholds the professional integrity of providers,” said Western Center’s Executive Director Cori Racela in a press release. “They’re entitled to safety and confidentiality.”

Whether CHLA can or will still have to fork over certain records to the Department of Justice is unclear. But at the very least, the records will be scrubbed of personally identifiable information—for all trans youth treated at CHLA, not just the few whose families went to court.

“Their bravery helps protect all of us from unlawful and discriminatory government intrusion into private health care decisions ” said Lori Rifkin, Litigation Director at Impact Fund.

Erin in the Morning also obtained a copy of the CHLA subpoena, which can be found here. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles did not respond to Erin in the Morning’s request for comment.

CHLA also didn’t respond to requests for comment from their own patients and staff, according to sources that spoke to Erin in the Morning, and according to parent testimonies in court filings.

Every single plaintiff said they had reached out multiple times, but CHLA has never publicly acknowledged they were sent a subpoena, even after the DOJ did.

The subpoena itself reads less like an investigation into supposed fraud and more like a legal “fishing expedition,” lawyers said. The day the subpoena was sent, CHLA shut down the Transyouth Center; meanwhile, some parents say they prepared to flee the country given the intensifying political attacks on trans youth.

“I worry the government will in fact put me in jail, take my child away, and send my child through the dangerous practice of conversion therapy,” one wrote in court documents.

The subpoena also solicited detailed patient notes from clinicians. “Nothing prevents the DOJ from using patient information to send FBI agents to interview patients, family members, providers and friends,” plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote. “In fact, DOJ has announced its intention to ‘share intelligence’ with state attorneys general and partner with them to ‘build cases against hospitals and practitioners.’”

The fear doesn’t come from nowhere. Trump issued a slate of January executive orders last year targeting trans youth’s care. In an April proclamation for “National Child Abuse Prevention Month,” he decreed that “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today is the sinister threat of gender ideology,” and that supportive parents of transgender children are abusers who ought to be prosecuted.

The Trump regime and other hostile state actors can be arbitrary and haphazard in their enforcement, however. Legal groups emphasize that states, not federal officials, are in charge of child abuse and custody cases.

Nonetheless, families also cited extrajudicial violence from hate groups and extremists. The hospital and others that provide gender-affirming care have already received bomb threats. Before the Transyouth Center shut its doors, anti-trans extremists and hate groups targeted the center’s inaugural medical director and her family, and CHLA had to arrange for her to get a private security detail. Some clinic staff reportedly began wearing body armor to work, as per court filings.

Of the 20 summer subpoenas that went out to gender-affirming care providers, fewer than half of them are publicly known. But in those we do know about, the courts have sided, at least in part, with hospitals, and declared the Department of Justice could not request identifiable information of patients.

In the case of CHLA, it wasn’t just the six families named in the lawsuit who fought back. Another parent, Justine—who asked to use a pseudonym so she wouldn’t out her trans child—was grateful for lawyers’ work and relieved that the DOJ settled, withdrawing the most dangerous aspects of its subpoena. But she still called CHLA “spineless” in the face of the hospital’s capitulation.

“My suspicion is [the DOJ] was like, ‘Well, screw it—none of these kids are getting care there anyway,’” she told Erin in the Morning. “Like, ‘We did what we came to do, which was shut the program down.’”

Justine said that autonomous groups of parents like her organized around the issue. They bombarded patient relations lines, sent form letters informed by other state battles on similar grounds, and pressured the Attorney General of California to take action and uphold state anti-discrimination laws, which should protect trans people’s equal access to health care.

Silver, of Lawyers for Good Government, said the settlement was also likely—at least in part—achieved through the collective action of the legal battles ongoing across the country. Trump’s war on trans kids comes with a literal price tag, as it turns out. Federal lawsuits both on the offensive and defensive are beginning to pile up for the Department of Justice.

“They’re dealing with dwindling resources,” Silver said.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/in-huge-lawsuit-six-chla-families at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

Trump Pressures International Orgs To Disavow Trans Care, Social Transition Globally "At Any Age" With Funding Ban

ERIN REED | JAN 26, 2026, 1:42 PM EST | SOURCE

The new rule would enact the "Mexico City Policy" towards what it calls "gender ideology."

Wikimedia Commons // WHO // Thorkild Tylleskar

On Monday, the Trump administration published a new rule in the Federal Register that could affect more than $30 billion in U.S. foreign aid distributed to international organizations. The funding—supporting hospital clinics, HIV/AIDS programs, educational institutions, and more—would be conditioned on sweeping new restrictions barring “social transition” and gender-affirming care at any age, including therapy and counseling. While the administration has already frozen large portions of foreign aid, this rule would formalize those efforts and dramatically expand their reach, with potentially severe consequences for transgender people worldwide as the administration escalates its campaign against transgender lives both at home and abroad.

The rule, titled “Combating Gender Ideology in Foreign Assistance,” would impose sweeping conditions on U.S. foreign aid that effectively bar recognition of transgender people and the care they need to live safely and equally. It is modeled loosely on the Mexico City Policy, which restricts aid to organizations that provide abortion services, but goes significantly further. Rather than targeting specific medical procedures, the rule would apply broadly to any school, hospital, or organization receiving U.S. funding—or funded indirectly through partner organizations. Those entities would be prohibited not only from providing gender-affirming care to youth and adults, but from “promoting” such care at any age, including “social transition” and even counseling that acknowledges it as an option. In practice, the rule would attempt to force groups receiving U.S. aid worldwide to adopt extreme discriminatory policies toward transgender people as a condition of continued funding.

“The Department does not believe taxpayer dollars should support sex-rejecting procedures, directly or indirectly for individuals of any age. A person’s body (including its organs, organ systems, and processes natural to human development like puberty) either healthy or unhealthy based on whether they are operating according to their biological functions,” reads the policy. It goes on to institute specific bans for any organization receiving federal dollars internationally. Bans include:

- “The provision or promotion of sex-rejecting procedures or sex-rejecting social transition”

- “Committing resources, financial or other to increase the availability, or use of

sex-rejecting procedures or sex-rejecting social transition”

- “Providing advice that sex-rejecting procedures or sex-rejecting social transition

is an available option for treatment of gender dysphoria, or referring for, or encouraging individuals to consider, such activities”

Several more similar restrictions are outlined.

The rules also include pass-through requirements, meaning the restrictions would apply not only to primary recipients of U.S. funding but to any downstream organizations they support. In practice, that could force schools in countries receiving U.S. assistance to adopt anti-transgender policies of their own. The same would be true for clinics, including those serving HIV/AIDS patients, which often also provide LGBTQ+ health care or counseling related to that care. Under the rule, access to U.S. funding would hinge on enforcing those exclusions throughout the entire funding chain.

"This is about weaponizing U.S. foreign assistance to promote an ideological agenda," says Keifer Buckingham, managing director for the Council for Global Equality, in an interview with NPR. "This really represents a culmination of the Trump administration's ideological war on LGBTQI+ people, marginalized populations, people of color, women and takes it to a whole other level, exporting what has been a domestic crusade abroad.”

The policies also represent a significant escalation into two areas transgender rights advocates in the United States have long feared could eventually be pursued domestically: restrictions on adult transgender health care and limits on social transition. While the early phases of the Republican Party’s broad assault on transgender rights focused largely on youth and sports, recent efforts have increasingly targeted adult care. Attempts to impose similar restrictions through federal funding bills were rebuffed by Democrats, but the Trump administration appears to view global aid policy as a more permissive testing ground—arguing that formal legislation is unnecessary and that it has broader constitutional latitude when acting abroad.

This strategy—using federal rulemaking and funding threats—has also been central to how the Trump administration has targeted transgender youth domestically. By focusing on hospitals and schools that rely on public funding, the administration has repeatedly threatened to pull that support unless institutions agree to impose sweeping restrictions on transgender people. That approach has already been successfully weaponized, contributing to several pediatric hospitals ending their gender-affirming care programs and extracting concessions from universities on issues such as transgender sports participation and bathroom access.

The rule now will go for public comment. It will then go into effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/trump-pressures-international-orgs at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

Nebraska Bills on Trans Bathroom Bans and Health Care Restrictions Scheduled For Hearings

S. BAUM | JAN 23, 2026, 3:03 PM EST | SOURCE

The bills, if passed, would be a devastating blow to trans-affirming health care for all ages. Plus: an anti-trans bathroom ban on state-run facilities.

Senator Kauth

On Jan. 28 and 29, Nebraska’s unicameral legislature will be hosting public hearings on a slate of anti-trans bills. Here, we’ll break down what the bills are, what they could do, and how you can get involved in the fight to stop them.

LB 730 - An Anti-Trans Bathroom Ban for State-Owned Facilities

“This bill would redefine ‘sex’ in state law using rigid, binary definitions that erase transgender and gender-expansive people, forcing state agencies to ignore their identities,” according to OutNebraska, a statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. “It would also ban trans and gender-expansive Nebraskans from using restrooms and locker rooms at state buildings and public schools, increasing discrimination, harassment, and barriers to daily life.”

Other impacted areas would include colleges and universities, highway rest stops, state parks and fairgrounds, and government buildings like the State Capitol.

This bill is among the first to be proposed by Nebraska State Senator Kathleen Kauth during this brief, 60-day legislative session otherwise addressing the state’s $471M budget deficit. She’s also behind the others in the trio.

LB 731 - Chilling Restrictions to Care At All Ages

“This bill aims to restrict gender-affirming care by making it legally and financially risky for doctors to provide it, allowing lawsuits up to 12 years later and framing care around regret and harm,” OutNebraska reports. “This would reduce access to medically necessary care for trans people of all ages by driving providers and insurers away from offering or covering gender-affirming treatment.

In other words, unlike most care, it seems gender-affirming care providers may not even need to commit malpractice to be subject to a lawsuit. Continuing to offer it would be seen as too risky, too costly. Offering it would become too risky.

When used in the past by other states, such legal maneuvers have caused an exodus of providers of gender-affirming care.

Such efforts “aim to make GAC providers ‘uninsurable’ as a backdoor method to reduce access to gender-affirming care for everyone—including adults,” according to a dispatch from Planned Parenthood earlier this year. It’s a page taken straight from the anti-abortion playbook. If you wrap health care in enough red tape, you can functionally shut down providers even without a formal ban on the books.

LB 732 - A Final Blow to Care for Trans Youth (and Some Adults, Too)

This provision would ban providers from prescribing hormone replacement therapy to trans patients under 19 years old, and enables the Attorney General to pursue legal action against medical experts. It carves out an exception, grandfathering in patients who began treatment before Oct. 1, 2023, but requires them to cease providing care before January 1, 2027.

“Instead of trusting doctors and families to make informed decisions, this bill adds more government interference into deeply personal health care choices,” a statement from the progressive group Nebraska Appleseed reads.

Activists are encouraging members of the community to contact their state lawmakers and express opposition, submit an online comment, or attend the hearings and stand against the bills. The hearing schedules can be found on the legislature’s website; these bills will be heard on Jan. 28 and 29. You can also follow along using the legislature’s live stream.

These proposals come on the heels of two state laws targeting the community over the last few years. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen approved Legislative Bill 89 in 2025. He also issued an executive order directing state agencies to enshrine sex assigned at birth as binary and immutable, and signed into law a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for those under 19, both back in 2023.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/nebraska-bills-on-trans-bathroom at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

From Pharmacists to Therapists, Florida Could Prosecute “Aiding And Abetting” Trans Youth Care If New Bill Passes

S. BAUM | JAN 22, 2026, 3:07 PM EST | SOURCE

These bills can be weaponized against providers or schools based on &#8220;suspicion, politics, or grievances from ideological extremists.&#8221;

Florida capital // Daniel Vorndran // Wikimedia Commons

The anti-trans bills passed in the Florida House and Senate this week—SB1010 and HB743—are groundbreaking for a few reasons, all of which have activists on the ground sounding the alarm bells and rallying the troops.

Described by activists as the “The More Lawsuits for Teachers & Doctors Bills,” the proposal opens up any health-care practitioner who “aids and abets” a minor pursuing gender affirming care to legal liability. And the bill’s vague and undefined standards embolden Attorney General James Uthmeier to further antagonize trans Floridians, their families, and the doctors who provide them with life-saving care.

Caption: HB0743

The bills passed in both House and Senate committees on Tuesday, with one Democrat—Senator Darryl Ervin Rouson—joining Republican colleagues to vote in favor of the measures, as per the committee vote record.

A policy brief from Equality Florida, shared with Erin in the Morning, argues the bills’ “deliberately” vague language could expose nearly every healthcare worker, from lab techs to therapists, to civil liability or even felony charges for routine care—like counseling, drawing blood, or filling a prescription.

It also targets anyone who is “an employee of the state.” This most notably applies to public school teachers under the guise of “parental rights” over everything from class curriculums to acknowledging a trans student’s name and pronouns.

The lack of guardrails or clear standards also invites selective enforcement—enabling the AG to antagonize providers or schools based on “suspicion, politics, or grievances from ideological extremists,” Equality Florida said.

Furthermore, the bills establish private causes of action, allowing trans patients and their families to sue doctors for physical and “emotional” damages with a statute of limitations as high as 20 years. Fines could be as high as $100,000 per count; the mere threat of such extensive legal liability is enough to cause some professionals to withdraw care completely.

“Never before has state law threatened even mental health support for transgender youth, like the sweeping and ambiguous language of this bill could,” said Jon Harris Maurer, Public Policy Director of Equality Florida. “Lawmakers continually seek to replace parents, doctors, and therapists in caring for these minors.”

While the focus is indeed on youth, the medical chilling effect of bills like this impacts everyone.

Vance Ahrens, a trans Floridian and Navy Corps veteran, spoke out against the bill at the hearing. A mother and grandmother, she’s struggled to access gender-affirming care due to increased regulations in the state, including those imposed on adults.

Florida law now requires that gender-affirming care be provided only by a physician, in-person, with a signed consent form. This strips nurse practitioners and telehealth providers of their ability to offer such care.

It might seem like innocuous red tape—but in practice, it causes serious disruptions. And that’s the point.

“I saw a nurse practitioner for my care in 2023 and lost that access,” Ahrens told Erin in the Morning. “One of the doctors I was able to get an appointment with just before the bill became law called and canceled my initial appointment because they were no longer providing gender-affirming care.”

Similar bills have been passed in other states too, including Arkansas and Indiana. But in some ways, Florida’s “aiding and abetting” law is uniquely poised to empower one person, activists say: Attorney General James Uthmeier, who has used his seat to target dissidents and stoke fear to the point of overcompliance.

The DeSantis appointee has become a leading innovator in using the office of the AG to chip away at Floridians’ human rights and liberties. Most notoriously, he was the architect behind the newly-established concentration in the Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” for migrant detainees.

Meanwhile, his attacks on trans rights have been a convenient excuse to bolster the powers of the Attorney General, according to some critics.

During this week’s House hearing, Democratic Representative Kelly Skidmore eviscerated the “aiding and abetting” bill—and Uthmeier—in no uncertain terms.

“This bill,” she told the House, “is about giving a person who misappropriated somewhere between 10 and $35 million of taxpayer money—and I’m being kind—additional authority to go after physicians.”

The Chair attempts to interrupt her, but Skidmore bites back.

“This is a terrible bill,” she said. “It is about empowering an individual who doesn’t deserve it. Everyone should vote ‘no.’”

Even though the bill made it through committees, there’s still a long way to go before the bill becomes a law. The fight isn’t over—a final vote is yet to come.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/from-pharmacists-to-therapists-florida at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

Trans Girl Scouts On Cookie List Sell 71,000 Boxes Of Cookies And Growing

ERIN REED | JAN 22, 2026, 2:12 PM EST | SOURCE

This is the 5th year EITM has maintained a list of trans girl scouts to buy cookies from.

Melissa Doroquez // Creative Commons

If you are a regular reader of Erin In The Morning, you are likely familiar with the transgender Girl Scout cookie list. The idea first took shape five years ago, as the earliest coordinated attacks against transgender youth began to spread across the country. Watching trans kids absorb that first wave of cruelty, I had a simple thought: let’s make a few of their days better—and what better way than by finding transgender Girl Scouts and buying a whole lot of cookies from them. In the years since, the list has grown steadily, connecting more scouts with more supporters. Today, Erin In The Morning is proud to announce that scouts on the list have sold more than 71,000 boxes of cookies—and counting, a record for the trans girl scout list.

While it’s impossible to know exactly how many sales can be traced directly to our reporting and the list itself, we do know its reach has been enormous. On Facebook alone, the list reached more than 2 million readers, with similar viral spread on Instagram and Bluesky. Each year, I begin tallying cookie sales about halfway through the ordering season, tracking how much support flows to scouts on the list. This morning, the total stopped me short: 71,254 cookies sold so far, with 189 scouts participating. And with weeks still left in the season, that number is certain to climb even higher.

Those purchases have had a tangible impact on the lives of transgender Girl Scouts. In 2025, the scouts on the list used the funds to attend the National Girl Scout Convention, go camping, and support trips as far afield as Japan and Costa Rica. This year, their goals are just as wide-ranging, with scouts hoping to see Broadway shows, support unhoused people in their communities, or travel to Niagara Falls. Taken together, the purchases have gone a long way toward helping these transgender Girl Scouts reach goals that might otherwise have been out of reach.

More than the numbers, families have told us how deeply the response has resonated with their children. Several parents report that their scouts were shocked—and overjoyed—by the level of support they received. Transgender youth in the United States are under extraordinary pressure right now: many have lost access to health care as hospitals capitulate to the Trump administration, while others face constant hostility from political leaders in their own communities. Again and again, families and scouts themselves say the cookie drive has become a rare source of joy, a reminder that people across the country see them, value them, and care about their lives.

If you’re still waiting to place your Girl Scout cookie order, there is still time—and still need. Dozens of transgender scouts are continuing to work toward their goals, many of them hoping for just a few more orders to get there. Seek out a scout who has not yet seen as much support and order a box—or ten. If cookies aren’t what you need, consider donating instead. And above all, thank you. The scouts are, quite simply, over the moon.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/trans-girl-scouts-on-cookie-list at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

Lurie Children’s Rolls Back Trans Youth Care

S. BAUM | JAN 21, 2026, 7:54 PM EST | SOURCE

Lurie was one of six hospitals targeted by the HHS last week over the provision of legal and medically necessary care for trans patients.

Lurie Children’s Hospital // Laura Brown NMH Communications

Editors Note: A previous version of this story referred to protests. Those protests actually happened last year in response to a separate act of capitulation by the Hospital on trans youth surgical care.

Lurie—the only independent, research-driven children’s hospital in Illinois—has announced it will no longer prescribe life-saving puberty blockers and hormones to trans minors at its pediatric gender clinic, unless they are an existing patient already on these regimens.

In a statement shared with Erin in the Morning, the hospital cited federal threats as the catalyst for the changes. “As we await Federal court rulings and assess the rapidly evolving legal landscape, at this time, Lurie Children’s will not initiate gender-affirming medications for patients under age 18 who have not previously been treated with these therapies by our team,” the statement reads.

“Actions by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including their announcement on January 15th of a referral for an investigation of Lurie Children’s, have resulted in this decision,” it continued. “This threatens our ability to care for all of our patients.”

But community activists challenged this narrative. “Let us be clear: this is pre-compliance,” Trans Up Front Illinois, a grassroots advocacy group, said in its own statement on Jan. 20. “No hospital system has lost federal funding. No court has ruled. No law has changed. What we are witnessing is the result of pressure designed to intimidate health care providers and families before any enforcement has occurred.”

Lurie was one of six hospitals targeted by HHS General Counsel Mike Stuart last week over the provision of legal and medically necessary care for trans youth. The Jan. 15 announcement also singled out hospitals in Delaware, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York and Oregon.

A tweet by Mike Stuart from Jan 15.

Federal officials say they’re taking aim at hospitals providing gender-affirming care to trans youth (which the right is now calling “sex-rejecting procedures,” in an attempt to erase trans identities). It’s not the first time the HHS has referred trans-friendly hospitals to the Office of the Inspector General to intimidate and harass providers. Denver Health and Children’s Hospital Colorado also recently scaled back care because the HHS “referred” them for “investigation” to the OIG.

Lurie already stopped providing gender-affirming surgeries for trans patients under age 19 in February, after President Donald Trump signed an anti-trans health care executive order. However, executive orders do not hold the weight of law, and that rollback, too, was widely seen as complying in advance in an attempt to avoid costly legal battles.

“Not only may this decision represent a failure to provide medically appropriate care to its patients, but we are also exploring whether Lurie Children’s may be in violation of the law by potentially denying care to trans patients,” Brian Johnson, CEO of Equality Illinois, said at the time. “Gender-affirming care is essential, evidence-based, and life-saving, and any rollback of such services puts vulnerable youth at risk.”

“Many of Lurie’s patients were referred for surgery to nearby Northwestern Memorial Hospital,” WBEZ Chicago reports, “which then canceled their appointments.”

Providers around the country have also followed suit, and in many cases, it has thrust trans patients into chaos and disarray.

There are initiatives dedicated to helping families impacted by care bans and pediatric gender clinic closures such as the Trans Youth Emergency Project, Trans Up Front’s Gender Affirming Care Navigation System, and Elevated Access—plus fact sheets compiled by organizations including the ACLU and Lawyers for Good Government.

For many, Lurie’s retreat was seen as a long time coming. The Department of Health and Human Services has launched a full-scale assault on gender-affirming care for youth. While no federal law banning gender-affirming care has been passed, the agency is attempting to inflate its own power and authority by cracking down on it anyway, using federal funding as a carrot on a stick—essentially holding all patients hostage.

Similarly, Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego announced Tuesday it would no longer provide “medical interventions, procedures and prescriptions” to transgender patients under age 18 seeking gender-affirming care.

A Rady spokesperson said continuity of care would otherwise “affect our role and responsibilities as a provider participating in federal programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, which are essential,” as per The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Rady did not respond to Erin in the Morning’s request for comment. Transfamily Support Services, a California-based trans advocacy group, will be leading a protest outside of Rady this Saturday at 11 a.m.

Meanwhile, proposals for anti-trans federal funding cuts to hospitals are still hanging in the balance. The Federal Register is still open for public comment until 5 p.m. on Feb. 17. You can submit input here and here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/protests-erupt-in-chicago-after-lurie at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

Is The Trump Administration Attempting A Backdoor Gun Ban For Trans Americans?

ERIN REED | JAN 21, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | SOURCE

Reporting indicates that the Trump admin is considering requiring gun applicants list their "biological sex at birth," which could put them in a bureaucratic catch-22 if it does not match their ID.

Wikimedia Commons

On Tuesday, Jan. 20, reporters at The Washington Post revealed that the Trump administration is planning sweeping changes to federal firearms regulations and forms. While most of the proposed revisions are framed as expanding access to guns, one provision immediately raised alarms among transgender legal experts. The Justice Department is expected to alter the firearm purchase form to require applicants to list their “biological sex at birth” rather than their gender identity—a seemingly technical change that could function as a de facto ban on firearm access for transgender Americans.

The form, ATF Form 4473, otherwise known as the “firearms transaction record,” is the federal doccument that must be filled out for every firearm purchase from a federal firearms licensee, which includes gun stores, pawn shops, and most retailers. As of now, the form allows applicants to list their gender identity, including a nonbinary gender identity. If the form changes, however, applicants will be expected to list their assigned sex at birth. This could create a bureaucratic headache for transgender people and potentially serious legal issues, placing them in a catch-22.

Consider two scenarios if such regulations take effect when a transgender woman attempts to purchase a firearm. In the first, she complies with federal guidance and lists “male” on the required form. When the dealer then verifies her government-issued ID—as required by law—and the sex marker reads female, the dealer may lawfully refuse the sale, unable to confirm that the form was completed truthfully and accurately. In the second scenario, if she lists “female,” she risks being accused of making a false statement on a federal form—an offense punishable by up to five years in prison. Either way, the result is the same: the transgender applicant is effectively barred from purchasing a gun.

“Whether that rises to the level of materiality for a criminal charge compared to say, using a false name, is up the courts but the mere possibility is enough to chill people from purchasing a gun. If they fill it out with sex assigned at birth, they could be denied for not having matching information,” Alejandra Caraballo, a Harvard Law instructor and civil rights activist, told Erin in the Morning. “I expect to see more instances of this with the federal government weaponizing forms and applications to force trans people to out themselves or even revert state ids to get basic services. This already happened with immigration forms and FAFSA. We could see this expand into welfare programs such as Medicaid, ACA exchange plans etc. Trans people must out themselves or risk losing program benefits or even face the potential of criminal charges for listing their gender identity.”

While blue states have shown a willingness to sue the Trump administration to protect transgender Americans, it remains unclear whether that resolve will extend to firearm regulations. Many Democratic attorneys general support strict gun-licensing requirements, and overlapping state laws—particularly mismatches between state and federal forms—could further complicate any legal challenge. Those dynamics may make the proposed requirements more difficult to legally combat even as their impact on transgender people becomes increasingly clear.

The latest push appears to trace back to recent efforts by far-right influencers advocating restrictions on gun ownership for transgender Americans. In September, Daily Wire reporter Mary Olohan reported that the Justice Department was considering “banning guns for transgenders,” quoting a source who said, “we’re not playing semantics with words like dysphoria. We’re talking about trannies, and we don’t think they should have guns.” That reporting was later corroborated by The Washington Post and CNN. While little changed in the immediate aftermath, months later it appears the administration may have identified a regulatory pathway to impose such restrictions.

For now, the proposal remains in its earliest stages and has not yet been formally submitted as a federal rule. That process is lengthy, opening the door to public comment, legal challenges, and potential delays before any change could take effect. Still, if the administration ultimately moves to restrict gun access for transgender Americans, an unresolved question looms: whether the country’s most powerful gun rights organizations will step in to defend transgender gun owners. When the proposal surfaced previously, the NRA publicly condemned it—an unexpected moment of alignment that surprised many transgender advocates. This time, however, the mechanism under consideration is far subtler, potentially designed to sidestep that opposition.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/is-the-trump-administration-attempting at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

Democrats Successfully Strip All Anti-Trans Riders From Final Appropriations Bills

ERIN REED | JAN 20, 2026, 4:12 PM EST | SOURCE

The HHS and Education bills once contained the most sweeping anti-trans provisions in congressional history. Now they contain none.

Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash

Early Tuesday morning, final appropriations bills for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education—and related agencies—were released, marking the last major funding measures to be negotiated in the aftermath of the record-breaking government shutdown fight in 2025. That standoff featured multiple appropriations bills loaded with anti-transgender riders and poison pills for Democrats, ultimately ending in a short-term continuing resolution that punted many of those provisions to the end of January. While other “minibus” packages funding individual agencies moved forward, the Education and HHS bills were conspicuously absent, as they contained some of the most sweeping and consequential anti-trans riders ever proposed in Congress. Now, with the final bills released, it is clear that no anti-transgender riders were included—meaning transgender people will largely be spared new congressional attacks through most of 2026 should they pass as-is.

As the government shut down on Oct. 1, the state of appropriations bills needed to reopen the federal government for any extended period was extraordinarily dire for transgender people. Dozens of anti-transgender riders were embedded across House appropriations bills, even as those provisions were largely absent from the Senate’s versions. The riders appeared throughout nearly every funding measure, from Commerce, Justice, and Science to Financial Services and General Government. The most extreme provisions, however, were concentrated in the House HHS and Education bills, including language barring “any federal funds” from supporting gender-affirming care at any age and threatening funding for schools that support transgender students. Taken together, those measures would have posed a sweeping threat to transgender people’s access to education and health care nationwide.

Those fears eased somewhat when the government reopened under a short-term continuing resolution funding operations through the end of January. In the months that followed, Democrats notched a series of incremental victories for transgender people, advancing multiple appropriations “minibus” packages that stripped out anti-trans riders as the government was funded piece by piece. As amendment after amendment fell away, those wins grew more substantial, including the removal of a proposed ban on gender-affirming medical care from the NDAA—even after it had passed both the House and Senate. Still, the most consequential question remained unresolved: what would ultimately happen to the high-impact anti-trans provisions embedded in the HHS and Education bills.

Now, the package has been released—and for the moment, transgender people can breathe again. The final HHS and Education bills contain no anti-transgender provisions: no ban on hospitals providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth, no threats to strip funding from schools that support transgender students or allow them to use the bathroom, and no mandate forcing colleges to exclude transgender students from sports or activities like chess or esports. The bills are strikingly clean. As such, they avert yet another protracted shutdown fight in which transgender people are once again turned into political bargaining chips—and, at least for now, remove Congress as the immediate vehicle for new federal attacks, should they pass as-is.

When asked about the successful stripping of anti-trans provisions, a staffer for Representative Sarah McBride tells Erin In The Morning, “Rep. McBride works closely with her colleagues every day to defend the rights of all her constituents, including LGBTQ people across Delaware. In the face of efforts by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress to roll back health care and civil rights, she was proud to work relentlessly with her colleagues in ensuring these funding bills did not include anti-LGBTQ provisions. It takes strong allies in leadership and on committees to rein in the worst excesses of this Republican trifecta, Rep. McBride remains grateful to Ranking Members DeLauro, Murray, and Democratic leadership for prioritizing the removal of these harmful riders.”

This does not mean that transgender people will not be targeted with policies and rules that affect them in all areas of life. The Trump administration has acted without regard to law in forcing bans on sports, pulling funding from schools and hospitals, and banning passport gender marker updates. The Supreme Court has been increasingly willing to let the office of the presidency under Trump do whatever it would like to transgender people. However, the lack of passage of bills targeting transgender people means that these attacks will only last for as long as we have Trump in the White House, and a future president should hopefully be easily able to reverse the attacks.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/democrats-successfully-strip-all at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

Dept. of Education Attacks Middle School For Supposedly Letting Trans Student Onto Co-Ed Cheer Squad

S. BAUM | JAN 20, 2026, 1:22 PM EST | SOURCE

&#8220;Our District has not violated any laws,&#8221; the Superintendent said.

Unnamed MU Photographer // Creative Commons

A Maine middle school cheer squad is facing the wrath of the Trump regime for reportedly allowing a trans student to join its co-ed team.

Last week, the Department of Education (ED) descended upon 18 educational institutions, announcing in a press release from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) that they are investigating everything from K-12 school districts, to college sports teams, to state departments that may allow “students to participate in sports based on their ‘gender identity,’ not biological sex.”

Soon after the OCR announcement, the Bangor Daily News reports, Superintendent Michael Hammer of Maine’s Regional School District #19 released a letter firing back at ED. In the case of RSU 19’s Nokomis Regional Middle School in Newport, Maine, ED claimed someone assigned male at birth was allowed to compete on the cheer team and use the women’s locker rooms, as per Hammer.

“The complaint alleges that the District discriminated against female students on the basis of sex by allowing a male student to join the girls’ cheerleading team and use the girls’ bathroom and locker room at Nokomis Regional Middle School,” Hammer wrote. “We were surprised to receive the letter from OCR because we have no record of having received any complaints about our cheerleading program.” He emphasized that the cheer squad is co-ed, non-competitive, and open to any student. Nobody is “cut” from the team.

“[I]t is hard to understand how participation by any student, regardless of their gender or gender identity[,] would discriminate against any other student,” Hammer said. Erin in the Morning was unable to reach a spokesperson for the district for further comment.

Like almost all of the attacks on trans athletes, the press release focused on “safety” in women’s sports—a common and contrived talking point for the right, whose concern for students and women’s athletics seems to evaporate when it comes to issues like addressing the gender wage gap in sports or supporting student survivors of sexual assault.

The Department’s investigations don’t name trans women as the explicit target of the OCR blitz, but that’s mostly because the federal government wants to avoid acknowledging the existence of trans people at all. They use transphobic epithets to get their message across, referring to trans teenage girls as “biological men.”

But RSU 19 and many of the other institutions on the list—such as Santa Monica College in California or Foxborough Public Schools in Massachusetts—are in states with robust equal rights protections for trans people, which would in theory penalize academic institutions for discriminating against their transgender athletes.

In other words, the federal government is investigating schools for allegedly following their state’s laws. There is no federal law requiring schools to ban trans athletes from competing on the team that aligns with their gender.

It’s unclear at this time whether even this is true, and whether there is or ever was a trans student on the cheer squad—cisgender women and intersex people are also common casualties in the right’s war on gender. The anti-trans craze has caused mass harassment campaigns and violence against transgender and cisgender students alike.

Hammer added that RSU 19 does not have a formal policy on gender-based bathroom usage, and that while they will comply with officials conducting the investigation, the district is “confident that when it is completed, it will be determined that our District has not violated any laws.”

Newport, Maine, is a town of just over 3,000 people. It is a distant rural school serving 500 kids from fifth to eighth grade; about half of the students in the district are classified as economically disadvantaged.

Last year, the regime pulled school lunch funding for low-income children in the state over the state’s refusal to comply in advance with anti-trans laws, sparking a lawsuit. The suit was settled in May—federal agencies unfroze the school lunch money, and Maine kept their anti-discrimination laws intact.

CAPTION: A letter sent out by Maine Regional School District 19.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/dept-of-education-attacks-middle at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

Judge Kacsmaryk Compares Drag To Blackface, Allows College Campus Drag Ban In Texas

ERIN REED | JAN 19, 2026, 2:42 PM EST | SOURCE

The judge also ruled that drag shows do not convey any message about gender subversion, exempting it from first amendment protections.

Judge Kacsmaryk // Cspan

On Saturday, Jan. 17, far-right judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued one of his most extreme rulings yet, finding that West Texas A&M can ban drag performances on campus. In reaching that conclusion, Kacsmaryk discarded long-standing First Amendment precedent and made demeaning assertions about drag itself, including a comparison to “blackface.” The 46-page ruling is riddled with strained reasoning and misapplications of law and, unless overturned by a higher court, will continue to prevent the campus LGBTQ+ organization Spectrum WT from holding its drag show on campus—an event that raises funds for LGBTQ+ suicide prevention hotlines.

Spectrum WT is an LGBTQ+ student organization at West Texas A&M. The group previously held drag performances on campus, including in 2019, without incident. That changed in 2023, when University President Walter Wendler announced a ban on drag shows, writing in a campuswide email that the university would “not host a drag show on campus” because, he said, “every human being is created in the image of God, and therefore, a person of dignity.” Wendler went on to justify the ban by characterizing drag as “misogynistic,” “derisive,” “divisive,” and “demoralizing,” even comparing it to blackface. He concluded by writing:

“A harmless drag show? Not possible. I will not appear to condone the diminishment of any group at the expense of impertinent gestures toward another group for any reason, even when the law of the land appears to require it. Supporting The Trevor Project is a good idea. My recommendation is to skip the show and send the dough.”

(The full email is attached at the end of the story)

The dispute has since evolved into a protracted legal battle winding its way through the courts. Judge Kacsmaryk first denied a preliminary injunction, allowing the ban to take effect. That decision was briefly reversed by a divided panel of the Fifth Circuit, before the full court vacated the panel ruling and opted to rehear the case en banc. Now, following a full bench trial, Kacsmaryk has issued a final ruling on the merits, holding that West Texas A&M may ban drag performances on campus.

While the decision permitting a campus drag ban is itself extreme and departs from precedent in similar cases nationwide, Judge Kacsmaryk’s reasoning is particularly egregious. In his ruling, Kacsmaryk accepts University President Walter Wendler’s framing wholesale, concluding that the ban is justified because Wendler likens drag to blackface and claims it “mocks” women. Embracing that comparison, Kacsmaryk writes that “the only difference is that one performance is ‘abhorred by cultural elites’ while the other is in vogue—at least for now.”

This framing, however, fundamentally misunderstands both drag and its comparison to blackface. Blackface was created by white performers to dehumanize a marginalized group and reinforce racial subjugation. Drag, by contrast, emerged from marginalized communities themselves as a form of self-expression, community building, and survival. It has existed across cultures and centuries, from Shakespearean theater to Harlem ballroom culture to contemporary performance. In its modern form, drag conveys meaning about gender identity and expression, deliberately subverting gendered expectations around clothing and performance—placing it squarely within the realm of activity protected by the First Amendment.

Judge Kacsmaryk also sidesteps these First Amendment protections in a separate section of his ruling, where he claims—without explanation, by fiat alone—that drag carries no discernible message. During the proceedings, Spectrum’s former president testified that drag performances convey messages including “bending gender norms,” among others. Kacsmaryk dismisses that testimony, writing that it is unclear whether any drag performances would feature cross-dressing that communicates such a message—a conclusion that requires a willful disregard for what drag is and how it functions. He further asserts that “this court cannot find that there is great likelihood that this message would be understood by those who viewed it,” effectively imagining a world in which audiences attend drag shows without recognizing their commentary on gender norms.

Kacksmaryk ruling that drag does not carry a message.

This is not the first time Judge Kacsmaryk has issued a controversial and legally dubious ruling targeting LGBTQ+ people or advancing far-right causes. His record includes a 2022 decision opposing workplace protections for LGBTQ+ employees, a 2024 ruling striking down Biden administration Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, a 2025 decision siding with employees who misgender colleagues and restrict bathroom access based on gender identity, and his widely criticized 2023 attempt to suspend FDA approval of the abortion medication mifepristone. None of this is coincidental. Before his appointment to the bench—where he continues to preside over cases of national consequence—Kacsmaryk served as deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute, a conservative Christian legal organization that routinely litigates against LGBTQ+ rights.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling stands in sharp tension with recent decisions elsewhere in the country. In June, the 11th Circuit found that drag bans create a “chilling effect” on protected speech, whereas a federal judge issued an injunction against Montana’s drag ban after concluding the law violated the First Amendment by censoring expression without proving obscenity. Even courts that have allowed drag restrictions to proceed have emphasized that such bans may be enforced only against obscene performances—not family-friendly shows. Whether this ruling endures may now hinge on the Fifth Circuit’s pending en banc hearing on drag bans. After previously blocking similar restrictions, the court vacated its own decision to rehear the issue before its full, heavily conservative bench—a showdown that will unfold this week and could determine whether Kacsmaryk’s reasoning holds permanently in states belonging to the circuit.

See the full decision here:

Dragdecision

749KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

See Walter Wendler’s full email banning drag on campus here:

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/judge-kacsmaryk-compares-drag-to at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

GOP Congressman Calls McBride "Gentleman" During Her Tribute to Women—Including a Cancer Victim's Memory

S. BAUM | JAN 16, 2026, 1:54 PM EST | SOURCE

A Georgia Republican couldn&#8217;t resist turning the moment honoring important Delaware women into a transphobic soundbite for the anti-trans Twitter mob.

Rep. Clyde // CSPAN

What do an esteemed military chaplain, a beloved daughter lost to ovarian cancer, Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride, and an entrepreneurial small business owner have in common?

All are women owed deference on the floor of the House this week. However, Andrew Clyde—a Republican from Georgia appointed the Speaker pro tempore during a short absence of Speaker Mike Johnson—used his brief turn at the podium to demean them, turning a moment meant to honor women into a display of calculated disrespect aimed at Congresswoman Sarah McBride and designed to score cheap political points.

The Jan. 13 morning hour of debate in the House began when the Speaker, a congressman representing Georgia’s 9th congressional district, called McBride to the podium—introducing the co-chair of the Equality Caucus with a masculine honorific as the “gentleman from Delaware.” McBride had been called to recognize esteemed Delawarean women.

McBride commended Rev. Dr. A’Shellarien Addison for her promotion within the Delaware National Guard—the first woman chaplain in Delaware Guard history. She also paid homage to the closing of GrassRoots, a local small business chain founded by two women in the 1970s, Marylin Dickey and Vonna Taylor.

Finally, she recognized Dwayne and Karen Johnson, who lost their 26-year-old daughter Faith to ovarian cancer. They turned their grief into life-saving medical advocacy, helping to usher in a law that required health insurance companies in their state to cover yearly ovarian cancer screenings.

“We owe it to Faith and families across the country to keep pushing for early detection,” McBride concluded.

She left the podium without incident and did not reply to the Speaker’s comment. In turn, the congressman has either posted or reposted transphobic content about Sarah McBride half a dozen times since the seconds-long incident went down on Jan. 13.

Rep. Clyde posting spree

The congressman in question is otherwise known for barricading the doors on Jan. 6 to stave off “the mob who tried to enter” the Capitol, which he also described as a “normal tourist visit” with “no insurrection.”

It’s not the first time McBride has had to deal with hate and harassment on the House floor. In February of last year, a representative from Illinois’s 15th congressional district used masculine terms to address McBride. Republicans subsequently went on a public hate campaign because the congressional record fixed the incorrect language to accurately refer to McBride.

Then, in March, Texas Republican and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe Chair Keith Self addressed the congresswoman as “Mr. McBride.”

“Thank you, Madam Chair,” McBride replied.

She seemed prepared to move on and do her job, but her Democratic colleague from Massachusetts, Congressman Bill Keating, wouldn’t let yet another jab at her very existence pass by unchallenged. Keating and Self got into a heated exchange. “Mr. Chairman, you are out of order,” Keating said. “Have you no decency?”

Republican lawmakers also passed a Capitol anti-trans bathroom ban aimed explicitly at keeping McBride out of the women’s restroom—although all Capitol Hill visitors and staff have also been caught in the dragnet. McBride agreed to follow the rules, but denounced the effort as a ploy “to distract from the real issues facing this country.”

This didn’t stop South Carolina’s Rep. Nancy Mace, who regularly hurls slurs across the House floor, and Colorado’s Rep. Lauren Boebert, Mace’s hateful counterpart who was ejected from a theatre for behaving inappropriately with her date, from deputizing themselves as the bathroom police. In Jan. 2025, they accosted a woman they believed to be Congresswoman McBride in a Capitol Hill bathroom.

In actuality, the individual in question was an unsuspecting cisgender woman, caught by surprise when she was suddenly thrust into the crosshairs of the GOP’s anti-trans attacks.

Update: Congresswoman McBride sent the following statement: “I didn’t hear the remark and I still don’t know who Rep. Clyde is.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/gop-congressman-calls-mcbride-gentleman at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

Even Barrett Seemed Alarmed by the Implications of Anti-Trans Arguments at SCOTUS

S. BAUM | JAN 15, 2026, 5:01 PM EST | SOURCE

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who penned what might be the most virulently anti-trans Supreme Court document in history, had &#8220;concerns&#8221; about how Hecox and BPJ might impact cisgender women.

Wikimedia Commons

Some transphobes might be on the cusp of understanding what the trans community has been saying for decades now: anti-trans extremism hurts everyone, transgender and cisgender people alike.

Realistically speaking, it’s doubtful these human rights concerns will be enough to tip the scales in favor of progress for the trans community at SCOTUS. We are staring down the barrel of Supreme Court decisions in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ, both of which follow young trans women who had the audacity to want to play sports with the other girls at school.

The decisions could potentially shape how Americans of any sex or gender are treated across all aspects of life—not just trans people, and not just in sports.

“Even Barrett was a bit alarmed about what a broad decision here could do for women,” Alejandra Caraballo, a Harvard Law instructor and civil rights activist, told Erin in the Morning. “It could result in segregation of women in a host of other areas of public life under the rationale that biologically, men are different and they need to be separated.” Underlying this is the assumption there is a universal scientific or legal definition enshrining two binary sexes, which there is not.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020, previously penned one of the most conservative anti-trans documents in SCOTUS history in an even further right-wing concurring opinion for Skrmetti. In this case, however, she seems to at the very least acknowledge that anti-trans policies mandating sex segregation inevitably harm cis women, too.

“Your whole position in this case depends on there being inherent differences,” the Justice told the anti-gender rights camp. “I’d be a little bit concerned about what the ramifications of that might be.”

What if, for example, a state produced evidence that women outperform men in math—that women’s good grades put men at a disadvantage academically? Would women need to be culled from advanced math; would there be a required men’s-only remedial option? “Seems to me like there would be some risk on your understanding that that would be okay,” Barrett remarked.

And as far as competitions go, liberal Justice Elena Kagan added: “How about chess club?”

West Virginia Solicitor General Michael Williams, arguing in favor of the state in BPJ, said this would “fail” to require sex segregation “because there’s an actual lack of evidence of meaningful physiological differences that are reflected in the existence of the express regulations in the athletics context.” (Note: There has nonetheless been a successful push to ban trans women from many gendered chess tournaments, as Erin in the Morning has extensively reported on since 2023.)

Beyond that, despite the snipers atop the roof of the Supreme Court on Tuesday, who oversaw protestors and counterprotestors alike, the tenor inside of SCOTUS was more cordial—on its face. Lawyers exchanged pleasantries. Justices asked them questions about “your friends on the other side.” At least one of the trans youths who fascists have scapegoated to tear apart the country sat quietly as her humanity was interrogated in front of the world.

“A lot of people want to read hope into the justices’ generally more conciliatory demeanor on Tuesday but I fear we cannot afford that luxury right now,” Khadijah M. Silver, Director of Gender Justice and Health Equity at Lawyers for Good Government, told Erin in the Morning.

“We must prepare for a world where whatever decision, however narrow on its face, is read expansively by judges that have been placed in their roles explicitly to erase our legal right to exist,” they said. “This has never been a strict constitutional or statutory inquiry but instead a political one.”

Some expert spectators latched on to milquetoast comments by the likes of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who told the lawyers representing a trans athlete: “I think one of the themes of your argument has been the more people learn, the more they’ll agree with you.”

But this is arguably an off-hand comment at best, and a condescension at worst—a post-Skrmetti affirmation that the court does not see trans people as a distinct class worth protecting. During questioning, many Justices refused to recognize the long and storied history of legal discrimination against the trans community in the United States. Conservative Justices suggested that, because most anti-trans laws do not actually use the word “transgender,” that they can’t possibly be a symptom of discrimination against trans people.

We’ve seen the fallout of this mental-legal gymnastics before; as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion on Skrmetti, this line of thinking was used to justify racial segregation by arguing that, while different races were separated, they all were separated equally.

“[N]early every discriminatory law is susceptible to a similarly race- or sex-neutral characterization,” Sotomayor had said of Loving v. Virginia, which challenged a state antimiscegenation law. “A prohibition on interracial marriage, for example, allows no person to marry someone outside of her race, while allowing persons of any race to marry within their races.”

In today’s legal battle over trans rights, this manifests as trans erasure. The more the government can plausibly deny the existence of trans and intersex people—robbing them of legal recognition—the more it emboldens lawmakers to discriminate. The logic rests on the idea that you can’t violate the constitutional rights of a group if that group does not exist.

On Tuesday, Justices further grappled with the combined and contradictory legacies of the 2025 Skrmetti case, which upheld Tennessee’s law preventing trans youth from accessing many kinds of gender-affirming care, and the 2020 Bostock decision, which established employee anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people.

Republican-appointed swing Justice Neil Gorsuch was the primary author of the Bostock decision. He argued then that trans people were constitutionally entitled to employment protections from discrimination on the basis of sex. This time around, Gorsuch sparred with attorneys over what “sex” even means.

But, as University of California - Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky notes in his analysis on SCOTUSBlog: “Over the last year, the court has failed to follow the logic of Bostock in upholding discrimination against transgender individuals.”

Indeed, the more these cases play out in front of the court, the more the contradictions of anti-trans extremism seem to crumble.

“My sense is that this court is going to sidestep the constitutional questions entirely—they didn’t seem even remotely eager to grapple with the basic reality that trans people are protected under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause,” said Tekla Taylor, a Public Education Specialist at Advocates for Trans Equality.

“It wouldn’t shock me if they ultimately say that states can discriminate against trans girls under Title IX, which completely glosses over the fact that the feminists who fought for Title IX did so to expand opportunity and dismantle sexist stereotypes—not reinforce them.”

Taylor further emphasized how laws are already chipping away at trans, intersex and women’s rights. “It was extremely disappointing,” they said, “though not remotely surprising, to hear Chief Justice Roberts try to wave away the Court’s own ruling in Bostock in order to pretend these laws don’t plainly discriminate against young trans people and deprive them of the same opportunities everyone else has.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/even-barrett-seemed-alarmed-by-the at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

"No Investigation Will Stop Us From Taking Care Of Our Kids": School Districts Respond To Latest Anti-Trans Threats From Trump Admin

ERIN REED | JAN 15, 2026, 1:11 PM EST | SOURCE

School districts in CA, CT, HI, ME, MA, NV, NY, PA, VT, and WA received word that they would be placed under investigation for trans-supportive policies.

Maryland GovPics // Wikimedia Commons

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education issued sweeping threats and launched investigations into 18 school districts across the United States for allowing transgender girls to participate in girls’ sports. The actions appear to be a continuation of the administration’s long-running pressure campaign against districts with transgender-inclusive policies—most of which have refused to comply and, in many cases, have successfully fought back. Notably, the latest wave of investigations coincided with historic Supreme Court oral arguments on transgender sports participation held the same day, signaling that the administration may believe a ruling favoring discrimination is imminent and is preparing to force compliance even in blue states with longstanding protections for transgender students. In response, multiple school districts are already declaring their intent to keep supporting their transgender students.

Among the school districts and institutions notified that they will be placed under investigation for transgender-inclusive policies are Jurupa Unified School District (CA), Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District (CA), Santa Monica College (CA), Santa Rosa Junior College (CA), Waterbury Public Schools (CT), the Hawaii State Department of Education (HI), Regional School Unit 19 (ME), Regional School Unit 57 (ME), Foxborough Public Schools (MA), University of Nevada, Reno (NV), Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District (NY), the New York City Department of Education (NY), Great Valley School District (PA), Champlain Valley School District (VT), Cheney Public Schools (WA), Sultan School District No. 311 (WA), Tacoma Public Schools (WA), and Vancouver Public Schools (WA).

The threats appeared to focus primarily on sports, though the administration’s past Title IX enforcement actions have also explicitly or implicitly sought to dictate policies governing dormitories and bathroom access. Notably, the investigations are concentrated largely in blue states with progressive policies and, in many cases, shield laws protecting transgender rights, asserting that it can override those protections. This approach rests on a novel and fringe legal theory advanced by the Trump administration: that Title IX not only permits discrimination, but requires it. Under this theory, the administration has repeatedly attempted to withhold significant federal funding from school districts that allow transgender girls to participate in youth sports or use bathrooms aligned with their gender—funds that often support programs such as free and reduced-price lunch for hungry students and after-school services.

“In the same week that the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the future of Title IX, OCR is aggressively pursuing allegations of discrimination against women and girls by entities which reportedly allow males to compete in women’s sports. Time and again, the Trump Administration has made its position clear: violations of women’s rights, dignity, and fairness are unacceptable,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey in a press release for the Department of Education. “We will leave no stone unturned in these investigations to uphold women’s right to equal access in education programs—a fight that started over half a century ago and is far from finished.”

Schools are already beginning to formulate their responses, and so far, none appear to be immediately complying with demands to ban transgender athletes or impose bathroom restrictions in response to the letters. Instead, multiple districts are publicly reaffirming inclusive policies. In Vermont, Champlain Valley Superintendent Adam Bunting said in response to the letter, “No investigation is going to stop us from taking care of our kids… I want to assure you and all of our students that we remain steadfast in our commitment to honoring the identities of every learner.” At the University of Nevada-Reno, a spokesperson similarly pushed back, stating, “The University remains committed to fostering an inclusive, supportive, and respectful campus environment for all of our students. We also recognize and uphold our responsibilities under state and federal law, and we will continue to act in accordance with the U.S. Constitution.”

Many school districts have remained silent in the immediate aftermath of receiving the letter, likely working with legal counsel to determine their next steps. While multiple major universities and Ivy League institutions have, in the last year, broadly capitulated to anti-transgender pressure, local school districts have shown far greater reluctance to comply. Earlier this year, multiple districts rebuffed similar administration threats to withhold funding tied to school lunch programs and sex education, including school systems in Virginia, New York City, Denver, and Chicago—all of which refused to back down.

The threats arrive alongside a Supreme Court hearing on transgender participation in school sports. While the case itself is narrowly focused on athletics, its outcome could have sweeping consequences for transgender rights nationwide—shaping how Title IX is enforced in blue states and whether transgender people receive any constitutional protections tied to sex and gender identity at all. As the court deliberates, the fight is already playing out on the ground, with state and local officials bracing for continued federal pressure that seeks to strip funding from basic school programs, including lunch assistance for hungry children, in an effort to force discrimination against a small number of transgender students.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/no-investigation-will-stop-us-from at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

New Jersey Remains Among Last Blue States Without Trans Shield Law As Democrats Punt To Next Session

S. BAUM | JAN 14, 2026, 12:07 PM EST | SOURCE

There&#8217;s a new governor, a new legislature, and a new call to action. Will New Jersey lawmakers finally protect trans kids&#8217; care?

New Jersey State Legislature // Niagara // Wikimedia Commons

It’s a new day in New Jersey politics, we hope. Activists and lawmakers say the Garden State is on the verge of passing sweeping health care laws protecting transgender people and their medical providers. They’ve been saying as much for years, but a new coalition of advocates has emerged to make equal rights and access to care the law of the land.

Advocates who spoke to Erin in the Morning said they had been under the impression that the law would be put to a vote during the final weeks of Governor Phil Murphy’s tenure—and expressed fear about what the delay could mean for trans New Jerseyans.

“As a new session of the New Jersey legislature opens today and the state prepares for the swearing in of Mikie Sherrill as governor on January 20, a new coalition of transgender adults, parents, providers and allies calls on the state legislature to honor their lame duck commitments and get protections for gender-affirming and reproductive health care on the books immediately,” a press release by the newly-formed Transgender Rights Coalition of New Jersey (TRC-NJ) reads.

The group emerged after years of attempts to pass “shield” laws fell short, leaving trans youth, their parents, and their providers in a state of perpetual fear as assaults on trans Americans’ rights intensify every single day. The proposal also protected reproductive health care more broadly, including abortion.

“I’m terrified,” one parent of a trans teen told Erin in the Morning at the end of the last legislative session, which was earlier this month. She said hundreds if not thousands of trans people, parents of trans youth, doctors and activists have voiced their support for the measures. “I don’t understand how I can live in New Jersey, which always says, like, ‘We’re the bluest of the blue.’”

It’s not immediately clear why New Jersey, which has had almost a decade of Democratic leadership across the board—Democrats control the Senate, the Assembly, the governorship, and the attorney general’s office— adjourned without enacting a version of a law that has been implemented in most every other state in the Northeast Corridor. New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, and the District of Columbia all have trans shield laws on the books.

Governor Phil Murphy also signed an executive order creating shield protections, but without the codification of law, these safeguards remain up in the air. A new governor could overturn it at any time.

Some New Jerseyans initially criticized Democratic leadership over the stalemate. “As a coalition, we were deeply disappointed that the bill we need to protect trans people, reproductive health access, and health providers did not pass in the previous legislative session, despite substantial support among lawmakers,” said Louise Walpin, co-lead of the progressive group WADEIn NJ and a founding member of the TRC-NJ.

“At the same time, we appreciate that legislative leadership understands the importance of this bill and is committed to work with us to deliver a new bill to Governor-elect Mikie Sherill’s desk in the first months of her governorship.”

Garden State Equality’s Action Fund Board Chair, Jeannine Frisby LaRue, struck a similarly hopeful chord in a statement on Tuesday afternoon, as one of the most consequential Supreme Court cases for trans rights in history played out before a conservative majority of judges.

“Legislative leaders have personally assured me this is an issue they support and that we will expeditiously pass this bill in the new legislative session,” LaRue said. “I am confident Governor-Elect Sherrill will enthusiastically sign this bill into law.”

Khadijah M. Silver, Director of Gender Justice and Health Equity at Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG), a national nonprofit delivering pro bono services to TRC-NJ, also told Erin in the Morning that the fight is still on.

“We call on everyone who is impacted by snowballing federal and out-of-state attacks on your rights to come together,” Silver said. “Tell your stories to the Attorney General’s office and the legislature so they can effectively fight for your rights, and protect each other as we push this bill over the line.”

Constituents can also use the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters to contact their representatives, and to demand that the 222nd Legislature make trans rights a priority from day one.

This article was downloaded from https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/new-jersey-remains-among-last-blue at Jan 27, 2026 at 6:02 PM EST.

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