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For nearly five decades, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights has fought to secure legal equality for LGBTQ people. Today, that fight has taken on a new urgency. The federal government, which once served as a backstop against discrimination, has become its principal engine. In this moment, state-level protections are not a supplement to federal civil rights law—they are the front line.
The scope of the current federal assault is staggering. Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has issued a relentless barrage of executive orders seeking to eliminate any legal protection or recognition of transgender people: banning them from military service, reversing federal anti-discrimination protections, preventing transgender people from obtaining federal ID, and directing the Bureau of Prisons to transfer incarcerated transgender women into men's facilities regardless of the documented risk of violence and sexual assault. Our legal team is meeting these attacks in court.
In Talbott v. USA, NCLR and our partners have secured rulings halting the discharge of transgender service members—decorated, qualified patriots whom the administration seeks to expel for no reason but animus—as we prepare for trial. In Doe v. Blanche, we won injunctions protecting transgender women in federal custody from transfers that would deliberately expose them to extreme danger. We have gone to court on behalf of California families to stop the Justice Department from using a sweeping out-of-state grand jury subpoena to seize their children's confidential medical records from California children's hospitals—an act of pure intimidation, unsupported by any evidence of wrongdoing, that strikes at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship.
But litigation against federal overreach is only half the battle. After United States v. Skrmetti, in which the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee's ban on health care for transgender adolescents, the states have become the decisive arena. In states like Florida, where legislatures have enacted their own bans—laws NCLR has challenged on behalf of transgender youth and their parents—young people suffer. When states protect access to care, families can breathe. That is why we are representing California families suing Rady Children's Health to stop a hospital system from unlawfully cutting off care that state law protects. Strong state nondiscrimination laws, health care protections, and privacy safeguards are what stand between transgender people and a federal government determined to harm them.
State protections for youth are equally vital in the wake of Chiles v. Salazar. More than twenty states have banned the discredited and dangerous practice of so-called conversion therapy, which every major medical and mental health organization condemns. This spring, the Supreme Court held that Colorado's ban, as applied to talk therapy, must satisfy strict First Amendment scrutiny. The ruling is a setback—but it is not the end. The Court did not question the overwhelming evidence that conversion therapy harms children, and it pointed toward the tools states retain: malpractice liability, consumer protection law, and carefully drawn regulation of professional conduct. NCLR has launched a new state-level strategy to help legislatures update their conversion therapy laws to incorporate the Court's guidance—ensuring that survivors can hold practitioners accountable and that these protections rest on the firmest possible constitutional footing.
The lesson of this moment is clear. Federal hostility makes state action indispensable. Every state nondiscrimination statute, every conversion therapy protection, every shield law for transgender health care is a lifeline. NCLR will keep fighting in federal court to stop the worst of these attacks—but we will also keep working state by state, because that is where transgender people's daily lives are lived, and where their rights can still be made real.
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