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The shifts in federal policy come at a time when harassment and violence against transgender people are increasing. New hate crimes data released in mid-November by the F.B.I. showed that hate crimes dipped slightly in 2018, but crimes directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people nudged up almost 6 percent. Crimes against transgender people leapt 34 percent, to 142 in 2018 from 106 in 2017, and those are only the crimes reported to the police or recorded as an attack on a transgender victim.
At least 22 transgender people have been fatally shot or killed in 2019, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Nearly all of them were black women. Some fear that the Trump administration’s policies could be interpreted by some as a signal that such attacks are acceptable.
“The rhetoric that these policy changes promote is that we aren’t people, but some toxic plague trying to destroy America’s family values,” said Tiara Kelley, a black transgender woman living in Colorado.
Ash Penn, who lives in North Carolina and is black and transgender, said, “To be queer, to be black, to be trans in America today, you constantly live in fear.”
Mimi Lemay, who lives in Massachusetts with a 9-year-old transgender son, said Washington policies were having a real-world impact. Some transgender children, in the face of bullying and ostracism, will avoid going to the bathroom at school if they cannot choose the one that matches their gender identity.
“I’ve spoken to people who have developed infections at school,” she said.
After the administration moved to expand protections of health care workers who deny procedures to transgender patients on religious or moral grounds, Ari Murphy, a Louisianian who is transgender and does not identify as exclusively a man or a woman, stopped correcting doctors who use alienating or upsetting pronouns.
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