Opinion: If we don't step up to protect trans Americans, they'll come for you too

This story first appeared on Bonnie Fuller’s Substack

I don’t fully understand why Donald Trump and Republican state lawmakers have singled out transgender Americans who account for 1% of our population – just 2.8 million people – from a total population of 341.8 million people to, seek to persecute.

But they have.

It’s a national mission forTrump who has declared that there are only two biological sexes , has forced all trans people out of the military, has directed the state department to issue passports to trans people only if their birth genders are listed and has issued an executive order banning trans girls from playing sports with other girls in school.

He has gone so far as to have Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr threaten all hospitals with the loss of their Medicaid and Medicare funding if they provide gender affirming care to anyone younger than 18.

Gender affirming care that has been studied and recommended by all the leading medical associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics as necessary for the health and wellbeing of young trans people.

Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers across the country treat trans Americans – who are minding their own business, going about their lives like everyone else – as if they are an alien species that they need to eradicate.

I’m sorry to make this awful comparison since the Holocaust is without comparison in its horror, but like the Jews in Nazi Germany, America’s trans citizens have been singled out, dehumanized and given ‘special’ treatment by Donald Trump and the Republican party for years and their efforts are escalating.

Trump has exerted far more sweat into to trying to erase trans people and deny them healthcare , than he ever has on actually trying to make the lives of the rest of the 338 million Americans more affordable, sustainable, healthy and enjoyable.

Just let that sit with you for a minute.

There are 338 million other Americans.

Yet he and his fellow Republicans are obsessed with this group of 2.8 million. Obsessed with what ‘F’ or ‘M’ or ‘X’ that they put on their passports, birth certificates and driver’s licenses.

Obsessed with trans preteen and teen girls playing on girls sports teams and especially …. obsessed with where every trans person goes to the bathroom.

Imagine if Donald Trump, RFK Jr and every Republican state lawmaker had put the same effort into protecting America’s children from being killed by gun violence, as they have traumatizing trans teen girls who play sports.

Candidates including Trump spent $215 million on ads in the 2024 election, bolstering their war against the 12 % of transgender teen girls who actually do play sports. That’s 12 % of the 1% of trans people in the US.

In other words, a teeny tiny number of people.

Then Republicans claim that they do this in order to ‘protect’ biological girls.

That’s the same argument these guys and women use, when they ban medication abortion. They are ‘protecting’ women from big bad abortion pills.

It’s all a big pile of bullshit.

TARGETING TRANS AMERICANS – ANOTHER WAY TO DIVIDE & DISTRACT

Laws singling out and targeting trans people have nothing to do with ‘protecting’ women and girls from mythical hairy men supposedly posing as females in their locker rooms.

Neither does scapegoating trans Americans have to do with ‘protecting biological women ‘from the ‘horrors’ of DEI or ‘woke ideology.’

They are just another way to divide and distract us, while they deliver ginormous tax cuts to billionaires while slashing our healthcare.

Once dictator wannabe Trump and his sycophantic Republican lawmakers think they’ve wrung enough political ‘winning’ out of demonizing our trans neighbors, they will find another group of Americans to marginalize and stigmatize.

You never know when you will be in that group.

When you could become the next scapegoat victim of their political agenda.

The American Constitution doesn’t exist to just protect ‘biological’ males and females. It exists to protect ALL of us, no matter our sexual preferences, our gender identity, our skin color, ethnicity or religion.

When one tiny group of Americans has been and continues to be the target of the federal and state governments efforts to rob them of their civil rights, that is a problem for all of us!

We all have a stake in standing together with trans people and all LGBTQ people against the Republican’s diabolical tactics.

But for now, “othering” trans Americans has been a highly successful distraction for Trump and his party so they are going full steam ahead with their attacks.

In 2026 1,022 anti trans bills were introduced across the US and 126 were passed. Already in 2026, 740 bills are being considered.

So it’s not my imagination that literally every week, I learn about a new law courtesy of a Republican – controlled state legislature that goes farther and is even more cruel to the trans people that live within its borders.

But the Kansas Republican – dominated legislature has outdone itself, even overriding the veto of the state’s Democratic governor Laura Kelly, in order to pass a bill called SB244 .

This bill, passed on Wed. Feb 25th, decreed to all transgender Kansans that their driver’s licenses would be invalid on the very next day if their gender marker had been updated to reflect their identity, instead of their gender at birth!

So here’s my first question – why do Republican lawmakers in Kansas or anywhere else care so much about which gender someone else identifies with, that they will force trans residents to change their gender designation on their driver’s licenses?

And with absolutely zero notice?

Is this a Kansas emergency up there with a tornado warning?

After all, it had been legal for trans Kansans to have their chosen gender identity on their driver’s licenses since 2007!

Why did this suddenly become such an urgent problem for Republican members of the Kansas state legislature – bigger than how to find dollars to provide healthcare and food to Kansans after Trump cut Medicaid and SNAP in his ‘Big Beautiful Bill’?

Since the new law allowed zero time for trans Kansans to update their driver’s licenses. They became lawless the moment they got in their cars to go to work, school, or go to the gym the very next morning.

KANSAS DELIBERATELY MADE EVERY TRANS KANSAN LAWLESS

Even if they raced to the Department of Motor Vehicles to update their licenses, they could still have been technically charged with a misdemeanor on the spot. If they were stopped twice by authorities, before they made it to the DMV, they would be fined $1000!

But Kansas’s new trans hating law didn’t end there.

It also decreed that trans Kansans could only use government bathrooms of their birth genders . That means trans men, who look like men must use women’s bathrooms and trans women who appear to be women, must use men’s bathrooms.

From now on, anyone in Kansas can civilly sue someone that they suspect of using the ‘wrong’ government bathroom, for $1000.

Yes, bounty hunters will have a whole new opportunity to make money in Kansas if they stake out government bathrooms.

Listen ,most Kansans probably don’t even know a trans person.

There are only 22,400 trans adults in Kansas out of a population of 2,941,0000. Kansas‘ trans adults account for only 0.99 percent of the state’s overall population.

There’s no question that Donald Trump, his ‘race’ czar Stephen Miller and their paramilitary ICE and Border Patrol thugs have found numerous groups of immigrants and naturalized citizens – Somalis, Latinos, Haitians, Palestinians – to target and traumatize.

Minnesotans courageously showed all of us how to stand up, fight back and protect our neighbors, no matter what their immigration status, color or accent.

But our fellow Americans should never be singled out to be tormented and punished by federal and state governments, simply for existing. And trans people have always existed in every society.

Can we all please think like Minnesotans. If your state is planning to pass some cruel ludicrous anti trans law, call your state legislators and demand that they stop!

Trans people are our neighbors. We need to stand up, fight back and stop their persecution!

When you consider who you vote for in the upcoming midterm elections, check out what each candidate has said about trans people. Will they be ‘Minnesotans’ who protect trans Americans or will be dehumanizers like Donald Trump?