Conditional Solidarity in the Age of Anti-Trans Legislation

In May 2019, Muhlaysia Booker, a 22-year-old transgender woman, was fatally shot in Dallas, Texas.  Her murder made national headlines and occurred just weeks after a video of her being brutally beaten in public went viral on social media. But Muhlaysia Booker’s case is far from unique. In 2024, Nex Benedict, a non-binary teenager, died by suicide after being severely beaten at school and then repeatedly deadnamed and misgendered by the press. In 2024 at least 32 trans and gender-expansive people were murdered across the U.S., 56% of them Black trans women, their lives often minimized or erased in public record. These are only some of the names in a long and devastating list.

Queer advocacy groups and loved ones held small vigils, but mainstream feminist organizations have remained largely silent. When cisgender women are attacked, outrage rightly follows. When trans women are murdered, the response is quieter — a shrug within institutions that loudly declare “Me Too.” Feminism’s crisis is not just one of visibility; it is one of solidarity.

Media as a Tool of Dehumanization

Violence doesn’t begin with a weapon. It begins in language, policy, and the stories that make dehumanization seem rational. Mainstream media plays an important role in amplifying Anti-trans rhetoric: Tucker Carlson has dedicated entire segments of his (now cancelled) Fox News show to calling trans people dangers to society; Candace Owens has gone on social media tirades claiming that gender affirming healthcare is akin to "mutilation" and that being trans is part of a “sinister liberal mindset.”

In the recent aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assasination, many right‑wing pundits and outlets jumped on early, unverified claims that the shooting was connected to “transgender ideology.” Right‑wing commentators like Megyn Kelly and Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt called the shooting an “act of LGBT terrorism,” because the suspect was allegedly in a relationship with someone transgender or identified as transgender themselves. 

Social psychology meta analyses show that dehumanizing portrayals reliably predict greater willingness among observers to aggress against the target group.  According to the  “epidemic of violence” study (Walsh 2025), there is a direct correlation between negative media depictions and anti-trans fatal violence, hate crimes and increased legislative attacks. Anti-trans rhetoric in the media often precedes or accompanies anti‑trans policies. Legislators can point to “public concern,” “danger,” or “what’s being reported” as justification for restricting rights. Media stories claiming harm or threats—especially to children—are powerful levers for policy change.

Criminalizing Identity

Trans people in the U.S. not only face mounting violence and discrimination,  but also a wave of anti-trans legislation introduced in state legislatures nationwide. In 2024 alone, over 600 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in the United States. Many explicitly target gender-affirming healthcare, such as Arizona’s S.B.1687, which bans care for trans youth, and Georgia’s S.B.39, which blocks coverage under state-funded insurance plans. 

That legislative assault has now been matched at the federal level: in January 2025, President Trump issued an executive order redefining “sex” to refer only to immutable biological categories and directing federal agencies to cease recognizing gender identity or funding “gender ideology” programs, including care for incarcerated people. Soon after, he signed Executive Order 14187 (“Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”), which seeks to cut off federal funding for gender-affirming care for minors; Executive Order 14183 to exclude transgender individuals from military service; and Executive Order 14201, banning trans women and girls from participating in women’s sports in federally funded institutions. 

These executive orders come in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and removed federal constitutional protection for abortion access. Since then, 12 states have implemented total abortion bans and 29 more restrict abortion based on gestational age. From abortion bans to restrictions on gender-affirming care, today’s conservative project is animated by an obsession with the reproductive capacity—or refusal—of female-presenting bodies. 

Whether in policing the womb or outlawing transition, these policies rest on the idea that autonomy can be denied to those who defy prescribed roles. Yet mainstream feminism too often treats these struggles as separate, revealing fractures in solidarity within the movement.

The Silence of Mainstream Feminism

Feminism in America has always carried fault lines. Again and again, women who fall outside the boundaries of white, cis, middle-class respectability have been treated as expendable. The current divide between abortion rights and gender-affirming care is only the latest expression of earlier betrayals at the core of the fight for women’s rights.

During the women’s suffrage movement, leading white feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed the 15th Amendment because it enfranchised Black men but excluded white women, and at times used racist arguments to make their case more palatable to white audiences. Meanwhile, Black women who fought for both racial and gender justice were denied a seat at the table. Sojourner Truth captured this exclusion in her famous 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman?,” where she exposed the limits of a women’s rights discourse that claimed universality but ignored women who looked like her. Other Black women echoed the same frustration, among them Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who in 1866 warned white suffragists that “we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.”

This pattern resurfaced a century later with second-wave feminism, which promised liberation but often centered the needs of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Women of color and queer women were frequently treated as an afterthought. Audre Lorde condemned this dynamic in her 1984 essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, where she argued that feminism treated difference as division, erasing race, sexuality, class, and age from its vision of solidarity, and reducing marginalized women — especially Black lesbians — to tokens rather than full participants. 

But exclusion during this era was not limited to race or sexuality. Trans women were pushed even further to the margins, often denied recognition as women at all. Nearly a decade earlier, Beth Elliott — a trans lesbian singer and activist who had helped organize the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference — was scheduled to perform during the opening night. She was met with hostility from a separatist faction, the Gutter Dykes, who circulated flyers denouncing her as a man and confronted her on stage. The next day, keynote speaker Robin Morgan escalated the attack, calling Elliott a “gatecrashing… male transvestite” and accusing her of being “an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer — with the mentality of a rapist.”

The denial of trans womanhood endures even today in intersectional feminist spaces.  At the 2019 Women’s March, journalist Lucy Diavolo witnessed an older trans woman proudly declare, “I’m a woman with a penis, and I belong here,” only to be met with sneers from nearby protesters. As Meredith Talusan argues in her essay “We’ve Always Been Nasty”, the Women’s March — hailed as the largest one-day protest in U.S. history — revealed how trans women and femmes are largely excluded in feminist activism. Though organizers eventually invited trans women to participate in leadership, Talusan notes this late gesture only underscored the failure to treat them as equal architects of the event. 

 TERFs, “Gender Critical” Rhetoric, and the Co-opting of Feminist Language

What began as dismissive language in the second wave has since hardened into organized movements that claim the mantle of feminism while actively undermining the rights of trans women and cis-gendered women alike.

The most visible of these groups today is the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), founded in 2013. Though it brands itself as defending “sex-based rights,” WoLF has lobbied against gender-affirming healthcare, opposed trans inclusion in sports and schools, and filed amicus briefs in cases that seek to deny legal recognition to transgender people. 

In 2017, WoLF co-founded the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, an alliance that brought radical feminists together with Christian right activists. At first glance, the pairing seemed improbable: secular feminists on one side, religious conservatives on the other. Yet shared opposition to trans rights forged common cause— and mutual benefit—as anti-trans feminist advocates tapped Christian Right funding and right-wing media to amplify their message, while their testimony has been repeatedly cited to justify restrictions in Title IX and Equality Act debates.

These partnerships have paved the way for collaboration with the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, a comprehensive transition blueprint for the next conservative presidency. Heritage — which publicly backed Trump in 2024 — has elevated attacks on transgender healthcare, LGBTQ+ protections, and abortion access as cornerstones of its agenda. 

By aligning with Heritage and other Christian nationalist groups, organizations like WoLF lend feminist cover to a far-right project that seeks not only to roll back trans rights, but to curtail reproductive autonomy and re-impose rigid gender hierarchies across American life.

Defunding the Safety Net: Toward a Shared Defense

Trans women, women of color, queer collectives, and their allies are building movements that refuse gatekeeping and center care. Planned Parenthood (many affiliates provide reproductive care and gender-affirming services), the Transgender Law Center (the largest national trans-led legal advocacy group), and Advocates for Trans Equality (formed in 2024 when NCTE and TLDEF merged). Together they advance protections that benefit both trans women and cis women by defending bodily autonomy, access to care, and equal protection.

But lawmakers are now targeting the funding streams that keep this care alive. In March 2025, the administration froze Title X family-planning grants, temporarily withholding support from 16 grantees—including all nine Planned Parenthood networks—jeopardizing contraception, cancer screening, and STI services used by millions. States have also moved to cut public reimbursements to providers: Texas pushed Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid, cutting off payments even for non-abortion care that many low-income patients rely on. And in Oklahoma, Executive Order 2025-16 directs agencies to stop grants and contracts to any entity “affiliated with” abortion providers—policies that squeeze clinics that also deliver gender-affirming care. The pressure is already closing doors: Children’s Hospital Los Angeles announced it would shut down its long-running trans youth center amid federal funding threats, cutting a crucial access point for publicly insured teens. 

This moment demands clarity: bodily autonomy in all its forms—abortion, contraception and gender-affirming care—is a feminist issue. The laws targeting trans care and the laws targeting abortion share authors, funding, and goals; our answer has to be shared power, shared defense. Mainstream feminism has begun to recognize that trans women’s struggles are not adjacent to women’s rights but integral to them—each attack on one group sets precedent for the next. The only way to resist this coordinated rollback is through solidarity: a feminism that is intersectional, collective, and unwavering in its defense of our shared freedom to live fully and without fear.