While addressing the press on Wednesday, President Donald Trump lamented how much he hears about transgender people.
“Everything is transgender, everybody transgender; that is all you hear about—and that is why we won the election in record numbers,” the president claimed.
It seems the irony is lost on him. After all, if Trump truly wanted to hear less about the trans community, perhaps he and his party should stop making trans lives the centerpiece of their culture war crusade. Since his return to the White House, his administration has implemented sweeping anti-trans policies, taking direct aim at gender-affirming care, trans service members, and transgender athletes. The sheer volume of legislation, executive orders, and public statements dedicated to policing trans identity is staggering. Yet, somehow, Trump thinks it’s everyone else talking about trans people too much?
Policies That Create the Problem He Complains About
Since his reelection, Trump’s administration has fast-tracked a range of policies that actively make life harder for trans Americans. Among his first executive actions:
- Banning gender-affirming care for young people, despite overwhelming evidence from major medical organizations that such care is life-saving.
- Reinstituting the military ban on transgender service members, erasing years of progress for trans individuals in the armed forces.
- Blocking trans women from participating in women’s sports leagues, a political fixation despite the minimal number of trans athletes competing at elite levels.
At every turn, his administration ensures that transgender issues remain a hot-button topic, but instead of acknowledging his own party’s role in the visibility of trans issues, Trump simply complains that he’s hearing about it too much.
The Anti-Trans Fearmongering Machine Rolls On
The president’s remarks coincided with “DeTrans Awareness Day” in Washington, D.C., an event sponsored by conservative lawmakers and advocacy groups looking to bolster anti-trans narratives. The event centered on detransitioners—a small group of people who regret aspects of their gender-affirming care—who have been co-opted into the right wing’s playbook to undermine transgender rights.
During a press conference, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) doubled down on his commitment to restricting gender-affirming care for minors. “Taxpayer dollars should not be flowing to institutions that are causing life-altering harm to kids in the name of an ideology,” he stated, echoing the common (and misleading) talking point that gender-affirming care is reckless or experimental.
The reality is quite different: Most transgender individuals begin transitioning in adulthood, with medical interventions—especially surgical ones—rarely pursued by minors. But the GOP’s goal has never been to align with reality. Instead, they’ve worked tirelessly to frame trans identities as dangerous, radical, or fraudulent, all while presenting themselves as protectors of children and women.
RELATED: Using Detransitioners as Weapons: The GOP’s Attack on Trans Lives
The Musk-Trump Disinformation Nexus
Trump’s tirade against trans visibility isn’t just limited to public speeches—it’s deeply embedded in his administration’s budget and policy priorities. Recently, both Trump and Elon Musk have pushed the bizarre and entirely baseless claim that the U.S. government is spending millions on “transgender surgery on mice.” The falsehood has been used as part of their broader justification for gutting federal agencies under the banner of efficiency. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—which is quickly becoming an Orwellian nightmare—has been leading these efforts to eliminate essential federal programs, with trans healthcare as an easy and politically convenient target.
The GOP’s Self-Fulfilling Outrage
If Trump wants to hear less about trans people, the solution is simple: stop making transgender Americans the scapegoat for every grievance his party can conjure. It’s not Democrats hosting all-day symposiums about the “dangers of transitioning.” It’s not progressives slapping “BIOLOGICAL” signs on Capitol bathrooms, misgendering their colleagues, or introducing wave after wave of anti-trans legislation. It’s Trump’s own allies who have turned trans lives into a political punching bag.
And yet, the president feigns confusion about why transgender issues dominate the discourse. The answer? His administration ensured that they would. Anti-trans rhetoric has been a linchpin of the GOP’s electoral strategy, a tactic designed to stoke fear, fire up the base, and provide a distraction from actual policy failures. Trump himself admitted as much when he tied his electoral success to the trans issue in his Wednesday press conference: “That’s why we won the election in record numbers.”
If trans issues are, as Trump puts it, “all you hear about,” it’s because his administration has chosen to make it that way.
The Bottom Line
While Trump and his allies continue their anti-trans spectacle, real people are suffering. Trans individuals—particularly trans women of color—face heightened risks of violence and discrimination. States that have banned gender-affirming care are seeing spikes in suicide risk among trans youth. Families are being forced to move across state lines to access necessary medical care. But none of this seems to concern the president. Instead, he’s too busy pretending to be exhausted by a narrative his own administration fuels.
Trump’s latest grievance about trans visibility isn’t just an exercise in hypocrisy—it’s a stark reminder of how deeply entrenched anti-trans bigotry has become in modern conservative politics. The more his administration continues to erase and punish trans people, the more we will have to talk about it. Because the alternative—silence—would only let them succeed.
If Trump truly wants to hear less about transgender people, he should consider this radical idea: stop attacking them. But we all know that’s not going to happen.
