AGAINST LGBTQ PEOPLE
How a rhetorical target became a security designation, and how often the courts said no
Counterterrorism Strategy · $166M FBI Budget Line · Repeatedly Struck Down
Unserious leaders are unsafe.— Opening line of U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai's 49-page judgment voiding the HHS gender-affirming care ban, April 18, 2026
Political rhetoric about transgender people is not new, and this page is not a catalogue of insults. The reason it exists is that something specific happened between 2025 and 2026: the subject moved out of the culture-war register and into the machinery of national security.
That transition is documentable, and it happened in a particular order. First the rhetoric. Then the removal of civil rights enforcement capacity. Then healthcare, schools, and prisons. Then, in May 2026, a formal counterterrorism strategy naming an ideology rather than a group.
The other half of the record matters just as much: courts have repeatedly ruled these actions unlawful, and in one of the most significant cases the panel included two of Trump's own appointees.
From Culture War
to Counterterrorism
A White House strategy document did something no previous one had: it named a political ideology, rather than an organization or a tactic, as a top-tier terrorism threat.
On May 7, 2026, the White House released a new United States Counterterrorism Strategy, the first such directive since the 2021 Biden-era memo on white supremacist violence. That earlier memo was scrubbed from the White House website.
The strategy, authored by Sebastian Gorka, places three categories at the same threat tier: "Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists," legacy Islamist terrorism, and groups described as "radically pro-transgender." It commits the federal government to "prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups."
The distinction that matters here is between conduct and belief. Terrorism designations have historically attached to what a group does. Naming an ideology attaches the designation to what a person thinks, which is why the language drew objections from legal analysts across the spectrum.
The budget request is where a strategy document becomes an operation. Alongside the $166.1 million and 328 new positions, it describes a watchlist of roughly 5,000 people, a 300 percent increase in investigations, and a new Joint Mission Center staffed by ten federal agencies to "proactively identify" domestic terrorist networks.
The indicator language traces back to NSPM-7, the September 2025 presidential memorandum issued three days after the executive order designating "Antifa" a domestic terrorist organization. Its list of "common threads" includes "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity" and "extremism on migration, race, and gender."
Who Enforces
Civil Rights
Before the new priorities arrived, the offices that would have resisted them were substantially emptied.
Care, Classrooms,
and Cells
What the strategy looked like when it reached institutions that hold people.
Healthcare. HHS under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. imposed a ban on gender-affirming care. The Office of Personnel Management issued a carrier letter ending coverage of that care under Federal Employee Health Benefits and Postal Service plans as of 2026. On August 3, 2026, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation filed a class action for five federal workers, arguing the exclusion is sex discrimination barred by Title VII under the Supreme Court's 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision.
Medical records. The Justice Department subpoenaed UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh for transgender minors' records, including intake documents, consent forms and parental authorizations for puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Courts quashed it. Around August 10, 2026, the DOJ moved to dismiss its own appeal, giving no reason, which made the ruling final.
Prisons. On May 20, 2026, Judge Royce C. Lamberth renewed a preliminary injunction blocking the transfer of transgender women to men's prisons, and ordered the Bureau of Prisons to maintain gender-dysphoria treatment at pre-January 2025 levels. The record before him included plaintiffs who had been raped in male facilities.
Schools. On May 1, 2026, the DOJ Civil Rights Division opened investigations into 36 Illinois school districts over whether parents could opt children out of LGBTQ-inclusive instruction.
How Often
the Courts Said No
A page like this can read as though the policy simply happened. It largely did not. The losses are as documented as the actions.
On April 18, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai voided the HHS gender-affirming care ban as unlawful in a 49-page summary judgment. He wrote that Kennedy had acted with "wanton disregard" for the law in a way that "causes very real harm to very real people," and characterized one HHS argument to the court as "a bald-faced lie." The judgment opens with the line: "Unserious leaders are unsafe."
Three days earlier, the Eighth Circuit rejected a challenge to Minnesota's inclusive athletics policy and held that executive orders cannot establish Title IX violations. "Executive guidance and agency findings do not reflect settled law." The panel included two Trump appointees, Judges Grasz and Erickson, with the opinion written by a Bush appointee, Judge Gruender.
Judge Lamberth's prison injunction has been renewed rather than lifted. The DOJ abandoned its own appeal in the UPMC records case. The pattern across these rulings is consistent, and it is not partisan: the objection is that policy was being made by directive in areas where Congress and the courts had already spoken.
"Executive guidance and agency findings do not reflect settled law.
— Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, April 15, 2026, on a panel including two Trump appointees
Removal From
the Record
Some of this is symbolic. Some of it forecloses the ability to measure anything later.
On February 10, 2026, the administration ordered the Pride flag removed from Stonewall National Monument, the nation's first national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights. The flag had been permanently installed by the National Park Service in 2021, the first Pride flag on federally managed land.
The data changes are quieter and harder to reverse. A tracker maintained by data policy researchers counted at least 28 federal datasets deleted and 338 modified across more than 60 agencies. Health data absorbed roughly 40 percent of it. A recurring change is the removal of questions about gender identity from federal surveys, several of them at the CDC, tied to the executive order "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."
The distinction is worth stating plainly. A survey that asks a question and reports an inconvenient answer can be argued with. A survey that stops asking produces no answer at all, and the gap it leaves cannot be filled retroactively.
What Gets Said
Out Loud
The rhetoric did not stop when the policy started. It became less accurate.
These four are not equivalent, and the page does not treat them as such. A slur from the Defense Secretary is a matter of conduct in office. A false claim about the CHIPS Act, delivered to the Army War College, is a factual assertion that can be checked against the statute and fails. The DoorDash exchange is mostly a study in how reliably the subject gets raised whether or not anyone else brought it up.
What they share is the direction of travel. As the policy record accumulated losses in court, the public description of that policy grew less tethered to what the policy actually said.
This page is one of six documenting how the same rhetorical machinery is aimed at different groups.