Image by Hannah Voggenhuber.

2025 has been a hard year to be Queer in this necrotic empire but it has been a downright horrific year to be a Queer kid and tragically, in many ways, it has never been harder to be transgender under 18. While past generations like mine spent decades languishing in the shadows of cramped closets with no place else to hide, the latest generation of gender outlaws has quite heroically liberated themselves through the power of chat rooms and message boards only to find themselves playing the unwitting role of the latest scapegoats for the professional hatemongers of the Christian Right. These same merchants of misery invested in MAGA back when it was still a sideshow stunt. Now that stunt has both the momentum of a populist uprising and the corporate sponsorship of the zillionaire tech bro class and smashing “transgenderism” in the cradle seems to be their favorite side hustle.

The laws just keep coming and they just keep getting worse. Since 2020, every new year has broken records with the sheer volume of anti-trans legislation, with the number of bills restricting transgender rights more than tripling between 2022 and 2023 alone. 2025 is no exception. The year isn’t even halfway through and a record breaking 923 bills have already been pushed forward with 88 at the federal level. Most of these bills are likely to die on the vine but 54 have already passed, adding to the rapidly growing matrix of police state provisions harassing Queer youth wherever they dare to exist.

As much as 40% of trans youth between the ages of 13-17, or roughly 100,000 patients, now live in states restricting gender affirming care, including 6 states where providers face felony charges just for treating trans kids with the same puberty blockers still handed out to cis girls suffering from their own version of precocious puberty. This is being done in spite or perhaps even because of the fact that this treatment has been proven repeatedly to reduce suicidality among trans youth exponentially.

Trump has joined in on this anti-scientific campaign of........

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