Dr Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Mehmet Oz, better-known as Dr Oz, has raged about “$150k penis surgery” for trans youth, but he failed to cite any facts.
Dr Oz, who leads Medicaid and Medicare, announced on Thursday (18 December), alongside health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, measures that will ban gender-affirming care for trans youth.
The ban, part of Dr Oz’s bid to end “taxpayer funding of sex rejecting procedures for children in Medicaid and CHIP [children’s health insurance program], full stop”, takes the form of two new proposed rules from Medicaid and Medicare.
The first prevents doctors and hospitals from receiving federal Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care provided to trans youth under the age of 18, while the second blocks all Medicaid and Medicare funding for any services at hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care.
Medicaid, which is the health care program that covers low-income Americans, alongside older and disabled citizens, is taken at most hospitals, meaning the proposals could have a wide-ranging effect, as per New Hampshire Public Radio.
During announcing the proposals, Kennedy referred to gender-affirming care as “malpractice”, while Dr Oz went completely off topic.
The 65-year-old began ranting about the prices of bottom surgery, which is very rarely performed on individuals under 18.
“A vaginoplasty – a procedure a child does not need – costs $60,000,” he claimed, adding: “Shockingly, a phalloplasty, the creation of a penis, costs, on average, in America, $150,000 per child.
“I do believe, with doing some work, that these prices have continued to increase due to increased manufactured demand,” he continued. “A scrotalplasty, where you add testicles? That’s extra.”
Dr Oz didn’t clarify where he pulled his quoted figures from, but according to the Gender Confirmation Center, the price of a vaginoplasty is between $23,000 and $24,500, while phalloplasty ranges between $35,000 and $50,000.
According to 2025 data from the Williams Institute, about one per cent of people aged 13 and older identify as trans in the US, and despite the proposals attacking gender-affirming care for trans youth, multiple studies show that surgeries are rarely performed on minors.
A 2024 study by researchers at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that no gender-affirming surgeries were performed on trans or gender diverse youth (TGD) aged 12 and younger in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available.
For teens ages 15 to 17 and adults ages 18 and older, the rate of undergoing gender-affirming surgery was 2.1 per 100,000 and 5.3 per 100,000, respectively. The majority of surgeries were chest surgeries.
Co-author Elizabeth Boskey, instructor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, said: “We found that gender-affirming surgeries are rarely performed for transgender minors, suggesting that US surgeons are appropriately following international guidelines around assessment and care.”
Lead author Dannie Dai, research data analyst in the Department of Health Policy and Management, added: “Our findings suggest that legislation blocking gender-affirming care among TGD youth is not about protecting children, but is rooted in bias and stigma against TGD identities and seeks to address a perceived problem that does not actually exist.”
Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
A same-sex female couple in Pennsylvania is suffering through a “Kafkaesque nightmare” after one of the women was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when she showed up for a regularly scheduled immigration check-in.
ICE agents detained her and shipped her to a detention center in California.
Xiomara Suarez, 28, arrived in the U.S. in 2022 seeking asylum after fleeing Peru, where she was stalked and endured a violent sexual assault based on her sexual orientation. In a sworn declaration to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials reviewed by Advocate, Suarez said Peruvian police refused to acknowledge her complaints or offer protection, and she feared for her life.
Suarez was admitted to the U.S. on “parole” as her request for permanent status was processed.
In February, Suarez married her then-girlfriend, Grazi Chiosque, 29, an American citizen. The couple hoped to adjust Suarez’s immigration status and smooth the way for her to obtain a green card. They filed the required documents in May.
Before that request was processed, however, Suarez was swept up in a wave of detentions by ICE at courthouses targeting immigrants scheduled for hearings — only to be arrested and shipped to detention centers despite their legal non-criminal status.
Suarez was now one of them.
Chiosque says her wife is enduring degrading and isolating conditions at the Adelanto ICE detention facility in Southern California, where she’s been detained since September.
“There’s mold in the food,” Chiosque said. “You don’t have any privacy.”
“She was put into shackles,” Suarez’s wife added. “She told me that crying because it really made her feel like she did something that was wrong, and she didn’t.”
Far from expediting Suarez’s immigration status, the couple’s decision to marry may have only complicated Suarez’s legal claim.
Earlier this month, she was scheduled for back-to-back appearances with government officials. The first was with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to adjudicate her spousal petition. The second was before an immigration judge related to her detention and status in the country.
Chiosque flew from Pennsylvania to help Suarez through the process.
At the first appointment, a supervisor with Citizenship and Immigration Services told Chiosque, referring to her wife, “USCIS does not have jurisdiction because she’s detained.”
“The immigration judge would have to adjudicate on both,” Chiosque was told.
But at that hearing, the explanation flipped, Chiosque said.
“‘No, I don’t have jurisdiction on the I-130,” the judge told Suarez, referring to her spousal petition. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“If USCIS does not want to give you an interview,” he added, “contact your congressman.”
The couple had hoped their marriage claim would help expedite Suarez’s permanent residency. Now it was keeping her behind bars.
“USCIS says it’s not them because she’s detained. And the judge says it’s not them, it’s USCIS,” Chiosque said.
Suarez was returned to detention. Her next immigration hearing is scheduled for January 28.
The couple’s legal limbo is indicative of a broader, and intentional, pattern by ICE and the Trump administration, said Álvaro M. Huerta, director of litigation and advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center.
“This administration is separating and trapping families like Xiomara and Grazielli in a Kafkaesque nightmare, with the clear intention of making life so unbearable that they abandon all hope,” Huerta said. “It’s not only a policy failure, but also a betrayal of LGBTQ immigrant families who deserve dignity, safety, and the chance to thrive.”
“It feels like we’re begging,” said Chiosque, whose wife sits in detention a continent away.
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May 14, 2024; New York, NY, USA; Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (center), and Vivek Ramaswamy (right) look on while former President Donald Trump speaks to the media alongside his lawyer Todd Blanche before his criminal trial at Manhattan criminal court at the New York State Supreme Court on May 14, 2024. Mandatory Credit: Justin Lane/Pool via USA TODAY NETWORK | Justin Lane/Pool via USA TODAY N
Yesterday’s announcement from Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shows just why the 2026 midterms will matter so much, and why the 11 months of waiting to get there could be so disastrous. We need a Congress that will stand up and snatch back the purse strings as the Founding Fathers originally intended.
In the United States Constitution, Congress is granted the power of the purse: the right to decide how much to spend and on what. Also, importantly, it gets to decide when to remove funding. In the 70s, that was used to pull funding from the Vietnam War. That power does not belong with the Executive Branch, which the Constitution says must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
Unfortunately, the Founders likely never imagined people like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) or Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who have been willing to roll over and allow Trump to usurp their power, in violation of the basic concepts behind the checks and balances built into the Constitution.
Congress is already working to block gender-affirming care. This week, the House of Representatives passed two gender-affirming care bans for minors, one from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and one from Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). Those bans are horrific, and we can only pray that the Senate will stop them, but they are at least going through some sort of democratic process.
The Trump administration has a way to move towards a gender-affirming care ban if that is in line with the will of the people and democracy. The HHS proposal doesn’t represent a ban; instead, it’s an end-run on democracy, hoping to conduct a scorched-earth funding pull that they should have no authority to do.
The HHS funding blocking proposal would pull all federal funding from any institution that conducts any gender-affirming care for trans people, even if patients pay for it without using federal funds. Hospitals will have to either comply with the HHS plans by ceasing gender-affirming care or risk losing all federal funding for all other treatments. Major hospital systems have already cut their programs because of these sorts of threats.
Trans youth and their families would be left seeking institutions that only provide gender-affirming care and forgo all government funding, if such a place even exists. Additionally, the removal of Medicaid coverage could see prices rise.
There will certainly be pushback against this plan, especially from cities and states that have marked themselves as trans sanctuaries. But those challenges will take time, and a small interruption in care or even just the threat of it does huge damage to trans youth. Denial of care has been linked to increased rates of depression and anxiety, and for those who have begun puberty, the physical changes that can happen in a short time can be extremely upsetting.
Trump keeps using threats of pulling federal funding to power his authoritarianism. That tactic is only working because Congress isn’t stopping him and saying, “No, that’s our job.” When Nixon pulled federal funds as a way to end programs with the Environmental Protection Agency (a process called impoundment), Congress passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, which closed loopholes and ensured that the president couldn’t rule this way. The Supreme Court went on to rule in 1975 that the president did not have the power to overrule Congress by impounding funds.
Michael Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University Law School, spoke with ABC News early in the Trump presidency, when he first started using this trick. “If Congress says you’re spending that much money on the federal programs, that’s how much is being spent. The president cannot stop it even temporarily,” he said. “Congress passed this statue this very particular rules of what exactly the president has to do if he wants to not spend money on money Congress has spent. He can ask Congress to for a recission, but there is a 45-day clock and a bunch of procedures, none of which have been followed by Trump.”
Congress’ move here wasn’t just granting itself new powers, but providing a safeguard to ensure that the power of the purse remained where the Constitution had put it. Republicans are quick to wheel out the Constitution and the will of the Founding Fathers, but all of that seems forgotten under Trump. Instead, Congress is leaving decisions to be drawn out in protracted judicial battles, which ultimately run the risk of landing in the Trump-packed Supreme Court.
All of those federal funding threats work well for Trump, as he and his administration can wave their hands and claim that they’re standing by their promise to cut bloated government spending (all while spending millions in taxpayer money on golfing and Kid Rock). But it all relies on a tactic that shouldn’t even be part of the presidential toolkit.
There might be a lot of justifiable hope in 2026 that things will work out. Elections this year have already shown a big swing away from Trump’s party. Republicans are resigning, opening more seats that the party could lose between now and 2027. And while Congress might be voting on gender-affirming care bans themselves, it took a capitulation to a hardline anti-trans Republican as she was heading out the door to get that to happen.
But we’re only halfway to those midterms, and there’s going to be a lot of pain if the current Congress can’t remember why they’re there for another year.
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Leonardo Garcia Venegas was detained by immigration agents while filming a raid on his worksite, despite having a REAL ID on him and telling the officers he was a citizen.
Reporting Highlights
Americans Detained: The government doesn’t track how many citizens are held by immigration agents. We found more than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests.
Held Incommunicado: More than 20 citizens have reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer. In some cases their families couldn’t find them.
Cases Wilted: Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”
About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.
Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.
So ProPublica created its own count.
We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened.
Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.
Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers.
These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.
Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)
George Retes, an American combat veteran, at the site of his arrest by immigration agents on California’s Central Coast. Retes was detained for three days without access to a lawyer and missed his daughter’s third birthday.
In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago.
The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.”
A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment.
An immigration raid on 79-year-old Rafie Ollah Shouhed’s car wash left him with broken ribs.Courtesy of Rafie Ollah Shouhed. Compiled by ProPublica.
Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.
We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.
Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them.
In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be.
When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.”
Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”
The video Garcia Venegas made of an immigration raid on a construction site shows him walking away from the officer while trying to film and then stating that he’s a citizen before being detained.Courtesy of Garcia Venega
When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”
Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers.
Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground.
Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!”
Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas told agents he was a citizen both times he was detained. His REAL ID was dismissed as a fake.
Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.
This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status.
DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime.
Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.
Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him.
“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.”
Men building a home in rural Baldwin County, Alabama. Garcia Venegas was detained by immigration agents twice while working on homes in the area.
George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside.
The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.
Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers.
Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.
George Retes’ family noticed his car in a compiled video posted to TikTok. This clip from that longer video shows his white vehicle surrounded by tear gas. Immigration agents later pinned him on the ground.nota.sra/TikTok
Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones.
“They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”
Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands. He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water.
Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.”
DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.
Retes said that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.”
The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twiceordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.
But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out.
Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.
Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles.
“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.”
Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”)
The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen.
Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days.
DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges.
Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend.
“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law.
More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”
The suit alleges the new state law unconstitutionally silences the viewpoints of students and teachers. The law’s supporters say DEI programs use public funds to promote political agendas.
The ACLU and a group of LGBTQ+ and student rights organizations are suing Texas to block the state’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in K-12 public schools. Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Texas Tribune
The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and a group of LGBTQ+ and student rights organizations are suing to block a new state law that would ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in K-12 public schools.
In a lawsuit filed last month in federal court, attorneys from the ACLU of Texas and Transgender Law Center argued that Senate Bill 12 violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments as well as the Equal Access Act. Gov. Greg Abbott signed the legislation last June, and it will go into effect Sept. 1 alongside an array of other transformative laws for public education in Texas.
“Senate Bill 12 is a blatant attempt to erase students’ identities and silence the stories that make Texas strong,” said Brian Klosterboer, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas. “Every student — no matter their race, gender, or background — deserves to feel seen, safe, and supported in school.”
Supporters of SB 12 say DEI programs use class time and public funds to promote political agendas, while opponents believe banning those initiatives will disproportionately harm marginalized students by removing spaces where they can find support.
Here’s what you need to know about the effort to block the law.
What the ban would do: Authored by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, SB 12 prohibits public school districts from considering race, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation in hiring decisions. The ban also bars schools from offering DEI training and programs, such as policies designed to reduce discrimination based on race or gender identity, except for when required by federal law.
The law requires families to give written permission before their children can join any school club, and prohibits school groups created to support LGBTQIA+ students. Parents will be able to file complaints if they believe their schools are not complying with the DEI ban, and the law requires school districts to discipline employees who knowingly take part in DEI-related activities.
Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Allen, said SB 12 builds on a 2021 state law barring public schools from teaching critical race theory, an academic discipline that explores how race and racism have influenced the country’s legal and institutional systems. While critical race theory is not taught in Texas public schools, the term has become a shorthand used by conservatives who believe the way some schools teach children about race is politically biased.
DEI advocates say initiatives that promote diversity provide support for marginalized communities in workforce development and higher education, while critics say DEI practices give preference to people based on their race and ethnicity rather than on merit.
What the lawsuit says: Attorneys from the ACLU and the Transgender Law Center are suing Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath and three school districts on behalf of a teacher, a student and her parent. They’re also representing the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, two organizations that say they would be harmed by the ban. The ACLU amended the complaint in September, adding as plaintiffs the Texas American Federation of Teachers, another student and his parent.
The suit calls SB 12 an “overzealous” attempt to ban DEI in public schools and argues that it censors constitutionally protected speech and restricts students’ freedom of association. It’s also vague and overly broad, the suit says.
“S.B. 12 seeks to erase students’ identities and make it impossible for teachers, parents, and volunteers to tell the truth about the history and diversity of our state,” said Cameron Samuels, executive director at Students Engaged in Advancing Texas. “The law also guts vital support systems for Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and LGBTQIA+ students and educators.”
As part of the lawsuit, the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network claims SB 12 singles out the organization by explicitly restricting student clubs based on “sexual orientation or gender identity,” language the group uses to describe the student organizations it sponsors at schools. That restriction harms the freedom of speech of the group and its members, the suit says. The Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network has chapters in Texas at more than a dozen school districts, according to the filing.
Lawsuits against similar laws have had mixed results in the past.
Because of SB 12’s ban on discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms, opponents have compared it to Florida’s “don’t say gay” law, which attracted widespread media attention in 2022 due to its far-reaching impacts in public schools. Civil rights lawyers sued to block it, saying the law violated free speech and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. But a federal judge dismissed the case and said the plaintiffs had no legal standing and had failed to prove harm from the law. The attorneys ultimately agreed to a settlement with Florida education officials that clarified the law to allow discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms only if it’s not part of instruction.
The Texas Education Agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The broader push against DEI:The DEI ban on K-12 schools comes two years after the Texas Legislature passed a similar ban for the state’s higher education institutions. Senate Bill 17 requires public universities to close their diversity offices, ban DEI training and restrict hiring departments from asking for diversity statements, or essays in which a job candidate expresses their commitment to promoting diversity in the workplace.
Creighton, who also authored that bill, has warned higher education leaders that they could lose millions of dollars in state funding if they fail to comply with the law. Earlier this year, Abbott threatened Texas A&M University President Mark Welsh III’s job after claims spread online that Texas A&M was sending students and staffers to a conference that limited participation to people who are Black, Hispanic or Native American.
At the national level, President Donald Trump has ordered all federal agencies to end “equity-related” practices and asked contractors to certify they do not promote DEI efforts. Trump also told schools and universities they would lose federal money if they do not eliminate diversity practices.
Over the last five years, Texas and other Republican-led states have also taken other steps to abolish and ban DEI efforts in public education and the workforce. Similar to Trump, Abbott issued an executive order in January mandating that Texas agencies end all forms of DEI practices.
“We must always reject race-based favoritism or discrimination and allow people to advance based on talent and merit,” Abbott said.
Disclosure: ACLU Texas and Texas A&M University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
“Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go,” protestors chanted in the middle of Times Square, among a sea of signs that read “love reigns not kings,” “gays against faux-king Trump,” “we stand with … our trans family” and “the future is coming.”
On Saturday, independent analysts estimated that the No Kings March drew between 5 and 8 million people, and organizers say over 7 million people attended 2,700 events across all 50 states. The event, which was organized to push against the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S., was the largest single-day protest in America since 1970.
Over 100,000 New Yorkers marched in all five boroughs in NYC on Saturday. Photo by Jelinda Montes.
Among the crowd were countless LGBTQ people, fighting back against an administration that has introduced a litany of anti-LGBTQ executive orders and used vile rhetoric to denigrate queer people. This backsliding of LGBTQ rights, according to experts, has a deep connection to authoritarianism, with research showing that when governments weaken protections for queer and trans people, they often turn to broader democratic institutions next.
“Threats to democratic institutions and threats to LGBTQ rights are mutually reinforcing, generating a vicious cycle that strengthens authoritarian control,” Ari Shaw, director of International Programs at the Williams Institute, told Uncloseted Media. “Increased persecution of minority groups, including LGBTI people, is itself evidence of democratic backsliding by indicating the erosion of liberal democratic norms [meant to protect] minority rights.”
Legal Abuse of Power
One of the ways the Trump administration’s abuse of power has been most evident is through its legal actions.
He’s also slashed HIV funding at a staggering rate. Uncloseted Media estimates that the National Institutes of Health has terminated more than $1 billion worth of grants to HIV-related research, including 71% of all global HIV grants.
Jeffrey Cipriano at the NYC No Kings protest Saturday. Photo by Jelinda Montes.
It was these cuts that prompted Brooklynite Jeffrey Cipriano to turn out to protest. “The specific reason that I’m protesting is actually on the shirt I’m wearing,” says Cipriano.
“My best friend works for an organization called AIDS United. … His job is to travel the country and help people get AIDS medication, specifically trans and unhoused community members. But his job is at risk,” he says. “The end outcome of his work is that people who have issues in their lives have the issues resolved and that’s going away under the current administration.”
Executive orders are based on powers granted to the president by the U.S. Constitution or by Congressional statutes. The president cannot use an executive order to create new laws or spend money unless Congress has authorized it. They are meant to direct how existing laws are implemented. But Trump has ignored democratic norms, often filling agencies with loyal supporters, using orders to go after political opponents and pushing the limits of what the law allows.
In some cases, he has moved illegally. “The President is directing various executive branch officials to adopt policy that has either not yet been adopted by Congress or is in violation of existing statutory law,” says Jodi Short, professor of law at UC Law San Francisco. “The analogy to a king and what has troubled many about this presidency is the sheer consolidation of executive branch power in one individual.”
Short’s colleague, Dave Owen, agrees. “Illegality has been rampant,” he told Uncloseted Media in an email. “People are often cynical about the government, and they might think what Trump’s doing is nothing new. But most of the time, the executive branch takes the law seriously, and both legal constraints and norms of good governance matter,” he wrote. He says that through history, there’s been “a lot more integrity and a lot less lawlessness than most people realize.”
“This administration has broken with those traditions,” he adds.
Revolt Against Executive Orders
Many Americans have recognized this. A survey from April found that 85% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed that the president should obey federal court rulings even if he doesn’t like them.
In response to Trump’s overreach, more than 460 legal challenges have been filed across the country challenging his executive actions. One of these is a federal lawsuit by Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation that challenges the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s ban on military service by transgender people. Another lawsuit challenges Trump’s order directing federal agencies to withhold funds from medical providers and institutions that provide gender-affirming medical treatments for people under 19.
Zoe Boik and her father, Derik, protesting on Saturday. Photo by Sean Robinson.
Both of those lawsuits are one reason 17-year-old Zoe Boik came out to protest with her friends and her dad. “Obviously, I’m disappointed and kind of helpless because there’s nothing I can directly do to change or impact anything that’s going on,” says Boik, who identifies as pansexual and gender fluid and is not legally allowed to vote.
Boik—who was seven years old when Trump announced his run for presidency in 2015—says she’s doing a research paper on Trump’s trans military ban and is frustrated because she sees it as inexplicable discrimination. “They’re not letting trans people serve … which doesn’t make any sense.”
Zoe as a child with her dad, Derik. Photo courtesy of Boik.
LGBTQ Rights and Democratic Backsliding
This type of blatant discrimination is often a key sign of a country moving closer to authoritarianism and away from democracy. According to a 2023 research paper by Shaw and his colleagues, anti-LGBTQ stigma may contribute “to the erosion of democratic norms and institutions.”
The paper found that when a country with relatively high acceptance of LGBTQ rights introduces anti-LGBTQ legislation, it clashes with what most people believe and can weaken public trust in democracy, deepen political divides and make it easier for populist or extremist movements to gain power.
“The level of acceptance of LGBTQ people is closely associated with the strength of democracy in a country,” Shaw says. “In some cases, we even saw that rising anti-LGBTQ rhetoric or policies preceded a broader decline in democracy.”
In Brazil, for example, early democratic gains coincided with rising LGBTQ acceptance, including legal recognition of same-sex unions and workplace protections. But as populist President Jair Bolsonaro came into power in 2019, he began questioning—without evidence—the security of Brazil’s voting systems, saying he would only lose his re-election campaign if there were fraud. He was also accused of trying to intervene in operations held by the Federal Police about the alleged criminal conduct of his sons, and he told his ministers that he had the power and he would interfere—without exception—in all cabinet ministries. At the same time, LGBTQ protections were rolled back, and schools and civil society faced censorship, suggesting that falling LGBTQ acceptance may have “preceded Brazil’s democratic erosion,” according to Shaw’s paper. In September of this year, Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup.
Another example is Poland’s democracy weakening since 2015 under the Law and Justice Party, which consolidated power by undermining the Constitutional Tribunal, installing loyal judges and restricting independent media. Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric became central to the party’s nationalist platform, fueling the creation of nearly 100 “LGBT ideology free zones,” inciting violence against LGBTQ individuals and stymying legal recourse through politicized courts.
When it comes to LGBTQ rights, Trump has mimicked the moves of these leaders even though most of his constituents don’t want it: A 2022 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 80% of Americans favor laws that would protect LGBTQ people against discrimination.
“The definition of an authoritarian system is a system where power is consolidated in one individual whose power is unchecked by any other institution. And I fear that in certain domains, that’s the direction in which this administration is trying to move us,” says Short. “I think it’s incredibly dangerous.”
Attacks on Higher Education
Another common tool in the authoritarian playbook is attacking higher education.
While many universities are rejecting Trump’s demands, others are experiencing a chilling effect, changing their policies before the administration tries to hold up funds.
James Revson, Maddy Everlith and Shay Wingate holding their signs at the No Kings protest. Photo by Jelinda Montes.
“I’m here because I’m angry and I feel that we aren’t angry enough,” Maddy Everlith, a sophomore gender studies major at Pace University, told Uncloseted Media as she marched with her friends. “Being a woman of color in America and having so many intersectional identities is also what affects me. … I want to stand up and advocate for other people.”
Everlith’s university responded to Trump’s threats in September by renaming its DEI office to the “Division of Opportunity and Institutional Excellence.”
“I am beyond horrified how quickly our university was willing to bend the knee on this decision,” Austin Chappelle, a senior at Pace, told the student newspaper. This change comes in the midst of uncertainty under the Trump administration, which has already caused many LGBTQ students to feel uneasy on campus.
“It’s part of an electoral strategy to try to mobilize right-wing voters to distract from other sorts of political or economic scandals,” Shaw says, adding that this tactic is another way to gain power.
Lars Kindem protesting for his trans sister at the No Kings protest. Photo by Sean Robinson.
The pain of this rhetoric has affected millions of trans Americans and allies alike, including Lars Kindem, a 64-year-old retired pilot from Minnesota who was marching to support his transgender sister.
“What Trump has done is he’s taken people that haven’t done anything wrong and has turned them into scapegoats,” he says, adding that Trump’s language is “hateful, petty, mean and hurtful.”
He says his sister and her partner are having issues getting the correct gender markers issued on their passports. Because of the Trump administration’s treatment of the community, they are making plans to move to Denmark, where “there’s a lot more acceptance.”
Christian Nationalism
This scapegoating has played into the hands of Trump’s voter base of white evangelical Protestants, the only major Christian denomination in the U.S. in which a majority believes society has gone too far in accepting transgender people.
Since 2020, Trump has increasingly embraced Christian nationalism in his rhetoric and imagery. He’s sold Bibles, created a federal task force on anti-Christian bias and been intrinsically linked to Project 2025, the 920-page plan calling for the establishment of a government imbued with “biblical principles” and run by a president who holds sweeping executive powers.
Experts say that “a strong authoritarian streak” runs through conservative Christianity. A 2023 study found that supporters of Christian nationalism tend to support obedience to authority and the idea of authoritarian leaders who are willing to break the rules. Nearly half of Christian nationalists support the notion of an authoritarian leader.
“They are trying to use the language of Christianity, but they are abusing it and misusing it constantly,” Rev. Chris Shelton, a gay pastor at the protest, told Uncloseted Media. “Our faith is all about reaching out to the marginalized, reaching out to the people who are ostracized by society and embracing them and offering love and welcome and a sense of dignity and worth. And to see any human being’s worth being denied is just a mockery of our faith.”
Rev. Chris Shelton marched in Saturday’s NYC protest. Photo by Sean Robinson.
Heidi Beirich, the vice president and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, says that “the LGBTQ community is the prime target of modern authoritarian regimes.”
“For Christian nationalists, attacking LGBTQ rights is the first pillar in destroying civil rights for all. This has happened in countries like Hungary and Poland as authoritarianism consolidated and now it’s happening here,” Beirich told Uncloseted Media.
Moving Forward
As the country bleeds toward authoritarianism, LGBTQ protestors are encouraging people to use their voice, something the queer community is familiar with doing: One 2012 survey found that queer folks are 20 times more likely to be active in liberal social movements than their straight, cis counterparts.
“It is imperative that people continue to pay attention,” Short says. “There is so much going on, a lot of it is disturbing and intense, and there’s such a strong impulse to look away. But we have to engage in political action and resist inappropriate assertions of authority and continue to show up and vote for our democracy.”
17-year-old Zoe Boik is ready. She remembers being in second grade and crying the day after Trump won his first election in 2016. She couldn’t believe how he could lead the country despite “all the bad things he said.”
Boik can’t wait until the midterm elections, when she will be 18 and finally able to vote. “If we don’t vote, then our voices won’t be heard,” she says.
Despite this, she’s also concerned about her freedom to exercise that right being jeopardized.
“My fears about Trump don’t stem specifically from me being queer, but from his authoritarianism as a whole,” she says. “I am scared about how far he will move into dictatorship, [and] my biggest fear is that our right to vote will be compromised, leaving us no recourse.”
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He has additionally espoused a view of the United States as a white, Christian nation, claiming that white people are undergoing a “cultural genocide” and deliberate replacement.
Multiple Trump nominees have had histories of racist, violent, white supremacist, and even pro-Nazi tweets. But almost all of them still end up being confirmed by Senate Republicans.
NPR identified more than a dozen files released by the DOJ on Friday that are no longer available Saturday afternoon, including one that shows President Trump’s photo on a desk among several other photographs. The removed files also show various works of art, including those containing nudity.
An Uncloseted Media investigation finds that Alberta’s government is using many of the same tactics that were used to pass anti-LGBTQ bills in the Deep South.
Jay, a 24-year-old trans man who immigrated from East Africa to Canada in 2016, used to think of Canada as a safe place for queer people. But with Alberta—arguably Canada’s most conservative province—attempting to pass the country’s first gender-affirming care ban, he doesn’t feel this way anymore. “It’s really heartbreaking as a person who, back home, would not be able to live the way that I do, seeing the same rights being stripped away from folks here,” says Jay, who asked to go by first name because he’s not out to everyone in his life.
Since September, when Alberta’s anti-trans sports ban and pronoun policy officially went into effect, Jay has felt his province’s values inch closer to those of the U.S.
“I’m constantly thinking maybe I should leave this province. It’s not very safe for me here,” he told Uncloseted Media. “It’s starting to feel like a foreign place.”
Alberta’s anti-trans policy push started making headlines last year. On Dec. 3, 2024, more than 80 Albertan politicians assembled in the province’s capital, Edmonton, to debate the Health Statutes Amendment Act, also known as Bill 26. The act—which is likely to go into effect—would impose the strictest ban on gender-affirming care for minors that Canada has ever seen.
Conservative Adriana LaGrange, who in 2019 introduced an amended act that made it legal for parents to be notified if their child joins a gay-straight alliance, sponsored the bill. During the assembly, LaGrange told her colleagues a ban “would preserve choice so that [minors] can make adult decisions in the future,” and that while “Albertans know that our government is committed to safeguarding individuals’ rights … there are times when public health measures must be taken to keep our communities safe.”
As the legislative debate continued, Sarah Hoffman, a member of the Legislative Assembly for the New Democratic Party (NDP), accused Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and those closest to her of “playing political games that will have potentially deadly consequences for teens.” And Peggy Wright, another member of the NDP, referenced American trans kids whose lives have been upended from similar state bans: “Kids in the United States shouldn’t have to travel away from home to get the health care that they deserve, and neither should the kids that I know that are already thinking about what it is that they’re going to do once this [Canadian] legislation is passed. … As a mom, as a grandma, I am asking that every single person in this House think about those kids in your life. What kind of a future do you want for them?”
Alberta Legislature, facing the front entrance. Photo by Daryl Mitchell.
After this assembly, Alberta’s plans for the ban were stalled when families of transgender children and LGBTQ groups took legal action against the province. But on Nov. 17, Premier Smith announced her government will attempt to nullify this litigation and enact the ban by using a constitutional provision called the notwithstanding clause. If it goes through, this clause—which was used inAlberta in 2000 to push through legislation opposing gay marriage—will override efforts to stop the ban for up to five years.
“I’m not aware, and I have looked into it, of any other constitutional democracy in the world that has a similar provision,” says Bennett Jensen, director of legal at Egale Canada, one of the groups that pursued legal action against Alberta.
“[Smith] has been following in the steps of some of the worst actions of lawmakers in the United States,” he says. “It’s really important, especially for Americans, to understand that with the exception of the pronoun component of this, all these other laws are new in Canada. No government has ever acted to ban gender-affirming care for minors before.”
Following in Alabama’s Footsteps
Jensen sees a connection between Alberta’s anti-trans policy and that of the United States, where the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is tracking over 600 anti-LGBTQ bills. He points to the provincial government’s citation of an Alabama ban, known as the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, that prohibits the prescription of hormones and puberty blockers for minors, as well as gender-affirming surgeries. This legislation also establishes criminal penalties for doctors who violate the ban and requires parents to be notified if their child wishes to change their name or pronouns in school.
The Alberta government submitted an affidavit to the provincial court citing Alabama’s ban. This included the Alabama bill as well as a written statement by Clay Crenshaw, the state’s chief deputy attorney general.
Crenshaw spent nearly $1 million to defend the Alabama ban and told legislators he hired “lawyers from the Cooper & Kirk law firm up in D.C. to help [them] with the transgender litigation.” This law firm is known for legislating against LGBTQ rights and led the defense when Californians challenged their state’s decision to prohibit same-sex marriage.
Alberta’s ban mirrors Alabama’s in that it prohibits surgeries, puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for minors, though—unlike Alabama—they would allow youth who are already receiving gender-affirming care to continue receiving it.
“[The Alberta government] relied on information from the government of Alabama in the context of its ban on gender-affirming care,” says Jensen. “So the government seems to be deeply informed by the actions of American lawmakers, and that is deeply troubling.”
A Shared Expert Witness
Alberta also hired James Cantor, one of the expert witnesses that Alabama used to push its ban through. Cantor is a Canadian psychologist who has acted as an expert witness in dozens of U.S. cases on trans issues. He was first hired in 2021 by the Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom. The Christian legal group has advocated for laws banning sodomy, has helped overturn Roe v. Wade, and is currently arguing the Supreme Court to overturn Colorado’s conversion therapy ban.
In a 2024 interview, Cantor told Uncloseted Media that his perspective on trans rights makes him “marketable” to U.S. conservatives. He compares his testimony to Marisa Tomei’s feisty character in “My Cousin Vinny” and references “Ally McBeal” and musical comedy “Schmigadoon!” as theatrical elements involved in being an expert witness.
“The first time I was going in court, we were just laughing,” says Cantor. “It was just teasing about how I love being a performer on stage enjoying an audience, and here I am doing it in a courtroom. … In Ohio, there was a television camera for the news at the courtroom. The next day on social media, all I kept hearing was what a good hair day I was having.”
Cantor is cited at least 36 times throughout Alabama’s defense of its gender-affirming care ban.
In his expert witness testimony in Alberta, Cantor makes dubious claims, including that trans adults consist “primarily of biological males and only those sexually attracted to females” and that kids identifying as trans “is a distinct phenomenon that, without social transition, usually desists.”
In taking legal action against the Alberta government, Egale Canada stated in February that “Dr. Cantor’s astonishing lack of insight into the limitations of his own expertise is wholly inconsistent with the role of an expert in a court proceeding and is disqualifying in itself.” And in a West Virginia Court case where they used Cantor’s expert testimony, the ACLU argued that Cantor’s “views, which pathologize transgender people … are irrelevant, harmful, and unfit for use by the Court.”
Even in Alabama, one of America’s most conservative states, U.S. District Judge Liles C. Burke wrote in his opinion and order that he gave Cantor’s testimony as an expert witness “very little weight” after it was uncovered that he had never treated a transgender child.
Still, Alberta hired him as an expert witness.
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Faefyx Collington (They/Them)December 21, 2025, 4:41 pm ESTMay 14, 2024; New York, NY, USA; Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (center), and Vivek Ramaswamy (right) look on while former President Donald Trump speaks to the media alongside his lawyer Todd Blanche before his criminal trial at Manhattan criminal court at the New York State Supreme Court on May 14, 2024. Mandatory Credit: Justin Lane/Pool via USA TODAY NETWORK | Justin Lane/Pool via USA TODAY N
The ACLU and a group of LGBTQ+ and student rights organizations are suing Texas to block the state’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in K-12 public schools. Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Texas Tribune
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