Transgender people need protection and allyship, now more than ever
United States President Donald Trump has made it very clear that transgender and non-binary people are not welcome in the U.S.
From the executive order signed on Jan. 20, 2025, which aims to restore “biological truth to the federal government,” to the one signed on Jan. 27, 2025, which seeks to exclude transgender people from military service, it is clear that Trump’s government is prioritizing the fight against what it calls “radical gender ideology.”
This agenda alienates an already vulnerable group and tells them they do not belong.
Worse yet, it tells people outside genderqueer communities that transgender people are dangerous and mentally ill. These executive orders are correlated with an increase in incidents of hate and harassment targeting transgender people in the U.S., according to the 2025 GLAAD ALERT Desk Report. The number of transgender people who were murdered in the U.S. and Puerto Rico went up from 29 people in 2017 to 56 in 2021, according to CBS News—a 93 per cent increase.
This is not limited to the U.S. A May 2026 Statistics Canada report found that people in Canada were less accepting of gender diversity in 2025 than in 2018. Among women, 77 per cent agreed with the statement “everyone should be able to express their gender however they choose” in 2025, down from 85 per cent in 2018. For men, it fell from 78 per cent in 2018 to 70 per cent in 2025.
While not stark, these differences do show a cultural lean towards a less accepting, and more importantly, less safe, world for transgender people in Canada.
In British Columbia, the Conservative Party won its first election in nearly a century on Oct. 24. The party’s leader has expressed his desire to repeal the use of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) 123 in schools. SOGI 123 is an educational initiative that works to make schools safer and more inclusive for all students.
A Google News search of transgender people in sports will return many, many articles, from outlets like the New York Times to the CBC.
However, this debate acts as a smokescreen. While it is important that transgender women are being excluded from women’s sports, it is more important that many transgender people have lost access to healthcare in the U.S. over the past couple of years.
Youth in Canada also risk losing their healthcare. Some already have. For example, in Alberta, the United Conservative Party used the notwithstanding clause to pass a bill containing three laws that will affect transgender youth, according to the CBC.
One of these Alberta laws will restrict access to gender affirming care to those who are under the age of 16, including prohibiting doctors from prescribing puberty blockers to this group, despite the Alberta Medical Association saying that puberty blockers do not render a person infertile, as stated in the same CBC article.
According to an article in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, denying transgender children access to puberty blockers, and thus forcing them to go through a puberty that does not align with their gender identity, can cause significant distress for the children. This research echoes the experiences of transgender people who have had no choice but to go through the wrong puberty.
Denying children the right to puberty blockers is violence. It tells these kids their lived experience does not matter. Additionally, the notwithstanding clause is being weaponized in Alberta to serve the interests of a particular political party and harm transgender people.
Transgender people are being used as a scapegoat to distract people from other issues plaguing populations, such as the rising cost of goods in both the U.S. and Canada. Much of this fearmongering is directed at transgender women. From the sports debate, which rarely, if ever, addresses transgender men competing in men’s sports, to the bathroom bans.
One of Trump’s executive orders states explicitly that it aims to “defend women.” This mindset infantilizes cisgender women and brings to mind the transphobic trope of a man dressing as a woman to harm them, as seen in Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs.
There is evidence that allowing transgender people to use the facilities they prefer does not lead to an increase in harm done to non-transgender individuals. In fact, it is transgender people who report being harassed and assaulted in such spaces. We should be putting our energy into protecting the vulnerable, and transgender people are clearly the party at risk here.
The Link supports the transgender community in its fight against this cultural shift. We stand with transgender people and their allies against the attacks on them by our governments.
Transgender and non-binary people need protection. They need access to healthcare. They need allies who are willing to stand up for them. They do not need to be othered and used as scapegoats.
This article originally appeared in Volume 47, Issue 4, published October 27, 2026.
