On the evening of the 2024 election, Sydney Duncan was completely blindsided. A longtime LGBTQ+ advocate and attorney, Duncan says she “was not expecting neighbor after neighbor to vote the way they did,” especially given the stark differences between the two candidates. President-elect Donald Trump, for his part, is the first Commander-in-Chief in American history to have been twice impeached, including over his role in inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, and the first to have been convicted of a felony resulting from his time in office. He was found guilty in April 2024 of 34 felonies for falsifying business records to conceal his hush money payments to former adult performer Stormy Daniels.
“I really, really did not see that coming,” Duncan tells LGBTQ Nation of the election returns, which saw Trump becoming the first Republican since 2004 to win both the popular vote and the Electoral College. “I’m still processing it. Since the election, I’ve been pinching myself to try to wake up from this nightmare, but here we are.”
Among the most difficult aspects of watching Trump retake the White House is knowing that he did so, in part, by vociferously opposing trans rights. During the presidential race, Republicans reportedly spent more than $222 million on advertisements directly targeting the trans community, including TV spots claiming that Democrat Kamala Harris “is for they/them.” If re-elected, Trump vowed to push for a federal ban on gender-affirming medical care for trans minors and policies restricting the ability of trans student-athletes to play sports in alignment with their lived gender. In what could be a preview of things to come, the House of Representatives recently instituted a bathroom ban targeting incoming freshman Sarah McBride (D-DE), the first out trans woman ever elected to Congress.
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Duncan, who works as the senior counsel for Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE), says that she has seen firsthand the deleterious impact of anti-trans policy living in Alabama. The state has on the books the nation’s most onerous trans youth health care ban, which prohibits transition care through the age of 19, and one of its harshest “Don’t Say Gay” laws, which restricts LGBTQ+ education through the end of the eighth grade. She sometimes jokes that her job at A4TE, the nation’s largest trans advocacy group, is “preventing the rest of the country from becoming Alabama,” but the remark hardly feels in jest following Trump’s win.
“We’re ready in Alabama because we’re living through it,” she says, adding that LGBTQ+ advocacy groups like A4TE have already begun to prepare for what they believe the incoming administration has in store: “Things can get worse, and I think we have pretty clear eyes on what that’s going to look like, at least initially. I’m OK, and I think my community is doing OK, but the kids here are not. They have really taken the brunt of the anti-trans rhetoric.”
As the LGBTQ+ community looks ahead to four more years of Trump, Duncan spoke with LGBTQ Nation about how advocacy groups like hers are preparing and what keeps them motivated to fight. For Duncan, her north star is the sheer inevitability of trans liberation: “This isn’t something that you can stop. It’s not something that you can just put back in a bottle.”
A new trans advocacy organization emerges
In many ways, A4TE was built for this moment. Launched in June 2023, the nonprofit results from a merger between the nation’s two largest trans advocacy groups: the National Center for Trans Equality (NCTE) and the Trans Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF). The organization combines TLDEF’s decades of legal expertise with the lobbying prowess of NCTE in order to grow and develop trans political power at a time when trans Americans are still jockeying for their seat at the table. A4TE’s work combines public education efforts with high-impact litigation to advance trans equality.
Less than a year after its founding, A4TE certainly has much work ahead. Duncan says that experts are anticipating that Trump, in the very first days of his term, will issue an executive order prohibiting federal funding for gender-affirming care. Such an order, she adds, is likely to be patterned after the Hyde Amendment, a 1980 law banning public insurers like Medicaid from covering abortion care. Trump may not meet much political opposition should he take such action: A must-pass defense bill recently signed into law by President Joe Biden included a provision blocking the children of active or retired servicemembers from seeking coverage for gender-affirming treatments under TRICARE, the military’s medical plan. It was the first anti-LGBTQ+ bill to be enacted in the U.S. since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in December 1993.
“It would be devastating,” Duncan says of a possible amendment attacking gender-affirming care. “It would end health care for a lot of people and remove the ability to get health care by removing it from their employee health plans. Our opponents say that [trans health care] is drive-through medicine and that it’s easy to access and easy to get. But the reality is, it’s not. It’s sometimes expensive. It’s cost-prohibitive to a lot of families—and a lot of families who rely on resources provided through the government to get these kinds of things.”
Duncan also fears that Trump will issue a federal order defining “gender and sex in a very limited way,” similar to proposed regulations floated during his first term in office. Trump has already indicated that he has an appetite for revisiting the policy: On his 2024 campaign website, he called upon Congress to pass a national law stating that “the only genders recognized by the U.S. government are male and female—and they are assigned at birth.” Those kinds of efforts will not be exclusive to the federal legislature: Alabama has, in recent sessions, pushed the “What Is a Woman?” Act to define trans people out of existence, and more states are likely to follow in 2025 as anti-trans legislation reaches record levels. Last year, at least 669 bills targeting trans Americans were put forward in 43 states, per the Trans Legislative Tracker website.
In looking ahead to the new Trump term, Duncan says that it may be a matter for Republicans to throw everything they can against the wall and see what sticks. “All indications are that they are going to take a lot of shots at the trans community,” she says. “They have both houses of Congress, so we’re expecting some bad legislation on top of that. We expect a tidal wave. We’re going to be slammed.”
Also keeping A4TE busy is the recent Supreme Court case that will determine the future of trans health care. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the nation’s highest judicial body will weigh in on the permissibility of state-level laws limiting the kinds of medical treatments that can be prescribed to trans minors. Currently, 26 states limit doctors from providing best practice medical treatments if the patient is a trans person under the age of 18—including Tennessee, the state whose attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, is named as the defendant in the suit.
If the Supreme Court decides that Tennessee is permitted under the Constitution to limit trans medical care without scrutiny, the ruling could provide a green light for other states that wish to restrict gender-affirming treatments while emboldening any similar efforts at the federal level. Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), introduced legislation in July 2023 that would jail doctors for up to 12 years for providing transition care to minors.
Duncan cautions, however, that even a positive outcome from the Supreme Court doesn’t necessarily equate to “trans rights for everyone.” It would simply mean, she says, that states must operate under “heightened scrutiny” when passing anti-trans laws: that they are required to demonstrate a rational basis for the legislation rather than acting out of pure animus.
“Right now, they don’t really have to say: ‘Here’s our evidence,’ ” says Duncan, who attended oral arguments in the case this December on behalf of A4TE. “We’re still going to face those state laws, but the states will be more burdened to say: ‘We’re bringing these laws because of these reasons, and the law is going to do this in concert with that reasoning.’ Right now, they don’t have to do that. Right now, it’s just: ‘We don’t like trans people.’ ”
We’re not going anywhere
Although early signs indicate that the Supreme Court is likely to uphold Tennessee’s law targeting trans youth health care, Duncan remains hopeful that a “rubber band effect” is imminent: that after years of attacks on the very existence of trans people, the momentum will reverse. She believes that what the trans community needs is the kind of pendulum swing that accompanied Ellen DeGeneres’ 1997 coming out, which helped humanize the everyday experiences of gay and lesbians to an American public that, by and large, widely held negative views of the community. A Gallup poll conducted the prior year indicated that a slim majority of Americans still believed that homosexuality should be illegal. Just 26 percent of respondents in the same poll felt that queer couples should have the right to marry.
“That’s why representation matters in media and in life,” Duncan says, noting the impact of Laverne Cox’s 2014 Time magazine cover on her decision to live her life openly as a trans woman. “Media is so fragmented right now that I don’t know if that same thing is possible for trans people. There needs to be something that happens that draws all eyes to it. If it draws my eye and not my neighbor’s eye, then it’s not going to do that. But if it has X factor, that says that these are real people, and this is a real human experience, I think that will cause a shift.”
“Every day, I see people waking up, living their best lives, and refusing to be any other way than the way they are.”
Sydney Duncan, Advocates for Trans Equality Senior Counsel
But while the community awaits its own sea change in public opinion, Duncan maintains that trans people will continue to persist the same way that they always have. Before joining A4TE, she worked for five and a half years as the attorney for Alabama’s largest LGBTQ+-led resource provider, Birmingham AIDS Outreach, and Duncan has seen—time and again—the state fail to stop people from being trans. After signing the state’s gender-affirming care ban, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) tweeted in May 2022, “If the Good Lord made you a boy, you’re a boy. If He made you a girl, you’re a girl. It’s Alabama common sense.” Although these kinds of laws are intended to discourage people from living their truth, Duncan says that she’s only gotten “louder and more obnoxious” in the face of far-right hate.
“Every day, I see people waking up, living their best lives, and refusing to be any other way than the way they are,” says Duncan. “I think that’s beautiful. I think it’s so radical and empowering. Watching that gives me hope. Nobody’s saying, ‘I’ll just give up and go back to the way it was.’ They’re saying, ‘Hell no.’ ”
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