Over the past decade, there have been numerous legislative attempts to deny transgender people access to bathrooms. Plus, campaigns were launched to ban books that include trans characters and storylines from K–12 schools and public libraries. More recently, policy efforts to deny gender-affirming health care to trans youth and to prohibit the participation of trans athletes in girls’ and women’s sports have intensified. Trans Legislation Tracker, an independent research organization, reports that so far in 2026, there have been 747 active bills across the country that, if passed, would negatively impact trans and genderqueer people. Last year, of the 1,022 bills that were formally introduced, 126 passed. The highest number target educational institutions.
Political and legislative violence negatively affects trans and genderqueer people across all racial and ethnic groups. It aims to discard and otherwise punish them for being who they are. But for Black girls and women, it uniquely multiplies their vulnerability and places them at highest risk for violence. This does not get acknowledged as often as it should. Hence, on this International Transgender Day of Visibility, I am highlighting the intersectional implications of minimizing the particular harms of legislative transphobia on Black people.
In the late 1980s, Columbia Law School and UCLA School of Law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw introduced the concept of intersectionality to illuminate how Black women were made especially vulnerable to injustices within the U.S. legal system. Her pioneering work showed that racism alone had long produced unequal judicial outcomes for Black women, but that other aspects of their identities often intensified these disparities.
Factors such as being a single mother, living in poverty, having a disability, being an immigrant and identifying as queer further compounded their risk of inequitable treatment in the courts. Across four decades, Crenshaw has helped legal professionals and scholars more fully understand how overlapping forms of disadvantage have long produced compounded inequities inside and beyond our nation’s legal system. Tragically, this still happens acutely to Black women, including those who are trans and genderqueer.
In a CNN interview last weekend, Ts Madison, a transgender activist and Emmy Award–winning entertainer, discussed the importance of transgender visibility, the impact of anti-trans legislation and the urgent need for stronger protections. The segment included statistics published in “The Epidemic of Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in the United States,” a 2024 report produced by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Accordingly, 84 percent of trans and what the HRC terms “gender-expansive” victims of fatal violence since 2013 have been people of color. Eighty-three percent of them were women, and 61 percent of them were Black women.
U.S. president Donald Trump, members of his cabinet and many conservative lawmakers often make hateful universal declarations and talk disparagingly about trans Americans they have never met. Fox News Channel anchors and guests frequently mock and villainize trans people by saying some of the most disgusting things about them. Last week, the International Olympic Committee announced that trans athletes will not be allowed to compete in women’s sports during the LA28 games and beyond.
Transphobic rhetoric and policies negatively affect all trans people, as well as those of us who love them and embrace their humanity. But because of the particular ways in which sexism, racism, anti-Blackness and transphobia intersect, it is Black trans girls and women who will be most harmed in contexts where human rights protections have been legislatively decimated in recent years.
As K–12 schools, colleges and universities, government agencies, corporations, nonprofits and other organizations continue to find ways to engineer safe and inclusive climates during this era in which DEI has been legislatively defunded (and in some instances, banned), they have a responsibility to ensure that trans and genderqueer persons are protected from violence. And their efforts ought not be raceless.
For several years now, many women of color, especially Black undergraduates, whom I have interviewed for my campus climate studies have critiqued women’s centers for feeling culturally, compositionally and programmatically like white women’s centers. Women’s studies programs tend to default to white women’s studies, research participants often tell me. And LGBTQIA+ centers reportedly focus too little on the ways in which queer collegians of color experience the intersectionality of homophobia, transphobia and racism. Anti-DEI policies have torn down many of these important campus structures, which is guaranteed to worsen, not improve the experiences of trans and genderqueer students of color.
Fortunately, many colleges and universities are finding creative, legally defensible ways to serve and protect diverse students and employees, albeit to varying degrees. Despite the hateful political rhetoric about them, institutions must deliberately create safe, affirming conditions that enable trans collegians to thrive. This should include but not be limited to trans students who play on sports teams and those who desire to compete in future Olympic games. Generic inclusion programming that renders trans people invisible will place them at greater risk of erasure, hypervisibility, violence and perhaps even death. Most of them will likely be Black women, which is an inexcusable reality.
Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.
