There is a particular kind of political obscenity in making people calculate whether honesty is safe. It happens when a worker pauses before mentioning a spouse, when a patient edits an answer on an intake form, and when a parent keeps quiet at a school meeting rather than risk making a child the next target. No police raid is required. Fear performs the work quietly, one withheld name and one swallowed sentence at a time.

I came out at thirteen. I have lived long enough to remember when the closet was presented as common sense, professional discipline, family loyalty, personal privacy, and every other polite phrase society invented to keep gay people hidden. I remember the AIDS years, when silence was treated as respectable and our deaths were treated as an inconvenience. I know what it sounds like when public officials claim they are merely debating policy after their policies teach people like me to disappear.

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2026 report, One Year In: LGBTQ+ Americans Under the Trump Administration, puts numbers beside that retreat. Nearly half of LGBTQ+ adults surveyed said they had become less open somewhere in their lives during the prior twelve months. More than half said they had become less visible. Parents of school-aged children reported the sharpest retreat at schools, where 40.1% said they had pulled back their visibility. Those are not abstract percentages. They represent millions of small decisions shaped by a single question: What could happen to me or my family if I tell the truth? (Human Rights Campaign Foundation [HRCF], 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

Donald Trump did not personally create every act of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination recorded in that survey. A survey cannot prove that one executive order caused one person to hide a wedding photograph or avoid a clinic. Yet causation is not the only honest question available. The federal government spent Trump’s first year defining transgender identity as false, purging diversity programs, restricting passports, ejecting transgender service members, narrowing civil-rights enforcement, ending the LGBTQ+ youth option on the 988 crisis line, and threatening institutions that provided gender-affirming care. People saw the message. Institutions saw it, too. (The White House) (The White House) (The White House) (SAMHSA)

This is what state-sponsored stigma looks like in a suit and tie. It rarely announces itself as stigma. It arrives as a definition, a grant condition, a personnel memorandum, a revised form, a deleted webpage, or a new interpretation of an old law. The cruelty is administrative, which lets cowards call it procedural.

The Numbers Are Not Vague, but They Need to Be Read Honestly

HRC’s analysis drew responses from nearly 15,000 U.S. adults age eighteen and older. The sample included nearly 10,000 LGBTQ+ adults and 5,000 non-LGBTQ+ adults. LGBTQ+ participants came through Community Marketing Insights’ panel, and PSB Insights conducted a separate survey using the same questions for non-LGBTQ+ adults. The report describes the project as the eighteenth annual LGBTQ+ community survey (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

The most widely shared finding is 47.5%. That share of LGBTQ+ adults reported being less open in at least one part of life than twelve months earlier. The retreat appeared at work, where 26.5% reported being less open; in healthcare settings, where 25.4% reported the same; and in public spaces, where the figure reached 28.3%. A separate measure found that 51.1% felt less visible, and 29.7% believed acceptance of LGBTQ+ people had declined (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

Precision matters here. The report does not say that 47.5% of every LGBTQ+ adult in the United States fully returned to the closet. It says nearly half of its LGBTQ+ respondents became less open somewhere in their lives. A lesbian may remain out to friends yet stop mentioning her wife at work. A transgender man may live openly at home yet stop correcting medical staff. A bisexual parent may stop volunteering at school events after hearing another parent turn a child’s identity into campaign material. Partial concealment is still concealment, and repeated self-editing carries a cost.

The report deserves attention, not worship. Its sixteen pages do not provide full field dates, complete question wording, response rates, detailed weighting procedures, or margins of sampling error. The LGBTQ+ sample came from a standing community panel rather than a random national probability sample, and the non-LGBTQ+ comparison came from a separate survey. Those omissions limit the certainty with which any percentage can be projected onto the full U.S. population. The report is significant, but it is not sacred. Its figures should be read as a serious warning from a very large sample, not as mathematical scripture.

Independent data make dismissal harder. Gallup reported in 2026 that 9% of U.S. adults identified as LGBTQ+ in 2025, more than double its 2012 figure. Among adults younger than thirty, the figure reached 23%. Gallup used a random sample of 13,454 adults and reported a one-point margin of sampling error for the full sample. A community this large is not a boutique constituency, a campus fad, or a cable-news invention. It is family, labor, taxpayers, patients, parents, veterans, students, neighbors, and voters (Gallup, 2026). (Gallup.com)

Public opinion adds an ugly contradiction. A 2026 PRRI survey found that 72% of Americans supported laws protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination. Broad public support can exist beside a federal campaign that makes daily life feel less safe. A majority may tell a pollster that discrimination is wrong, yet institutions still follow the loudest threat, the largest grant, the angriest regulator, or the politician most willing to punish them. Rights weaken when support remains private and intimidation becomes public policy. (PRRI)

The Closet Is a Survival Strategy, Not a Personal Failure

People who have never needed a closet often speak about coming out as a single brave announcement. That version fits a greeting card, but it does not fit life. LGBTQ+ people come out repeatedly: to a new doctor, a new supervisor, a landlord, a teacher, a home-health aide, a church member, a neighbor, a police officer, or the stranger who asks an ordinary question about family. Each disclosure has its own risk calculation.

The closet can protect a paycheck, a lease, access to care, a relationship with a child, or physical safety. It can protect someone for an afternoon and injure them over a lifetime. Calling concealment cowardice blames the person facing danger rather than the institution creating it. Nobody owes visibility to a workplace, clinic, school, or government that has made honesty hazardous.

Research on minority stress has long linked stigma, anticipated rejection, concealment, and structural discrimination with poorer mental and physical health among sexual and gender minorities. Frost and Meyer’s 2023 review describes minority stress as the strain produced by social conditions that place stigmatized groups under added psychological and structural pressure. That framework does not claim every LGBTQ+ person will become ill. It explains why repeated exposure to rejection, vigilance, and institutional hostility can create health disparities across a population (Frost & Meyer, 2023). (PubMed)

Healthcare offers a blunt example. Research using U.S. transgender survey data has found that anticipated discrimination can lead transgender adults to avoid care. Another study found that transgender people living in states with stronger protective policies had lower odds of avoiding healthcare from fear of mistreatment. Policy does not remain trapped in a statute book. It enters the examination room before the patient does (Goldenberg et al., 2020). (PubMed) (PubMed)

HRC’s respondents described that same calculation. One participant said that life felt scarier and that they stayed home more, reducing their presence in the community. Another reported feeling less comfortable at home and on the street under constant scrutiny of transgender people. The words are plain. People are shrinking their lives to reduce exposure to hostility (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

I refuse to romanticize visibility. Coming out has changed laws, families, workplaces, medicine, art, and public opinion. It has saved lives by letting isolated people see that they were not alone. Yet no movement has the right to demand that an individual become collateral damage for a broader cause. The obligation belongs to institutions and allies: make honesty safer, then let each person decide what to disclose.

The White House Made the Threat Official

Trump’s first-day executive order directed the federal government to recognize only male and female sexes, defined sex as unchangeable, and declared that gender identity would not be included in the federal meaning of sex. The order instructed agencies to remove policies, forms, messages, and practices that recognized gender identity. Its language did more than set an administrative definition. It used the authority of the presidency to label transgender identity false. (The White House)

That definition moved into documents people need to live and travel. The State Department now issues passports with an M or F marker matching what it calls a person’s biological sex at birth, and it no longer issues X markers. The department’s current guidance says applications requesting a different marker may face delays and will be issued using sex-at-birth records. A Supreme Court stay issued in November 2025 let that policy continue during litigation. (Travel State)

The administration extended erasure into the federal record. Research from the Williams Institute found that roughly 360 federal data collections removed at least one sexual-orientation or gender-identity measure after January 20, 2025. About 94% of the removed measures involved gender identity, and sixty removed measures involved sexual orientation. Government cannot address disparities it refuses to measure. Deleting the question does not delete the people; it deletes the evidence needed to hold agencies accountable. (Williams Institute)

Trump’s anti-DEI orders ended federal diversity programs, revoked a decades-old federal-contractor equal-employment order, and directed the attorney general to develop an enforcement strategy aimed at what the administration calls illegal DEI practices in the private sector. The government framed inclusion as suspect, wasteful, or discriminatory. Employers, universities, hospitals, and contractors heard a financial warning: keep visible inclusion programs and risk scrutiny, contracts, grants, or litigation. (The White House) (The White House)

The military policy was more direct. Trump’s January 2025 order treated gender dysphoria and transgender identity as incompatible with military standards. Defense Department guidance disqualified many current and prospective service members, ended funding for several forms of transition-related care, and ordered separation proceedings absent a narrow waiver. In June 2026, a divided federal appeals panel ruled that the policy illegally targeted transgender people, yet the ban remained in effect as further review continued. A person can meet military standards, serve honorably, and still be told that identity alone makes service unacceptable. (The White House) (AP News)

The administration ended the 988 “Press 3” service dedicated to LGBTQ+ youth on July 17, 2025. SAMHSA described the change as ending a separate service category and returning callers to the general crisis system. That phrasing does not erase the policy choice. A specialized line existed for a population facing distinct stigma and suicide risk, then the federal government removed it during an aggressive campaign against LGBTQ+ inclusion. (SAMHSA)

Education policy carried the same signal. The Department of Education returned to the 2020 Title IX framework after a federal court vacated the Biden administration’s 2024 rule, and the department directed enforcement around a narrow sex-based interpretation. It opened investigations tied to transgender participation and facilities, and it praised institutions that changed policy to match Trump’s sports order. The legal details vary by setting, but the public lesson is easy to read: transgender students are treated as a compliance problem. (U.S. Department of Education)

No single order explains every fearful choice recorded by HRC. Taken together, the orders created a federal posture. They told transgender people that their identity would be rejected in official records, military service, healthcare policy, education enforcement, and public data. They told everyone else that mistreating this group might earn political approval rather than federal resistance.

Healthcare Fear Is a Public-Health Failure

HRC found that healthcare discrimination had a measurable relationship with declining health. Among LGBTQ+ adults who reported discrimination in healthcare, 32.7% said their health had worsened during the prior year. The report said transgender and nonbinary adults faced the greatest access problems, with two-thirds reporting difficulty getting healthcare under the policy conditions of Trump’s first year (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

The HIV findings deserve close attention. LGBTQ+ adults using Medicare or Medicaid were more than twice as likely to report barriers to HIV prevention or treatment compared with LGBTQ+ adults using other coverage. More than 40% of LGBTQ+ respondents earning under $75,000 reported such barriers. HRC did not publish the full item wording, subgroup counts, or adjusted estimates in the brief report, so these numbers should be treated as warning indicators rather than final national prevalence estimates. They remain alarming (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

Medicaid is the largest insurance source for nonelderly adults living with HIV, covering an estimated 40% of that population. It accounts for a major share of federal HIV-care spending, and coverage interruptions can threaten medication access, viral suppression, preventive care, and continuity with clinicians. HIV treatment is not an optional monthly purchase that can be postponed until finances improve. Interruptions can injure the individual and weaken public-health progress (KFF, 2023; HIV.gov, 2023). (KFF) (HIV.gov)

The federal campaign against gender-affirming care added another layer of fear. CMS issued warnings to hospitals in 2025 and later announced proposed rules that would restrict Medicare participation for hospitals providing certain care to minors and bar federal Medicaid or CHIP funding for such care. These proposals used loaded government language and threatened the financing structure of hospitals. A clinician does not need a direct ban to become cautious when a federal agency places reimbursement, investigations, and institutional survival in the same sentence as transgender care. (CMS) (CMS)

Fear changes health behavior. Patients delay appointments, withhold medication histories, avoid emergency rooms, travel farther, pay cash, or stop seeking care. Transgender and nonbinary patients interviewed in emergency-department research have described structural barriers, harmful staff interactions, poor clinician knowledge, and experiences that shaped later decisions about care. Those are clinical consequences, not culture-war abstractions (Allison et al., 2021). (PubMed)

I have spent much of my adult life writing about HIV stigma. I have watched people confuse morality with medicine and punishment with prevention. Every era seems to produce another politician eager to prove that stigma can be rebranded as fiscal restraint, parental rights, religious liberty, or administrative efficiency. The label changes. The damage remains recognizable.

Workplace Cowardice Dressed as Compliance

HRC found that 39.1% of workers reported at least one DEI-related change by their employer during the prior year. Workers at organizations that reduced DEI practices were more than twice as likely to report stigma, bias, or discrimination compared with workers at organizations that maintained those practices, 54.2% against 24.9%. Among LGBTQ+ workers whose employers ended or reduced DEI efforts, 57.4% reported stigma or bias at work (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

The report recorded a sentence that should embarrass every employer who has ever issued a Pride-month logo and called the job finished: “My boss made it very clear that no one needs to know I am gay.” That is the workplace closet in one sentence. It does not require a termination letter. It requires a supervisor who knows exactly how to threaten belonging without creating a clean exhibit for court (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

Trump’s orders did not erase Title VII. The Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County remains law and holds that employers covered by Title VII may not fire a worker for being gay or transgender. Yet legal protection and practical enforcement are not identical. The EEOC shifted its public posture in 2025, announced a rollback of what it called the prior administration’s “gender identity agenda,” and voted in January 2026 to rescind its 2024 harassment guidance. (Supreme Court) (EEOC) (EEOC)

A worker deciding whether to complain does not consult a law-school casebook alone. That worker asks whether human resources will help, whether management will retaliate, whether the agency charged with enforcement still sees the claim as a priority, whether legal counsel is affordable, and whether unemployment is survivable. Rights that require years of litigation and thousands of dollars are fragile rights for anyone living paycheck to paycheck.

Corporate retreat deserves its own share of contempt. Many companies spent years declaring that inclusion was central to their values, recruitment, and customer relationships. Then federal pressure arrived, and some discovered that their values had an expiration date tied to the next procurement cycle. An institution that abandons LGBTQ+ workers at the first sign of political heat did not have values. It had marketing.

The business case is plain without reducing human dignity to profit. Hostile workplaces lose trust, increase turnover, discourage reporting, and push employees to spend attention on self-protection rather than work. HRC found that 59.5% of LGBTQ+ workers who experienced stigma or bias described their workplace as more hostile. Employers can call retreat “risk management,” but creating a fearful workforce is poor management by any honest measure (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

Parents Are Reading the School Climate Correctly

The 40.1% figure for LGBTQ+ parents with school-aged children may be the report’s most revealing number. Parents were more likely to reduce visibility at their children’s schools than in any other measured setting. That decision carries a distinct kind of fear. An adult may be willing to absorb insults aimed at them yet pull back when visibility could expose a child to bullying, administrative scrutiny, gossip, or political retaliation (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

Schools have become a preferred stage for anti-LGBTQ+ politics. Officials frame transgender students, pronouns, library books, classroom references, family structures, bathrooms, and sports as threats requiring government intervention. The policy details differ across states and districts, but the tactic stays familiar: make LGBTQ+ existence sound dangerous, then present exclusion as child protection. Children hear every word.

Federal enforcement can magnify that pressure. The Department of Education’s 2025 directives restored the administration’s preferred Title IX interpretation and linked federal oversight to transgender participation in school activities and facilities. In 2026 the department continued investigations and enforcement actions built around that approach. School leaders know federal money and public accusations may follow a dispute. (U.S. Department of Education) (U.S. Department of Education)

A parent who becomes quieter at school is not irrational. They may have watched a routine board meeting become a spectacle, seen private information posted online, or heard elected officials describe families like theirs as ideological contaminants. They may decide that the safest strategy is to attend fewer events, disclose less, and avoid becoming recognizable. The resulting absence then lets hostile officials claim LGBTQ+ families are rare or nonexistent.

That cycle is one reason visibility has civic value. School officials make different choices when they know LGBTQ+ families are present, organized, and paying attention. Other parents learn that the family targeted in a campaign is the same family sharing snacks at soccer practice or helping with a fundraiser. Retreat weakens those points of contact, but responsibility for that retreat belongs to the people who made contact dangerous.

The answer cannot be demanding that frightened parents sacrifice their children for public education. Safer participation requires clear district policies, confidential complaint processes, trained staff, anti-bullying enforcement, and school-board members willing to confront organized harassment. Allies need to speak before an LGBTQ+ parent is forced to identify their family in a hostile room. Silence from supportive people grants the microphone to the cruelest people present.

Economic Pressure Makes Silence Easier to Enforce

HRC found that LGBTQ+ adults were nearly twice as likely as non-LGBTQ+ adults to report a worsening financial situation during the prior twelve months. LGBTQ+ adults who reported discrimination were nearly twice as likely to describe themselves as financially unwell. Respondents earning less than $75,000 faced far higher insecurity, and job or household-income loss deepened the risk (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

Money affects visibility. A wealthy professional with savings, legal counsel, and several employment options faces a different disclosure decision from a disabled worker relying on Medicaid, a retail employee with no paid leave, a transgender renter in a hostile state, or a parent balancing food and utility bills. Formal rights mean less when exercising them could trigger an eviction, insurance loss, or a month without income.

That is where anti-LGBTQ+ policy and economic policy meet. Medicaid restrictions, nutrition-assistance cuts, unstable employment, healthcare costs, and weak labor protections raise the price of resistance. A person with no cushion can be controlled through scheduling, paperwork, coverage reviews, and the threat of termination. The state does not need to outlaw identity when it can make visibility financially reckless.

HRC’s report includes the words, “I can barely afford to live.” Six words explain why economic justice cannot be separated from LGBTQ+ equality. Pride flags mean little to a person choosing between medicine and rent. Civil rights that ignore disability, poverty, race, rural isolation, age, caregiving, and incarceration history will protect the people with the most resources first and everyone else later, if later ever arrives (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests)

My own life has taught me how thin the line can be between independence and institutional control. Disability, healthcare dependence, fixed income, and transportation barriers can turn a minor policy change into a personal emergency. People who write rules from comfortable offices often treat paperwork as neutral. It is not neutral when one missed notice can end coverage for medication, food, or care.

Any serious LGBTQ+ agenda must defend Medicaid, HIV programs, disability benefits, food assistance, housing access, labor rights, and affordable healthcare. Identity rights without material security leave people legally visible and practically trapped. The closet becomes easier to impose when survival depends on pleasing an employer, insurer, agency, landlord, or school administrator.

The Survey Has Limits; the Pattern Does Not Disappear

Critics will attack HRC as an advocacy organization. That description is accurate and incomplete. HRC advocates for LGBTQ+ equality, and its report uses forceful language. Advocacy does not automatically invalidate data, just as a government seal does not automatically make a claim honest.

The right response is scrutiny. Ask how participants were recruited, how questions were worded, how responses were weighted, how subgroup comparisons were calculated, and whether results can be replicated. HRC should publish a fuller technical appendix with field dates, instruments, weighting details, subgroup sample sizes, response rates, confidence intervals, and analytic methods. Greater transparency would strengthen the report and make lazy dismissal harder.

The methodological gaps do not give anyone permission to pretend the policy record is imaginary. The executive orders are public. The passport restrictions are public. The military separation policy is public. The 988 change is public. The DEI directives, CMS actions, Title IX enforcement shifts, and removal of federal identity measures are public. (The White House) (Travel State) (The White House) (SAMHSA) (Williams Institute)

Nor does a survey need to prove perfect causation to identify a social emergency. Researchers rarely get a randomized experiment in national stigma, and nobody should want one. Evidence accumulates through timing, policy changes, reported experience, institutional behavior, health research, legal records, and repeated patterns across sources. Here, those forms of evidence point in the same direction: federal hostility made concealment feel safer for a large share of LGBTQ+ respondents.

There is another warning hidden in the report. Reduced visibility can make future data look falsely reassuring. People who avoid disclosure at work may avoid disclosure in surveys, clinics, schools, and government forms. Agencies that remove identity questions then make the blind spot larger. The government creates fear, stops counting the people affected, and later claims there is no measurable harm. That is not ignorance. It is manufactured deniability.

What Resistance Needs to Look Like Now

Resistance cannot stop at outrage posts, Pride merchandise, or statements from organizations that vanish when grant money is threatened. Local governments, employers, hospitals, schools, unions, professional associations, faith communities, and civil-rights lawyers need policies that survive political pressure. Each institution should ask a direct question: What protection remains when the federal government becomes the source of the threat?

Employers should preserve clear nondiscrimination rules, confidential reporting, benefits that cover LGBTQ+ families, and workplace training grounded in law and actual employee safety. Hospitals should protect patient privacy, train staff, maintain accurate records, and resist political interference in evidence-based care within the bounds of current law. Schools should defend students from bullying, protect family confidentiality, and keep complaint channels usable for parents who fear exposure.

States and cities still have roles, though federal pressure and state preemption can narrow them. They can fund services, collect data, enforce local civil-rights ordinances where permitted, defend public employees, support community clinics, and file or join litigation. Courts remain an imperfect but active barrier. The June 2026 appeals ruling against the transgender military ban shows that executive authority is not limitless, even when relief arrives slowly and the challenged policy remains active during appeal. (AP News)

Allies need to stop waiting for LGBTQ+ people to volunteer as human shields. Speak at the school-board meeting before the queer parent must disclose a child’s identity. Challenge the supervisor who makes the joke. Ask the hospital why a form changed. Contact elected officials about Medicaid, HIV funding, data collection, military policy, passport rules, and civil-rights enforcement. Private sympathy has never defeated public intimidation.

LGBTQ+ people need room for different forms of resistance. Some will march, sue, organize, write, teach, vote, testify, or run for office. Some will protect themselves by becoming quieter for a time. Survival is not surrender, and nobody gets to grade another person’s courage from a safer position.

The larger movement must keep records. Save deleted federal pages, document denied care, track policy changes, preserve local histories, collect testimony, and support independent research. Erasure depends on lost evidence. A government that removes questions and rewrites public language is telling us exactly what it fears: a documented record of what it did and whom it harmed.

We Are Still Here, and the Government Knows It

Trump’s first year back in office did not make LGBTQ+ people vanish. Gallup still found that 9% of American adults identified as LGBTQ+, including nearly one in four adults younger than thirty. PRRI still found broad support for nondiscrimination protections. Courts continued to hear challenges, organizers continued to build local networks, and families continued to defend one another. (Gallup.com) (PRRI) (AP News)

Yet endurance should never be used to excuse abuse. LGBTQ+ people have survived criminalization, police raids, employment bans, family rejection, religious condemnation, the closet, AIDS abandonment, military exclusion, and decades of public lies. Survival proves our strength. It does not reduce the guilt of officials who keep testing how much harm we can absorb.

The HRC report should be read as a warning from people changing their behavior under pressure. Nearly half reported becoming less open somewhere. More than half felt less visible. Parents pulled back at schools. Workers encountered more hostility where DEI protections receded. Patients faced barriers, and people with public insurance or lower incomes reported sharper difficulty accessing HIV services (HRCF, 2026). (HRC Production Requests) (HRC Production Requests) (HRC Production Requests) (HRC Production Requests)

A president does not need to sign an order titled “Return to the Closet.” He can define transgender people out of federal policy, strip identity from forms, threaten institutions, narrow enforcement, remove targeted services, and let fear handle the rest. The result appears in the pause before a worker says “my husband,” the blank space on a medical form, and the empty chair at a school meeting.

I know that silence. I know the false respectability people attach to it. I know the price our community paid when hiding was treated as the reasonable compromise between our lives and somebody else’s prejudice. I will not pretend that a modern executive order becomes less vicious merely for arriving through an official website rather than a shouted slur.

The numbers count retreats, not disappearances. We are still here. We are watching, documenting, organizing, caring for one another, and refusing to let administrative language disguise deliberate stigma. The closet may protect an individual when institutions fail, but no democratic government has the moral right to make that closet feel necessary.

References

Allison, M. K., Marshall, S. A., Stewart, G., Joiner, M., Nash, C., & Stewart, M. K. (2021). Experiences of transgender and gender nonbinary patients in the emergency department and recommendations for health care policy, education, and practice. The Journal of Emergency Medicine, 61(4), 396–405. (PubMed)

Associated Press. (2026, June). Appeals court rules against transgender military ban. (AP News)

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (2025). HHS acts to bar hospitals from performing sex-rejecting procedures on children. (CMS)

Frost, D. M., & Meyer, I. H. (2023). Minority stress theory: Application, critique, and continued relevance. Current Opinion in Psychology, 51, 101579. (PubMed)

Gallup. (2026). What percentage of Americans are LGBTQ+? (Gallup.com)

Goldenberg, T., Reisner, S. L., Harper, G. W., Gamarel, K. E., & Stephenson, R. (2020). State policies and healthcare use among transgender people in the United States. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 59(2), 247–259. (PubMed)

Human Rights Campaign Foundation. (2026). One year in: LGBTQ+ Americans under the Trump administration. (HRC Production Requests)

KFF. (2023). Medicaid and people with HIV. (KFF)

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2025). SAMHSA statement on the 988 Press 3 option. (SAMHSA)

Supreme Court of the United States. (2020). Bostock v. Clayton County. (Supreme Court)

The White House. (2025). Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government. (The White House)

The White House. (2025). Ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity. (The White House)

The White House. (2025). Ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing. (The White House)

The White House. (2025). Prioritizing military excellence and readiness. (The White House)

U.S. Department of State. (2026). Sex markers in passports. (Travel State)

Williams Institute. (2026). Hundreds of federal surveys remove questions about sexual orientation and gender identity. (Williams Institute)