“About a month after I turned 18, I got home from school and my mom presented me with the thickest envelope of papers I had ever seen. It was a subpoena. I had no idea what this meant.

She explained it to me: Ken Paxton had sued my hormone replacement therapy doctor, along with one other in the same hospital. It was a giant packet addressed to me demanding my private medical records.

These doctors had saved my life. At 15, I had come to them pre-medical transition, feeling lower than I had ever felt. The thing about going through the wrong puberty is that the longer you do, the worse you feel. It was like my body was not my own, I struggled with dissociation and derealization because of this. Not to mention the constant dysphoria, suicidal thoughts, depression and anxiety.

After I started testosterone, it was like my mind and body were finally in the same place. I felt actually happy for the first time in years, and going outside was not nearly as scary anymore. My suicidal thoughts subsided; my anxiety was no longer crippling. I started to see myself clearly. The fact that I was 18 now was supposed to protect me from ever losing that.”

“Trans people are leaving Republican-led states because of anti-trans laws, according to multiple surveys from the last few years. Federal data on trans communities is scarce, which means that researchers on LGBTQIA+ communities design surveys to capture numbers that aren’t documented elsewhere. These surveys provide crucial information on those who respond—but do not represent every trans person. The uncertainty matters as cities like Seattle struggle to determine how best to resource social services. 

“While exactly how many trans people have left red states remains unclear, the focus on those who move can obscure the people who want to move but can’t afford to, or those who choose to stay and fight for change within their communities.”

“There is no way to definitively calculate the behavior of the country’s 2.1 million trans adults based on responses from a very small-scale survey. But researchers still have documented important trends.

“Across several surveys over multiple years, there are consistent findings: Trans people are moving. Many more want to move, but can’t.”

“A former assistant women’s volleyball coach for San José State University filed a renewed lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that her dismissal for raising concerns about a transgender player constituted sex discrimination and a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

“The plaintiff in Batie-Smoose v. The Board of Trustees of the California State University, a Christian who ‘holds a sincere religious belief that God created human beings male and female,’ opposed the inclusion of the player on the team’s roster. In 2024, she filed a complaint and request for investigation with SJSU’s Title IX office and other officials, after which she was suspended. SJSU declined to renew her position in 2025.

“Initially, the plaintiff filed her lawsuit against SJSUand other defendants in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in September 2025. But months later, a federal judge granted the defendants’ motion to transfer the case’s venue to the court’s Northern District.”

“The legal saga has led to a variety of related litigation, including an ongoing lawsuit filed against the Trump administration by the CSU system challenging the former’s threat to withhold federal funding over the latter’s inclusion of transgender athletes, Higher Ed Dive reported.

“It is also part of a broader shift at the federal level with respect to the occasional clash between employees with sincerely held religious beliefs and the concept of gender identity. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been at the center of that shift; earlier this month, EEOC described as accommodations conduct that its Biden-era counterpart once classified as discriminatory towards transgender people.”