* **Students' bathroom access:** On February 10, 2017, the Department of Justice dropped a defense of transgender students' access to bathrooms. Obama-era guidance had allowed students to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. The right had been challenged by a Texas District Court, and the Department of Justice had previously asked the court to lift its stay, but the Department of Justice (under the new Attorney General  Jeff Sessions  ) withdrew its request.  [519]  On February 22, 2017, Trump reversed a directive from the Obama administration that allowed  transgender  students who attend public schools to use bathrooms that correspond with their  gender identity  .  [520]  Education Secretary  Betsy DeVos  , questioned before the House Education and Labor Committee on April 10, 2019, about the previous rollback, acknowledged that she had been aware of the effects of the stress of discrimination on transgender youth; these effects include depression, anxiety, lower attendance and grades, and attempted suicide.  [521]  In May 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a Pennsylvania school regarding its bathroom policy, suggesting that schools may continue to set their own policies to accommodate transgender students.  [522]
* **Student athletics:** On May 15, 2020, the Department of Education's  Office for Civil Rights  wrote a 45-page letter threatening to withhold federal funding from specific school districts in Connecticut and from the  Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference  (CIAC) if they continued to allow transgender girls to compete on girls' teams. The Department of Education claimed that including transgender athletes on girls' teams is a violation of  Title IX  .  [523]  In September 2020, about $6 million, spread over two years and delivered by a Federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program Grant, was at stake for Connecticut.  [524]
* **Military ban:** Trump succeeded in implementing restrictions on transgender military personnel, an idea he first announced via Twitter. On July 26, 2017, Trump tweeted that transgender individuals would not be accepted or allowed to serve "in any capacity" in the U.S. military, citing medical costs and disruption related to transgender service members.  [525]  [526]  This announcement took Pentagon officials by surprise.  [527]  There are about 6,000 transgender military personnel on active duty, according to a 2014 study,  [528]  and the Trump administration provided no evidence that they pose a problem. Many key military leaders advocated for continuing to support transgender servicemembers. They include "the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force; the commandant of the Marine Corps; and the incoming commandant of the Coast Guard,"  [529]  as well as retired leaders like Vice Admiral  Donald C. Arthur  , Major General  Gale Pollock  , and Rear Admiral  Alan M. Steinman  (who served as the Surgeon General or equivalent of the Navy, Army, and Coast Guard respectively and who coauthored a Palm Center report in April 2018).  [530]  On August 25, 2017, Trump directed the  Pentagon  to stop admitting any new transgender individuals into the military and to stop providing medical treatments for  sex reassignment  , intended to take effect on March 23, 2018.  [531]  On August 29, 2017, Secretary of Defense  James Mattis  put a freeze on expelling transgender service members who are currently in the military, pending a study by experts within the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.  [532]  Federal courts temporarily delayed the implementation of the Trump administration's proposed ban by issuing four injunctions. On November 23, 2018, the day after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration formally requested the U.S. Supreme Court to issue an emergency ruling on whether transgender personnel may continue to serve,  [533]  and on January 22, 2019, without hearing arguments or explaining its own decision, the Court allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with the ban.  [534]  [535]  On March 12, 2019, the Department of Defense released a memorandum with  specifics of the ban  , essentially allowing existing personnel to continue to serve if they had already come out as transgender prior to the memorandum, but disqualifying anyone who was newly discovered to have a transgender body, identity, or history.
* **Employment:** On October 4, 2017, the Attorney General published a memo considering "discrimination against transgender individuals" in employment and concluding that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "does not prohibit discrimination based on gender identity _per se._ This is a conclusion of law, not policy."  [536]  On August 16, 2019, the Justice Department filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that "Title VII does not prohibit discrimination against transgender persons based on their transgender status," "gender identity," or "disconnect" between biological sex and gender identity. The brief related to a pending case,  Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC  .  [537]
* **Prisoners' rights:** In May 2018, the Trump administration ordered the Bureau of Prisons to house transgender prisoners according to their "biological sex." Treating prisoners as members of the gender with which they identify "would be appropriate only in rare cases." This reverses guidance created by the Obama administration in 2012, and it conflicts with the  Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003  .  [538]  In 2018, the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico operated a unit for transgender women; the women were housed together regardless of the reason for their detention. The building served as a federal prison, county jail, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, and housing for asylum-seekers.  [539]  Reporters were granted access for the first time in June 2019; there were 27 inmates at that time.  [540]
* **Defining gender as sex:** On October 21, 2018, _The New York Times_ revealed a  Department of Health and Human Services  memo that planned to establish a definition of gender based on  sex assignment at birth  across federal agencies, notably the departments of  Education  ,  Justice  , and  Labor  , which, along with Health and Human Services, are responsible for enforcing Title IX nondiscrimination statutes. The Justice Department would have to approve any new definition that Health and Human Services might suggest. The memo argued in favor of a definition of gender "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable" and the government's prerogative to  genetically test  individuals to determine their sex.  [541]  Over the following days, thousands of protesters gathered in  Washington, D.C.  ;  [542]  [543]   San Diego  ;  [544]   Portland, Maine  ;  [545]   Minneapolis  ;  [546]   Los Angeles  ;  [547]   Milwaukee  ;  [548]   Boston  ;  [549]  and other cities across the country, and on November 2, nearly 100 lawmakers signed a letter to HHS Secretary  Alex Azar  asking him not to implement this change.  [550]  On July 8, 2019, the  State Department  created the  Commission on Unalienable Rights  to initiate philosophical discussions of human rights that are grounded in the Catholic concept of "  natural law  " rather than modern identities based on gender and sexuality. Most of the twelve members of the commission have a history of anti-LGBT comments.  [551]
* **Healthcare:** Since 2016, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has explicitly interpreted the word "sex" in the nondiscrimination provisions of the Affordable Care Act (Section 1557) to recognize and include transgender people, entitling them to the same services to which everyone else is entitled, although a federal court injunction on December 31, 2016, prevented HHS from enforcing its nondiscrimination rule. Under the Trump administration, HHS lawyers began working on permanently reversing the rule,  [552]  and on May 24, 2019, the proposed reversal was formally announced.  [553]  [554]  On October 15, 2019, federal judge  Reed O'Connor  vacated the nondiscrimination rule, saying that it violated the  Religious Freedom Restoration Act  . His ruling meant that federally-funded healthcare insurers and providers may deny treatment or coverage based on sex, gender identity or termination of pregnancy, even if the services are medically necessary.  [555]  On November 1, 2019, HHS announced that, effective immediately, recipients of taxpayer-funded grants from HHS are permitted to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, as it will no longer enforce the 2016 rule known as 81 F.R. 89393.  [556]  [557]  This change affects "HIV and STI prevention programs, opioid programs, youth homelessness services, health professional training, substance use recovery programs, and many other life-saving services," according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.  [558]  In April 2020, HHS acknowledged that the pending rule to replace Section 1557 (which was then under review by the Justice Department) followed the federal court order that "vacated the gender identity provisions" of Section 1557.  [559]  The replacement rule was revealed on June 12, 2020.  [560]  [561]
* **Homelessness:** On May 22, 2019, HUD proposed a new rule  [62]  to weaken the 2012 Equal Access Rule, an existing federal nondiscrimination protection that requires equal access to housing regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. (The previous day,  Housing and Urban Development  (HUD) Secretary  Ben Carson  had told Congress that he had no plans to change this protection.) Under the proposed change, shelters receiving federal funding would be given leeway in "determining sex for admission to any facility" based on factors including the transgender person's "official government documents," the shelter operators' "religious beliefs," and any invented "practical concerns" or concerns about "privacy" or "safety." This could allow shelters to place transgender women in men's housing or to deny transgender people admission altogether. Within the proposed rule, HUD said that the treatment of transgender people would be considered valid as long as the shelter applied its own rules consistently and that this would not conflict with HUD's existing nondiscrimination policy. HUD has been moving in the direction of weakening this rule since 2017 when it withdrew proposals to require emergency shelters to post information about LGBT rights and updated its website to remove guidance for serving transgender people.  [562]  In July 2020, HUD proposed a rule to allow shelters to turn away any women they judged to look physically masculine, examining "factors such as height, the presence (but not the absence) of facial hair, the presence of an Adam's apple, and other physical characteristics which, when considered together, are indicative of a person's biological sex."  [563]  [564]  [565]