First came a presidential order defining gender in the simplest terms.

Trump: “I made it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female. Gee, that was a tough one.”

That executive order, signed on inauguration day by President Donald Trump, was quickly followed by two more assailing the rights of transgender Americans.

One lays the groundwork for banning transgender people from serving in the United States military, the other attempts to outlaw gender-affirming health care for young people nationwide.

These — among hundreds of executive orders of debatable constitutionality — came in rapid-fire succession, leaving reporters scrambling to cover the story, to predict the impact of the measures and — as always with Trump, to separate fact from fiction.

I’m David Hunt. In the news business when a reporter dominates coverage of an issue or event, tapping the best sources and providing the most insightful analysis, we say they own the story. If anyone owns the story of the Right’s assault on transgender Americans, it’s Erin Reed.

Reed: “I don't think many of us asked to be on the vanguard of this. But here we are. We're here and and we are building a world where future generations, I hope to God, don't have to fight this same fight. And as much as all the sound and fury from the top of the Oval Office is sort of raining down upon us. There are more people like me than ever before that are that are public, that are that are themselves.”

Reed isn’t just one of a small group of queer journalists covering national politics. She’s one of an even smaller subset of transgender journalists. As such, she’s covering the political assault on her own rights, even her own existence. And providing that coverage in great detail and with great accuracy, employing a veteran reporter’s unflinching scrutiny.

In a line-by-line analysis of Trump’s order banning trans people in the military, she writes,

This marks a chilling and undeniable shift. The attacks on transgender people are no longer cloaked in the faux respectability of “evidence,” “science,” or “protecting kids.” They never truly were, but now even the pretense has been abandoned.

Her daily reporting can be read on Substack, a subscription-based platform for independent journalists. Find her at erininthe morning.com. with Erin spelled E R I N.

On Jan. 30, Reed met with about a hundred trans people and their allies on a Zoom call sponsored by the trans-led nonprofit GRACE, Gender Research Advisory Council and Education. What started as a review of anti-trans legislation soon turned into strategy session and pep talk with GRACE board member Kathy Brennan.

Brennan: “Okay, Erin. Can you unmute yourself?”

Reed: “Yes. Hello. Hi, everybody. How's it going? Hello. I wish I were here under better circumstances, but I'm here tonight to speak with all of you and. Yeah, look forward to talking.”

“I've been doing this work for a long time, and I there are very few people who, you know, who who have the history that I do in terms of like reading the stuff. At the beginning, I was there whenever all of this current wave started. You know, when I read talk about five years ago, if had if you had time traveled somebody from five years ago to today, it would be unrecognizable. The debate over transgender people and our care and our existence and more. All of you will probably remember five years ago, the biggest thing back then around trans people were a smattering of states that had sports bans, and that was it. There was one bathroom ban in 2016 in North Carolina, and that was a disaster. Paypal pulled out out of the state, Deutsche Bank pulled out of the state. They lost $3.7 billion in revenue because of that bathroom ban.”

“But what what happened after that was the same organizations that have become very popular, famous, now infamous now, you know, your alliance Defending freedom, your project 2025 groups like the Heritage Foundation and more. They held a conference in 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona, and they planned out their strategy for what we're seeing now. And they executed that strategy over time. And they one of the architects of the plan had from the American Principles Project, Terry Schilling, had specifically said that they were going to start with sports so that way they could get people comfortable with discriminating. And then after they got you with sports, they were going to go to kids and then they were going to go to bathrooms and then they were going to continue growing on that more and more and more. And like he he sort of James Bond monologue this to CNN in early 2020. And we're seeing exactly that like the strategy has has happened exactly as he had planned it. And the same groups that were part of that conference are now the ones that are writing the Trump executive orders.”

Brennan: “So where do we start now? Right. Like it's you know, it's kind of a really tough situation. But now we have all these executive orders. So, you know, with the first one being about the military and then about government ID, so access, you know, government I.D. your I.D. is your access to everything in this country, in the world, you know, like your driver's license, your Social Security card, all of it like so it's, you know, access.”

Reed: “Those of us who have been working in this space for a long time, we had an idea that we would get some sort of a blitz, some sort of a massive assault on rights. And and I actually in the immediate aftermath of the election, for those of you who do read my newsletter, the very next day I published a here are the steps that you need to take right now and at the very top of that list was go get your passport renewed right now. Get it renewed right now. And thankfully, I was able to reach a large number of the community. I had built up quite a quite a large readership, a large following, large viewership on various social media video platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where I blasted this message out there because I knew that one of the first dominoes to fall would be passports. And in fact, the very first day of the Trump presidency, we got an executive order that erased legal recognition of transgender people throughout the government. So in every single aspect of the way that the executive branch handles trans people, so we're talking nondiscrimination protections, are they going to, for instance, file a claim of nondiscrimination if I get denied housing, you know, because I'm trans, because a particular landlord doesn't like that, doesn't want a trans person moving into the neighborhood. Am I going to be discriminated against in education because, you know, a public university decides that trans people go against their mission? And, you know, typically, no, you're not supposed to be able to discriminate against people like that. But but this administration has stated that it will refuse that legal recognition. And the top of that, the most impactful of that was in passports, because many people that were in the process of getting their passports have had them held up right now.”

You’re listening to This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine. I’m David Hunt.

Much of Erin Reed’s work as a journalist focuses on providing context to the onslaught of anti-trans measures “flooding the zone with shit,” in the words of Trump strategist Steve Bannon. She said the culture war attacks don’t represent the lived experiences of many trans and LGBTQ people.

Reed: “With all of the bad laws and all of the harmful things that they're doing at that at that level on our legal documents and more on a personal level, I've never felt more support in my entire life. Like, I've got more support than than I ever have. I go by myself in public every single day. I never get a second look. People talk to me about, you know, the things that I care about. I am a productive member of society. I'm here. I have friends. And I think that part of the reason why they're making such a push through laws is because they know that the people that you live with in your community that hate is not there. It's not. They want you to believe that it's so much more present.”

Reed: “I think that this is an issue of exhaustion. And I think that that is part of why we have seen this blitz of executive orders. It's designed to scare. It's designed to make you feel exhausted. It's designed to make you feel powerless.”

In a news analysis on her site, Reed explained how Trump’s executive order defining gender could fundamentally reshape how laws, policies, and regulations are applied throughout federal agencies.

“The practical implications are enormous,” she wrote. “These definitions form the foundation for the rest of the executive order, serving as a directive for every federal agency to reinterpret and enforce their policies through this narrow and reductive lens. For instance, the Department of Education could use this definition to exclude transgender women from Title IX protections” — federal protections from sex discrimination enacted in 1972.

In an analysis of the executive order banning gender-affirming care, Reed said, “The measure explicitly weaponizes the Department of Justice against transgender youth, their families, and their medical providers. The order defines gender-affirming care as ‘mutilation’ and then exploits that definition to claim that female genital mutilation laws apply to transgender care.”

“The executive order wields every available lever of federal power—and even some Trump may not legally control,” Reed reported.

If there’s such a thing as a trans power couple, it’s Reed and her wife, Zooey Zephyr, the first trans woman elected to the Montana legislature. The couple tied the knot last December in a ceremony at the Missoula County Fairgrounds in Montana — a moment that was, in Reed’s words — perfect in every way.

In April 2023, Zephyr was barred from her seat on the floor of the Montana House of Representatives after she shamed the Republican majority for voting to outlaw gender-affirming care for young people. She spent the remainder of the legislative session working from a bench in the House lobby — a bench her supporters took turns occupying on her behalf after Republicans tried to deny her even that place to sit down.

The GOP’s petty tactics may have alienated some of their supporters, Reed explained.

Reed: “you know, we drove through Glacier National Park, beautiful National And we pulled up to the side and and then this big F-250 pulled up behind us. And out of three burly men and camo, they walked up to us. And one of them looked to her and said, Are you Zoe Zephyr? And I was like, Yeah, yeah, that's me. Hi. Wow. And and he said, I'm a Republican. It's like, we can guess, but that's okay. I'm a Republican. But then he said he said, I want to let you know I would sit on that seat for you. And and he just he had such a visceral, visceral response to the idea that, like, she is a democratically elected person who is being silenced just for speaking words, just for saving her mind. And like, this was this was somebody who was winnable. This was somebody who who would vote for her. Yeah. And I think that, you know, one of the things that Republicans have been so good at doing for all of their ill that they've been doing upon the world what they've been good at doing, what they've been good at selling, at least, is the idea that, like they're going to push no matter what for the things that they care about. like for some people, like, they just want to see you do something like they didn't they don't want gridlock. They don't want to see you sit around and not do anything.”

Reed advised the trans people and their supporters on the Zoom call to focus on the things they can accomplish, the connections they can make, even in difficult times.

Reed: “I was a trans kid. I have this old Geocities website in archive.org that you can look back from 2001 from it has the old like Geocities aesthetic with pink and black. And it was just it was me and it was MySpace and it had my name on it. And I was 12 years old. I was living in conservative Louisiana out in the swamps from the bayou by jellyfish, an hour south of New Orleans. And it was impossible for people like me back then, impossible. There was no hope at all. And I worked really hard to find the spaces where I could be myself. Sometimes it was just in friend groups or online, but I kept that part of myself alive. And and I will say that, like, it was hard and I suffered for it. And people will suffer for it. Kids are going to suffer. And we have to make peace with that. Like that's going to happen now. But but I made it. And like my biggest message, number one to these two, these kids is is just hold on. Like, hang on. Stay with us because we are building we are working on building a world that is going to love you, that is going to be better for you. Now, that's my message to the kids, to the to the parents. know, there are practical pieces of advice that I always give. You know, I think I do think that we are at a point where, like, if you can go to a place where your rights are going to be more protected, it's probably important to do that or at the very least find a way to get to those spaces. and you know, being a supportive parent is in and of itself way more than most kids ever get. I didn't have supportive parents growing up and like most most kids don't today even. And so just doing that just using their name, using their pronouns like helping understand who they are, that is half the fight.”

“Don't let yourself burn out. I have something that has an endpoint. Find your local community. That's how we got through Stonewall. I mean, that's how we got through that period is that we had our our Gay-Straight Alliances and our queer, our queer family groups, our church groups and and more. And I think that, you know, whatever that looks like for you, if that looks like a church group foodbank that also is queer, inclusive, then great. If that looks like, you know, if you're a teacher and you can take care of the Gay-Straight Alliance at your school or, or, you know, the Rainbow Clubs because we can't call them Gay-Straight Alliances anymore because I, you know, like we whatever that looks like for you, help foster those connections because that will that will help people stay here while we're dealing with all this.”

I’d like to thank GRACE executive director Alaina Kupec, board member Kathy Brennan and journalist Erin Reed for organizing this discussion of the assault on transgender rights by the Trump Administration. Find links to their websites at Thiswayout.org. For This Way Out, I’m David Hunt.