Red Flag Alert 2 for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security condemns the US Supreme Court’s Skrmetti v. U.S. decision to uphold the state of Tennessee’s ban on hormone therapy and puberty blockers for transgender youth. This decision will allow similar laws in 24 US states to remain in effect and paves the way for new states – and perhaps the federal government – to follow suit.

In February 2025 the Lemkin Institute raised the alarm about the genocidal process against the transgender community that has emerged in the U.S. over the past decade and has spread across the globe. This process has rapidly escalated under the second Trump administration. The Skrmetti v. U.S. decision marks a radicalization of attempts to erase trans people, in whole, as a group, as it prevents trans children and their families from accessing the necessary and appropriate healthcare to support and confirm their gender identity.

Lawmakers claim they are protecting children by passing laws withholding necessary healthcare from trans children. This is a lie. Public health researchers have come to a consensus that access to gender-affirming care reduces rates of depression and suicide for transgender and nonbinary youth. Laws banning access to such care worsen health outcomes for trans children, potentially resulting in their deaths. Lawmakers are aware of these studies and know gender-affirming care saves lives. If they were interested in protecting children, they would ensure that transgender youth get the care and support they need and deserve. If Republicans cared about trans children, they also would not go out of their way to politicize transgender identity and use it as an insult, such as was done, for example, with the accusation that former First Lady Michelle Obama is a transgender woman. They certainly would not order the termination of the National LGBTQ+ Youth Suicide Lifeline, which the Trump Administration announced on 17 June.

Moreover, the Republican lawmakers who support anti-trans legislation regularly vote to reduce funding for schools and healthcare, cut SNAP and Medicaid benefits, and destroy the environment, an agenda that harms all children.

None of the anti-trans rhetoric in the United States and abroad is about protecting children. Genocidaires often use child protection and other supposedly noble goals to justify their hateful, violent, and dehumanizing agendas. One must always be skeptical of efforts to remove rights in pursuit of purportedly protecting children.

Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the term genocide, was aware of the way in which genocidal perpetrators instrumentalize children during genocidal processes to bring about the destruction of a group. He integrated his observations when drafting the Genocide Convention. Article II(e) of the Convention identifies “[f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group” as a form of genocide. While trans children are not currently being taken away from their parents, they are being removed from their group, forced to abandon their identity, and coerced into growing up as part of a group (cisgender people) to which they do not belong. In this manner, preventing trans and nonbinary children from receiving puberty blockers and hormones is forcibly transferring them away from their identity group (trans and nonbinary people) and bringing them up within another group.

The policies aimed at erasing trans children are similar to genocidal processes used against indigenous people in North America and Australia, for example, where children were forced to deny and forget their identities in government-run “boarding schools.” The genocidal intent rests not so much in the physical removal of children as such, but rather in their removal from an identity group and the suppression of identity that the removal enforces.

The anti-trans movement in the US has made it clear that it will not stop at banning gender affirming care for children. Emboldened by this Supreme Court decision, they will continue their attempts to restrict gender affirming care for adults as well. Furthermore, they will ramp up their attempts to erase trans identity through various non-medical policies, including bathroom bans, bans on conversations related to gender in schools, preventing schools and workplaces from using pronouns or names that don’t align with a person’s sex at birth, banning trans athletes from competition, and criminalizing dressing as a gender other than the one assigned at birth. In effect, the anti-trans movement strives to make it impossible to live publicly as a trans person in the United States. These laws also enforce the gender binary on intersex and gender nonbinary people and has already resulted in the harassment and persecution of people who engage in what is considered to be gender-nonconforming dress and behavior. Such a development will resuscitate a particularly dark era in U.S. history, when LGBTQ+ people were considered to be useless or dangerous to the body politic and were forcibly medicated, incarcerated, institutionalized and, in many cases, sterilized.

The Lemkin Institute reminds people that the genocidal process involves far more than just mass murder. Most genocidal processes involve complex policies aimed at actively and systematically obstructing an identity from manifesting itself within the social world through laws, decrees, speech acts, and practices enacted by groups in power. As a result of these acts, people within a threatened community cannot live publicly as who they are and community identity development becomes impossible.

Given that leaders in the anti-trans movement view trans people as internal enemies and U.S. President Donald Trump has identified them a national security threat, the recent Supreme Court decision can be seen as part of a much larger internal cleansing operation aimed at creating a white, heterosexual, cisgender ethnostate where immigrants are deported to third country prisons, where remaining people of color become second class citizens, where white women are cowed and submissive, and where LGBTQ+ people do not exist.

The techniques we see being used against trans people in the U.S. conform to the 9th Pattern of the Ten Patterns of Genocide, called “Denial and/or Prevention of Identity.”

In order to prevent a worsening of the situation for trans people in the United States, the Lemkin Institute urges Americans to support the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuits, to donate to or volunteer with trans-run civil rights organizations, and to urge their representatives to support legislation that actively protects trans people in their cities and states. We urge countries outside of the United States, particularly Canada, to consider immediately instituting special asylum processes for Americans affected by state persecution based on gender identity.


Lawmakers claim they are protecting children by passing laws withholding necessary healthcare from trans children. This is a lie. Public health researchers have come to a consensus that access to gender-affirming care reduces rates of depression and suicide for transgender and nonbinary youth. Laws banning access to such care worsen health outcomes for trans children, potentially resulting in their deaths. Lawmakers are aware of these studies and know gender-affirming care saves lives. If they were interested in protecting children, they would ensure that transgender youth get the care and support they need and deserve. If Republicans cared about trans children, they also would not go out of their way to politicize transgender identity and use it as an insult, such as was done, for example, with the accusation that former First Lady Michelle Obama is a transgender woman. They certainly would not order the termination of the National LGBTQ+ Youth Suicide Lifeline, which the Trump Administration announced on 17 June.