TRANSGENDER RIGHTS REMAIN UNDER ATTACK

By Amelia, Greater Lansing Writers Collective 

In Kansas, transgender people are being forced to surrender birth certificates and IDs that reflect their true identities. A recently passed law invalidates these documents and bars trans people from using public bathrooms and facilities that do not reflect the gender assigned to them at birth. This effectively limits their ability to drive and vote unless they obtain documentation invalidating and erasing their identity.

Restrained by the Trump administration’s trans passport bans, the community is surrounded on all sides, so they cannot live here safely and they cannot leave. In 2026 alone, 738 anti-trans bills were under consideration across the country, aiming to limit access to sports, bathrooms, education and health care. Legislation that discriminates against trans people encourages hateful rhetoric and emboldens transphobes to act on their violent urges.

We see this violence in our own community. In January, Lansing police arrested a Black trans person experiencing homelessness after slamming their head into the ground and pinning them by the neck to the floor. The attack occurred at a facility that was being used as a warming station, and criminalizes the act of seeking shelter in the cold.

The individual, who remains unknown, can be heard on video clearly stating “I didn’t do nothing and I didn’t trespass. I haven’t done anything, I’m here because it’s cold outside. I have nowhere to go. Nothing. I have nothing. I haven’t done anything wrong and this is how you treat me?” This plea, like so many before it, went unheard.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness reports that homelessness among transgender people rose an alarming 88 percent between 2016 and 2020. But the true weight of this crisis becomes even clearer when we look at who is most affected.

Trans homelessness is not distributed evenly. Black trans people, especially Black trans women, face the harshest consequences of racialized and gendered discrimination. According to a 2018 Human Rights Campaign survey, 42 percent of Black transgender respondents had experienced homelessness at some point in their lives. The National Black Women’s Justice Institute additionally found that Black trans women are incarcerated at 10 times the rate of the general U.S. population.

These numbers reveal a pattern: Our country’s systemic racism and transphobia intersect to create barriers that push Black trans people into cycles of housing instability, criminalization and state violence.

And this is only a fraction of the truth. When you put all of this together; the laws that erase them, the police who brutalize them, the shelters that turn them away, the documents that are stripped from their hands, you see a system that was never designed for trans people to survive.

For Black trans people, the danger is multiplied at every turn. If we are serious about liberation, then we have to be serious about the people who are most vulnerable and most abandoned. These numbers, these stories, these names we may never learn, they are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable outcomes of a country that legislates trans people out of public life and then punishes them for trying to exist anyway.