The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Transgender Ohioans are grappling with confusion, chaos and fear in the weeks following President Donald Trump’s executive order saying there are only two sexes.
“Trans folks have always been here, and transgender communities cannot be erased by the flick of a pen,” said Dwayne Steward, executive director of Equality Ohio. “However, the chaos that’s been created by this has definitely caused severe harm to transgender communities, to the extent that families are planning to leave the state or the country and people are talking about de-transitioning, which will cause major psychological trauma.”
On Trump’s first day back in office on Jan. 20 he signed an executive order saying the U.S. government will only recognize two sexes, male and female.
“These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” according to Trump’s executive order. “Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.”
Dara Adkison, executive director of TransOhio, called Trump’s executive order propaganda.
“The laws haven’t changed, the policies have not officially been changed, but we are seeing in some places both anticipatory and preemptive compliance with potential policies that can be enacted, and that is doing some real harm, but it’s also what is causing so much confusion right now,” Adkison said.
The U.S. State Department has stopped issuing U.S. passports with “X” gender markers and has suspended processing all applications from Americans looking to update their passports with a new gender marker. The executive order does not apply retroactively to current passports.
“Some transgender folks who are trying to get a passport currently or make changes to their passport are having a hard time with that,” Adkison said. “For people who have applied for one and haven’t received it back yet, we don’t know what that process looks like, because it’s unprecedented, and we’re just figuring it out, crowd-sourced information with you know everyone across the state and national partners, and wishing we had more concrete answers for folks.”
Steward has seen an increase in people who have been contacting Equality Ohio’s legal clinic due to issues they are having with passports and changing their ID.
“The preemptive compliance that is happening from the various agencies around these executive orders is very troubling and dangerous,” Steward said. “We’re seeing some trans folks have reported that their passports or IDs have been confiscated.”
The Trump Administration is fostering an environment that is unsafe for transgender people to exist, Steward said.
“They’re trying to legislate trans folks out of existence, but trans folks have always existed,” Steward said.
The Trevor Project saw a 33% increase in volume of phone calls, text messages, and chats to their crisis line on Inauguration Day (Jan. 20) and a 46% increase on Jan. 21 compared to typical daily rates weeks prior.
“There’s a lot of fear out there, and justifiably so, and we’re just trying to help people through what is based off of stuff that is actually happening versus what we are being told could happen in the future,” Adkison said.
Adkison said this executive order also excludes intersex people, who are individuals born with variations in their sex characteristics that do not fit the typical binary definitions of male or female. It is estimated that up to 1.7% of the population has an intersex trait, according to the Center for American Progress.
“Intersex people are very real and concretely exist as well,” Adkison said.
