Red state residents worry about a “nightmare” Trump presidency

Every four years, voters are told that this is the most important election of their lifetimes, but as well-worn as that cliché is, it’s true for LGBTQ+ Americans in 2024. 

The November general election presents a choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the latter of whom was responsible for more than 200 attacks against the LGBTQ+ community during his four years in the White House, according to estimates from GLAAD. Those assaults haven’t stopped since he left office, and LGBTQ+ Americans are already seeing a preview of what another Trump presidency might look like. In recent weeks, Texas announced that the state would begin banning trans people from correcting the gender markers on their driver’s licenses and state IDs. And a Trump-appointed judge ordered a Washington, D.C.-area high school to allow an anti-LGBTQ+ group to form on campus. 

Those included banning trans people from serving openly in the military, repealing Obama-era guidance mandating equal access for trans students in schools, rolling back nondiscrimination protections for trans patients, and denying marginally housed trans people affirming access to emergency shelter.

With trans rights on the ballot yet again, LGBTQ Nation spoke to trans voters about the key issues that are motivating them to get to the polls. While some expressed dissatisfaction with the Democratic presidential ticket, wishing that Harris would do more to lobby for progressive policy, they largely urged the trans community not to sit the election out. “That is just giving the Republicans what they want,” one source tells LGBTQ Nation. “They count on people not wanting to vote or not showing up to vote in order to win elections. You’re really not helping anything by abstaining.”

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Remi Buckley has had a fairly easy time transitioning, but she worries all that might change under a second Trump administration. If elected to a second term, Trump has vowed to prosecute gender-affirming care for minors on a nationwide scale, likening youth transitions to “child abuse” and “sexual mutilation.” He also called to ban the federal government from promoting “the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” even adults. His running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), introduced a Senate bill making it a felony for doctors to perform gender-affirming surgeries on minors, which is extremely rare.

“I’m most definitely voting for Kamala in this upcoming election,” Buckley tells LGBTQ Nation. “It would be a nightmare if Trump did happen to get elected. For my own safety, my friends, and so many countless others across the country, I feel like there’s only one right decision.”

Buckley, an 18-year-old who lives in Alabama, cannot fathom what it would mean for those kinds of policies to be enacted. Although her state banned gender-affirming care for minors in April 2022, during the early days of her medical transition, she has still been able to access her hormone replacement therapy (HRT) through a Georgia-based telehealth provider. That medication, she says, has had a dramatic positive impact on her mental health now that others have begun to treat her as the girl that she has always known herself to be. She has become more sociable and outgoing, and she no longer feels out of place, as if she doesn’t belong anywhere she goes.

Having that newfound confidence taken away by a second Trump administration would be devastating, Buckley says. “It would feel like I have to hide myself away again, which is a way I don’t think anybody should have to live: acting like a ghost of their former self or of the person they want to be,” she stresses. “I don’t really know what I would do.”

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Andrea Montanez, a 68-year-old Floridian, says that she is fighting against another Trump presidency because she already knows what it’s like to suddenly lose access to health care. In June 2023, she was turned away from her local Walgreens while picking up her regular HRT prescription that she’s been taking for many years, with the pharmacy citing the state’s then-recently enacted restrictions on trans health care. As a longtime LGBTQ+ organizer, she was able to mobilize her local community to put pressure on the pharmacy to refill her prescription. Montanez is one of countless trans people who have struggled to access medication under Florida’s draconian regulations.

Those laws are currently being debated in the courts, and Montanez knows that 2025 could bring even more challenges, whether from a Trump presidency or more restrictions passed by Florida Republicans. 

“I came to this country and this state looking for freedom, thinking everything would be OK, but now you have to fight for your rights and your health care — because health care is not a human right we have,” says Montanez, a refugee from Colombia. “It’s scary, but I don’t want to go anywhere. We’re going to keep fighting this.”

Trans and nonbinary gender markers

Destiny Clark is already thinking about her escape plan if Trump wins a second term in 2024, spending her free time wondering what countries are the safest and easiest to go to. Project 2025, a far-right policy playbook from which Trump has poorly attempted to distance himself, describes transness as a “social contagion” and effectively calls for the widespread criminalization of trans identity. She has frequent nightmares that trans people will be sent to Holocaust-style camps, a fear that she recognizes is “irrational” but still feels real to her all the same. 

“I’m not sure if I would be 100% safe, and I’d rather be safe than sorry,” she says of the possibility of fleeing. “I’d rather live to fight another day than to sit back and not be able to do that.”

Among her concerns about a Trump victory in November is that his administration would make it more difficult to access corrected legal documentation, a struggle with which she is already extremely familiar. Clark, 41, fought the state of Alabama for three years to be able to update the gender marker on her driver’s license, a request that was finally granted in 2021. When her license still listed her as “male,” Clark says that her freedom of movement was severely restricted. She was afraid to patronize unfamiliar bars or even drive late at night in case she was pulled over. In her area of rural Alabama, she says police officers often stop you “just for the fun of it.” 

Having a corrected ID has given Clark the freedoms that many others take for granted, such as the ability to take road trips with friends or have a beer at lunch without worrying about being carded. It would be hard for her, she says, to sacrifice that peace of mind. “When you’re only comfortable going to certain places, that limits what you can do in your life,” she says. “It’s scary not to have your documents that don’t match who you are.”

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Kayla Gore, 36, says the most likely move that Trump could make as president would be revoking trans people’s ability to get a corrected gender marker on their federal passports. In many states that still have restrictive ID policies on the books, she says it’s easier to get a passport that matches a trans person’s lived gender than it is a state ID, driver’s license, or other form of legal documentation. Gore has spent years in court lobbying Tennessee to allow her to correct her birth certificate, and her corrected passport has been a major lifeline while she awaits full recognition of her lived identity.

While the U.S. State Department also permits nonbinary people to apply for a gender-neutral “X” marker on their passports, Gore says the policy is vulnerable to repeal under a Republican presidency. (As a senator, Vance penned legislation that would ban nonbinary passports, saying that the policy would “restore some sanity in our federal bureaucracy.”) She says that many trans people have been rushing to get their documents updated in case they no longer have that option under Trump. “A lot of trans folks are scurrying to do things that could be changed with the stroke of a pen,” she says. “Those are policies that can change in a day’s time.”

If Harris is elected in November, Gore hopes to see Democrats work proactively to protect access to affirming documentation, to ensure that the freedom she felt in getting her corrected passport isn’t taken away. “It solidified that I was a part of society,” she says. “I was being respected in a way that I never thought possible. I felt like I could do anything. I could go anywhere. I could be anybody I wanted to be.”

Safe schools for trans students

Ray Loux is voting in November because he doesn’t want to see what’s happened in Kentucky spread everywhere else. In May 2023, Republicans overturned a veto from Gov. Andy Beshear (D) of an omnibus anti-trans bill that, among other things, banned gender-affirming care for minors, prohibited teachers from discussing LGBTQ+ identities, and blocked trans students from using gender-congruent bathrooms at school. Loux, who is 18, was forced to leave his school and finish his studies at a community college so he wouldn’t be forced to use the girls’ restroom.

Loux says that he just couldn’t stomach going back to what things were like in middle school when he was too scared to use either bathroom on campus. Because there were no gender-neutral facilities, he would wait until he got home, causing severe bladder issues. “Anybody would look at me really weird if I tried to use the women’s, and the nurse’s station didn’t have a bathroom,” he says. “I didn’t have many options.”

Since graduating, Loux has left his home state to attend college in Louisiana, and the outcome of the 2024 election could make the difference between whether he will ever return. The Biden administration issued a long-awaited directive in April advising schools that trans students should be treated in line with their gender under its interpretation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans sex-based discrimination in all federally funded educational opportunities. Those rules have been temporarily blocked in 26 states, including Kentucky, as the result of an ongoing lawsuit, but Harris would likely fight for their enforcement as president.

Loux wants to someday go back to Kentucky to build a life there, but that could be difficult if a Trump presidency emboldens Republican lawmakers to continue repealing trans rights. To date, more than 630 anti-trans bills have been introduced to state legislatures in 2024, and GOP lawmakers in Kentucky were responsible for 14. 

“I love my state,” he says. “I love the queer community there. It wasn’t actual Kentuckians who were doing these things. It wasn’t the Kentucky that I know.”

Steven Rocha, a 23-year-old teacher in Florida, knows how difficult it is to see your state make it more difficult to be yourself. In 2023, Florida passed its infamous Parental Rights in Education Act, which initially banned teachers in K-3 classrooms from addressing topics related to the LGBTQ+ community. Although portions of that law have been nullified due to a court settlement, Rocha still feels the impact. In the past, students have called him anti-gay slurs and asked whether he’s a “boy or a girl.” He isn’t out to his students, which he says makes him feel as if he is “betraying the community.” It’s a terrible feeling, he laments, to feel as if you have to lie to keep your job.

When Rocha meets LGBTQ+ people who live outside the South, they often express their condolences for everything that’s happened in Florida in recent years, including its restrictions on trans health care and drag performances (both of which have also been blocked in court). But he doesn’t want their sympathy because the truth is, Rocha says, that other states are “just a few bad elections away from being in the same position.” That’s why he says it’s so important for trans people and allies to make their voices heard this year.

“The bottom line is: A lot of trans people are going to get hurt under a Trump presidency,” Rocha says. “That’s just a reality. Trans people are such a small minority, but our lives have just as much meaning and value as our cisgender counterparts. The stakes really could not be higher.”

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