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Pete Buttigieg wasn’t sworn in as the first out gay U.S. president this year, but he racked up several achievements that he once thought were beyond his reach — including a cabinet position and fatherhood.

The former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination before throwing his support to Joe Biden, was nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as secretary of the Department of Transportation. This made Buttigieg the first out member of the LGBTQ+ community to hold a Senate-confirmed cabinet post. At his confirmation hearing in January, he introduced his husband, Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, to the chamber, and thanked Chasten for his sacrifices and support. A couple of weeks later, Pete Buttigieg was easily confirmed to the position, by a vote of 86-13.

Then in September, the Buttigiegs announced they had become parents of newborn twins, Penelope Rose and Joseph August. Pete became the first gay dad in a president’s cabinet, and the news was the subject of celebratory articles around the nation.

Many of the milestones in his life are things he once considered impossible for a gay man, Buttigieg notes. “I became a military reserve officer during the era of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ believing I might permanently have to choose between public service and a full home life,” he says. “I often reflect on how recently it was legally impossible for someone like me to serve in uniform — and would have been considered politically impossible for someone like me to serve openly as mayor of my hometown. Just a couple generations earlier, being out — or being outed — might mean being unable to serve in any government job at all.”

“Yet earlier this year,” he continues, “I was sworn in as the first out Senate-confirmed member of a president’s cabinet, with my husband, Chasten, standing by my side, holding the Bible. And more recently, we became parents to two beautiful children. It’s strange to think that having a spouse and children — in many ways the most normal thing about my life — is so extraordinary as to have been basically impossible just a few years ago. But this shift shows the power of advocacy and courage, as people like me walk down a path that so many others have helped to clear when the hard way was the only way.”

As additional confirmation of Buttigieg’s high profile, he became the subject of a documentary film, Mayor Pete, about his presidential campaign. Directed by Jesse Moss, the film screened at festivals in New York and Chicago in October, then was released on Amazon Prime.

After a record-breaking year for anti-trans legislation, 2025 is shaping up to be even more challenging for transgender and queer people across the United States. A legislative tracker maintained by Erin In The Morning and other volunteers has found that nearly 120 anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ bills have already been filed in states nationwide ahead of the 2025 legislative season. This far surpasses the 80 bills filed by this time in 2023, signaling another historic wave of legal attacks on the ability of transgender people to move, live, and exist freely as themselves in public.

The bulk of the bills so far come from Texas and Missouri, two of the earlier states that release prefilled legislation ahead of the 2025 session. However, states like South Carolina, New Hampshire, Georgia, Wyoming, and Montana all feature multiple anti-LGBTQ+ bills, with more being added every day. Thirteen states in all have seen anti-trans bills filed: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming.

This year, several state bills aim to strip legal recognition from transgender people entirely. Between 2022 and 2024, ten states passed such legislation or enacted similar policies, with devastating consequences for affected communities. In Kansas, Florida, and Texas, transgender individuals are now unable to update their driver’s licenses, and in some cases, states have begun reverting gender marker changes that were made years or even decades ago. Transgender people who have lived as their legal gender for years may face forced reversion of their identification documents if these new bills are enacted. Similar legislation has already been introduced in Texas, Missouri, South Carolina, and Wyoming.

In many states that have passed such legislation, bathroom bans have also been attached. Indeed, in the initial rush of bills, several bathroom bans can be found that target transgender adults. Two Texas bills would allow lawsuits if transgender people are encountered in bathrooms. One bill in Montana would bar transgender people from publicly owned bathrooms of their gender identity. One bill in Missouri would even make it “unlawful public discrimination” to allow a transgender person in bathrooms of their gender identity.

Book bans are seeing a resurgence in the prefiled bills. In 2024, PEN America found 10,046 instances of individual books banned, affecting 4,231 unique titles. Banned books include The Handmaids Tale, Flamer, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Gender Queer, and more. Texas features several such bills this year, despite the state being rebuked by higher courts for book bans in 2024.

Another common type of anti-trans legislation that is common is sports bans. Many bills aim to expand existing restrictions to even broader contexts. In Texas, one proposed bill seeks to deny private sporting events access to the state’s Events Trust Fund—a source of professional funding for major sporting events—if they allow trans athletes to compete. Other bills aim to extend sports bans to new age groups. For instance, a bill in Wyoming would expand its current ban, which applies to students in grade 7 and above, to include kindergarteners.

Several other categories of bills have seen activity, such as drag bans, forced outing of transgender students, “don’t say gay” bills, birth certificate gender change bans, drivers license gender change bans, and more.

According to the ACLU, legislative attacks on transgender people grew “exponentially” over 2023 and 2024. These anti-trans laws have directly caused an increase in suicide attempts in some states by up to 72%. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in four transgender youth have attempted to take their own life in the last year, with many of those attempts requiring medical treatment.

In the coming months, a landmark Supreme Court decision will determine the constitutional fate of bills targeting transgender people. While the case centers on a law restricting transgender medical care, its broader implications go far deeper—addressing whether discrimination against transgender people qualifies as sex discrimination warranting heightened scrutiny. The Court may also weigh whether transgender individuals are granted equal protection around their transgender status. This ruling has the potential to either shut the door on many of these bills and laws or swing it wide open, unleashing a flood of legislative attacks that could make 2025 a historically devastating year for transgender rights.

The Trump administration’s relentless campaign against transgender Americans has taken another dangerous turn. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a critical resource for tracking and protecting at-risk youth, has erased all references to LGBTQ+ and particularly trans children from its public materials. The Verge reports that the purge came after the Department of Justice threatened to pull the organization’s federal funding if it didn’t comply with the administration’s anti-trans directives.

This directive follows Trump’s day one executive order eliminating federal recognition of transgender people, a sweeping and cruel policy shift designed to strip trans individuals of legal protections. The order mandates that all government agencies adopt rigid, binary definitions of sex and remove any acknowledgment of gender diversity from official records and resources.

A deep dive into NCMEC’s website using the Wayback Machine reveals that at least three key reports—including those on missing children with suicidal tendencies and male victims of child sex trafficking—were removed after January 24, The Verge reports. Additionally, three crucial guides on identifying and preventing child sex trafficking, which explicitly mentioned transgender and homeless LGBTQ+ youth, were deleted.

It remains unclear exactly when these removals took place, as website content can be altered for various reasons. However, journalist Marisa Kabas, who writes for The Handbasket, reported that the Department of Justice had warned NCMEC leadership earlier in the week that funding would be revoked unless a site-wide review was conducted.

Kabas obtained an email allegedly sent to NCMEC staff on Wednesday, stating that the organization had been contacted by its primary federal grantor on Monday to ensure all public materials aligned with the “spirit of the President’s Executive Orders.”

Advocates and experts warn that removing these references makes already vulnerable children even more invisible. Research consistently shows that transgender youth face disproportionate risks of homelessness, trafficking, and violence. By erasing them from these critical resources, the administration is making it harder for agencies to provide life-saving assistance.