Now, after Trump’s comments and actions on the first day of his presidency, the group’s helpline is once again receiving a flood of calls. Sixty-two percent of incoming calls this week, the group tells WRED, are from trans and gender nonconforming teens ages 14 to 17.
The callers express varying degrees of emotional and mental distress, often expressing feelings of despair and fear. One of the most common sentiments shared is “my country doesn’t want me to exist.”
While the actions of the Trump administration are causing immense distress to the trans community and their families, a sharp increase in the attacks, online and offline, are already coming from Trump supporters who feel emboldened.
“We’ve already seen an increase in the hatred against us,” Fisher says. “We had someone come to our home just last Tuesday and put a note in our mailbox that said, ‘He’s your dad now, he’s your president. You people are no more.’ So yes, they are definitely encouraged.”
A pride flag they hung on their porch was stolen twice in the span of a week. At her local Piggly Wiggly, a supermarket, she overheard people at the next table talking about how glad they were that Trump had “walked away from” trans people.
“He didn’t get rid of them, they’ll always be there—but he put a hell of a target on them, especially my teenage son,” Fisher said.
And the attacks also target the groups that try to help the LGBTQ+ community.
“We saw a lot more hate,” Lance Preston, executive director of the Rainbow Youth Project, tells WIRED. “We got a lot of messages, crazy, like ‘Trump is your president, now you’re all going to have to go. We don’t want you here.’ We get those every day in contact forms, and since the election it’s just grown exponentially. It’s really sad.”
Some activists also worry that those who have always stood with the LGBTQ+ community might be too intimidated to speak out under the new Trump administration.
“Every time something like this happens, we notice that supporters back off and just calm down,” Chris Sederburg, who helps trans and gender nonconforming people through the Rainbow Youth Project, tells WIRED. “Not all of them, but many of them do because they are afraid of what is happening. They fear what might happen to them or they might catch hate for it.”
Sederburg, a trans person who works as a truck driver, communicates with young trans people on social media and says the response this week from the community has been one of “intense, immediate fear.”
For Jamie Anderson, a 40-year-old teacher living in Texas, her biggest fear is that the Trump administration is forcing her 15-year-old daughter Dawn, who came out as trans last year, to make a traumatic decision.
“My biggest concern is that she’s going to have to go back to lying, like not being who she’s meant to be,” says Anderson. “She’s happy now, she’s a lot happier than she was right before she came out. She was super depressed. We had no idea what was going on. And finally she comes out, and she’s this whole new, wonderful, loving child.”
