TFP’s Last Legislative Updates 9/19, 2025
Trans rights are still under attack in the United States. Please visit our website linked below to learn about your state and contact your reps. Here's a thread of today's updates:
I respect this audience too much to sugarcoat this, so I will say it at the top. We have decided to shut down the Trans Formations Project, permanently, effective immediately.
This will be our final newsletter.
To those who have been part of our story, part of this journey these past years - thank you.
Whatever it was that brought you here, to these words, to seek these inconvenient truths, it was a choice to listen. It was a choice to question what you were told by those in power about trans people. It was a choice to respect trans autonomy enough to listen to a scrappy group of volunteer researchers with nothing but immense amounts of time and passion.
When I founded the Trans Formations Project in June 2021, I would never have believed what would come of it. What began as a group chat about how to read bills and trying to remember Robert's Rules from college quickly gained traction none of us had ever anticipated.
I was 24 years old when TFP started. In 2021, I put out a call on twitter for helpers to look into anti-trans bills. Slowly and clumsily, we learned. Those who know me personally know I often say that my only true virtue is persistence. That was exemplified by everyone at TFP. In 2022, our research and analysis was shared by Alok Menon, sparking attention from many other celebrities. In 2023, we grew larger still, and I was deeply honored to be able to meet Alok Menon themself at the Trans Equality Now Awards, where I was presented the 20th anniversary Leadership and Advocacy Award from the National Center for Transgender Equality for the work of the Trans Formations Project. The last one awarded.
I dedicated my speech to the volunteers of TFP. I spoke about how TFP is not a testament to me or any other individual - it’s a testament to what happens when a community works on a task that is too big for any one person alone. I spoke about how so many of us are told to wait for a hero to arrive... and how that convinces us not to become collaborators in our own time and capacity.
Throughout the brief and brilliant history of the Trans Formations Project, hundreds of people have volunteered with us. Thousands have told us they benefitted from our research and analysis. Tens of thousands have read our work and hundreds of thousands have benefitted from it indirectly.
Since 2021 we have tracked 1855 anti-trans bills, analyzed them, and summarized them in plain language. Without AI. Just actual human volunteers doing the work.
Since 2021, 234 of those anti-trans bills have passed into law.
This final newsletter of the Trans Formations Project, is our 183rd newsletter. Each one containing invaluable tracking, analysis, and news information for the public as well as researchers and organizers.
Throughout TFP's history, myself and a few other select members of leadership have been the only public faces of this organization. That was a strategic and intentional choice made in case today arrived, despite our best efforts. It is no longer safe to organize this publicly, and so we are shutting it down.
But that does not mean it's over.
I am a student of queer history, and often cite how I found my queerness, and my transness in particular, buried in zines written by queers during the AIDS crisis in the United States. They taught me, even after death, that information is power. Political power, yes, but also power to exercise autonomy, to make informed decisions, and to find community and organize.
As I saw the tides turning once more towards open fascism, I looked to queer history again. And, as always, I found trans people. Trans people who lived, who loved, who organized, who laughed and cried.
Trans people who were killed for existing.
The Nazi Party of Germany committed trans genocide in 1933, the year they took power.
World War II was not declared until 1939. World War II did not end until 1945.
Before the Nazi Party took power, Berlin was the most openly queer city on earth. The Institute for Sexual Sciences was an advocacy, research, and medical organization that advocated for feminist, queer, and trans liberation. They hosted scholars, prescribed HRT, offered early vaginoplasties, gave trans patients legal documentation, engaged in political organizing, and so much more.
The Library of the Institute of Sexual Sciences hosted 20,000 volumes, many of them unique, on gender, sexuality, and feminism.
You have seen the photo of the Nazis burning those books in 1933 all your life, stripped of the context of trans genocide.
The Nazi Party of Germany did not burn the patient records of the institute. Instead, they hunted the patients down.
Therefore, I will do the opposite. We, at the Trans Formations Project, have always been aware this reality could come for us, too. So we have decided to burn our patient records.
We will destroy all data we can find about our volunteers.
And we will save the library.
Our data, our research, our analysis, our writings - are available. We will be working hard to store them in as many digital and physical archives as we possibly can. If you are able to offer an archive, please reach out to [email protected].
One of the personal contributions to this organization that I am proudest of was the suggestion of a phoenix as our logo.
Trans people, by and large, are born into intolerance and hatred. Those trans people who come out or transition are trans people who, despite a lifetime of abuse directed at our authentic selves, choose to love ourselves anyway. Trans people who come out are almost entirely trans people who go searching for others like them, and find themselves in doing so.
I dug myself out of the ashes of my trans elders. And so too will those who come after us.
Trans people will always be here. We will outlast any empire, any regime, any ideology that paints us as anything but what we are - a variation on humanity that deserves to be cherished, loved and celebrated.
Trans people after us will go looking through these ashes too - and I intend them to find us.
Trans genocide has been ongoing. We have been tracking its exhaustive and endless creep towards today for the past four years.
In 2022 the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention declared the “gender critical” movement to be explicitly genocidal against trans people:
Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement
On March 13th of this year the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention released a “Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States”, here:
Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States
The Trump administration, on the day of Trump’s Inauguration, released an Executive Order titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."
It defines transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people out of legal existence.
The propaganda report from the Department of Health and Human Services argues explicitly for conversion therapy and argues that transgender and nonbinary people do not exist.
It claims our healthcare is “experimental” and “unproven”, despite being older than antibiotics.
The Trump regime cancelled transgender health research.
The regime erased transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument.
It is awarding the Medal of Freedom to a man who called for "every gender affirming care doctor to face Nuremberg-style trials".
It has been torturing transgender people under the state's care in incarceration for years.
Trump just declared that trans people are an acceptable target.
Whatever happens next - the trans people who come after us deserve to know we fought like hell.
They deserve to know we were here. We did not go quietly.
The regime is coming for trans people.
They’re already calling us “Nihilistic Violent Extremists”
What's left is to fight like hell. With bricks. With teeth. With punches. With words. With every means necessary. What's left is to defy them with every breath we have left.
Every life matters. Every second matters. Every person who realizes the truth matters. Every time we speak the truth in public, someone hears it. Every time we fight, we inspire others. Show others like you what's possible. Fight, speak, organize like it's your last stand. It is.
If they will kill us regardless, the work is now to make meaning with the time we have left. Make radical art. Speak the truth. Love as loudly as you can. The choice, under full blown fascism, is to face death in surrender, or to face death in resistance. Only one matters.
Who will you be, at the end? If you do not resolve yourself, as soon as possible, to the grim reality, or the true stakes of the choices we are faced with at this moment, you will lack the conviction in the split second opportunities you will be given to act. Fascism makes the wrong choices easy.
Fascism makes the cruel, shallow, and cowardly choices socially rewarding, easy, and obvious. Unless you resolve yourself, in advance, to make the hard choices that will be your only opportunities to resist, you will fail. Steel yourself to make impossible choices. For love.
Do or die. Those are the stakes. Kindness costs everything when it really matters. What are you doing to prepare yourself, really, to be radically kind, even if it means losing everything? What are you doing right now to resolve yourself to choose love, even if it means death? That's the work.
Trans organizers have a "joke" amongst ourselves. We often say, "the trans agenda is an average life expectancy".
At every Trans Day of Remembrance, we hold each other, and we cry, and we say, in wavering voices of relentless hope, "Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living."
So that's what we do now. That's what trans people have always done. We mourn the dead. We remember them. We carry their legacies with us to pass on to those who find us. But we cannot stop there. Despair is compliance by another name.
We fight like hell for the living. And we do not go peacefully.
It has been an honor to organize with you throughout the story of the Trans Formations Project. Our work here mattered. It matters now. And it will matter, for those to come.
Our work does not stop here. It only changes form.
Whatever the next iteration of your work looks like, remember: our people will rise from these ashes too.
They deserve to see that we loved them fiercely enough to fight for them.
Trans people deserve a world better than this, kinder than this, more loving than this.
Trans people deserve an average life expectancy.
The Trans Formations Project vision statement reads, "We envision a world where through community all trans people are empowered in their lives, safe from persecution, and able to express themselves without fear."
The darkness is here despite our best efforts.
"Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Do not go peacefully. Go out furiously, radiantly queer, and with a brick in your hand.
I will see you on the other side, my friends. I love you.
Alex Petrovnia (ze/zir or any/all)
Cofounder, Codirector, and director of communications
Healthcare bills go against professional and scientific consensus that gender-affirming care saves lives. Denying access will cause harm.
Providers are faced with criminal charges, parents are threatened with child abuse charges, and intersex children are typically exempted.
Michigan HB4938 was moved to the House Judiciary Committee on September 16.
Educational Censorship and Student Suppression bills force schools to misgender or deadname students, ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, and make schools alert parents if they suspect a child is trans.
They remove life-saving affirmation and support for trans youth.
Ohio HB455 is an education censorship bill that was introduced on September 17.
Trans Erasure bills create legal definitions of terms like “sex” designed to exclude or erase trans identity and insert them into various laws. This can have many different effects, depending on what laws are affected.
They can force a male or female designation based on sex assigned at birth.
Some target anti-discrimination statutes, legally empowering trans discrimination.
Ohio HB457 is a trans erasure bill introduced on September 17.
These are other anti-trans bills that either fit multiple categories or stand on their own.
Pennsylvania SB1007 was introduced and referred to the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee on September 17. The bill creates a kind of detransition insurance called “Transition intervention reversal services.”
Ohio HB457 is a trans erasure bill introduced on September 17.
US HB5342 was placed on the Union Calendar on September 12. It covers many appropriations and interferes with trans inmates.
US HB5304 was introduced on September 11th. The bill cuts funding for transition related programs.
Wisconsin AB58 was sent to the Senate Licensing, Regulatory Reform, State and Federal Affairs Committee on September 12th.
We also have good news to share!
Updates on anti-trans bills that have failed:
Updates on positive bills which protect and affirm trans individuals:
California AB1084 had its amendments approved on September 13th and will be sent to the governor.
California SB59 was enrolled on September 17th and will be sent to the governor.
Massachusetts SB2516 was introduced on September 18th. The bill protects personal info that might out someone as private data.
It's not too late to stop these and other hateful anti-trans bills from passing into law. YOU can go to http://transformationsproject.org/ to learn more and contact your representatives!
