Eight prominent LGBTQ+ community, health and HIV nonprofit organizations sued the Trump Administration on Thursday for his recent spate of anti-transgender executive orders.
Among his flurry of orders issued since he took office on Jan. 20, Trump has blocked healthcare for trans youth and prevented trans women from participating in sports.
Dr. Carla Smith, CEO of The Center in New York City, said in a letter obtained by TheWrap that these orders “seek to dehumanize and erase transgender people” as well as defund organizations that serve the LGBTQ community.
The lawsuit was filed by Lambda Legal and challenges three executive orders that, as Smith’s letter states, “seek to erase transgender people from public life, terminate equity-related grants, and forbid federally-funded entities from engaging in diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs or from recognizing the existence of transgender people.”
Smith also wrote, “We joined this lawsuit because we have a responsibility to ensure that all LGBTQ+ people, including transgender people, people of color, and people living with or at risk for HIV & AIDS can live healthy and successful lives without fear or limitation. These executive orders threaten the vital services we provide to one of the nation’s largest and most diverse LGBTQ+ communities and are an affront to us all.”
She added, “The Center has always fought back against injustice. We fought back at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when silence meant death. We fought back against laws that sought to criminalize our existence. And today, we are fighting back again.”
On Jan. 20, Trump shared this order to White House official site: “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
In it, he lashed out at “ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex” and argued that the trans movement’s goal is to “eradicate the biological reality of sex [and] fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety and well-being. “
He argued, “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”
Trump is also expected to make good on previous promises to ban transgender members of the U.S. military from serving.
