Trump Viciously Attacks Trans Community in Congress Speech
President Trump called transgender identity a "big lie" and flaunted his orders restricting trans health care and sports participation.
President Donald Trump used his address to Congress on Tuesday, March 4, to attack transgender individuals, calling transgender identity a “lie” and railing against transgender athletes, gender-affirming care, and trans visibility in the military and more broadly within society.
At one point during the speech, Trump switched from speaking about a child who was diagnosed with cancer to claim his administration was protecting children from “toxic ideologies” in schools.
He brought up the story of January Littlejohn, a Florida anti-transgender activist who sued the Leon County School District in Tallahassee, Flordia, in 2021, alleging that her child’s school had discussed restrooms and name change requests with the child, assisting her in “socially transitioning” without informing Littlejohn or her husband of their efforts.
That narrative was the impetus for First Lady Melania Trump inviting Littlejohn — now a “parental rights” activist who has been linked to the anti-LGBTQ Moms for Liberty organization — to be her guest for the president’s address.
Littlejohn’s accusations were used by Florida lawmakers to help pass the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. As presented by Republicans, her story fueled conservative talking points that schools are seeking to cut out parental involvement or actively “transitioning” children without their parents’ knowledge — a contention that Trump gleefully exaggerated, misrepresented, and repeated many times on the campaign trail last year.
As CNN has since reported, the facts of Littlejohn’s story don’t match the picture that Trump sought to paint during his address to Congress.
Emails obtained by CNN showed that Littlejohn wrote her child’s school in 2020, notifying a teacher that her child, who allegedly identified as nonbinary, wanted to change her pronouns.
In one email, Littlejohn said she would not stop her child from using preferred pronouns or a preferred name not matching the one they were assigned at birth. In a subsequent email, Littlejohn said she would let her child and teachers “take the lead on this,” referring to the child’s preferred pronouns usage, name change request, and other gender identity-related accommodations.
Littlejohn’s lawsuit against Leon County Schools — which sought to attack a district policy stating that parents did not have to be told about a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity if a child came out at school — was dismissed by a federal judge in 2023. Littlejohn’s legal team has appealed the decision, which remains pending.
Citing Littlejohn’s allegations, Trump boasted that stories like that were why he signed an executive order “banning public schools from indoctrinating our children with transgender ideology.”
Trump then shifted to another transgender-related topic, boasting of signing an executive order to cut off federal money to any health care institution that offers hormones, puberty blockers, or surgery to transgender minors, which Trump referred to as a form of “sexual mutilation.”
“And now I want Congress to pass a bill banning and criminalizing sex changes on children, and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body,” Trump said. “It’s a big lie. And our message to every child is you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”
Trump also railed against “wokeness,” a word that has been misappropriated by Republicans, with an ever-shifting definition that appears to refer to any effort to highlight or recognize LGBTQ identity, racial and cultural identity, or racial awareness.
“We’re getting wokeness out of our schools, and out of our military,” Trump said. “It’s already out, and it’s out of our society. We don’t want it. Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It’s gone.”
Trump then shifting his focus his recent ban on transgender military personnel.
“Our service members won’t be activists and ideologues. They will be fighters and warriors that will fight for our country,” he continued, asserting that the Armed Forces experienced its best recruiting efforts “in years” in January, appearing to allude to right-wing talking points that so-called “wokeness” had discouraged Americans, particularly conservatives, from joining the military.
Trump highlighted the presence of another guest, Payton McNabb, who works with the Independent Women’s Forum. The anti-transgender advocacy group pushes for erasing gender identity protections from law, banning gender-affirming care, and banning transgender athletes from competing as women in sporting competitions.
McNabb, a former high school volleyball player who was injured in a match against a team with a transgender player, has claimed to have suffered a concussion that caused traumatic brain injury and left her struggling with ongoing cognitive issues.
Pointing to McNabb, Trump touted an executive order he signed to strip federal funding from schools that allow transgender athletes to compete on female-designated sports teams.
“Three years ago, Payton McNabb was an all-star high school athlete, one of the best, preparing for a future in college sports, but when her girls volleyball match was invaded by a male, he smashed the ball so hard in Payton’s face causing traumatic brain injury, partially paralyzing her right side, and ending her athletic career,” Trump said.
“It was a shot like she’s never seen before. She’s never seen anything like it. Payton is here tonight in the gallery and Payton, from now on, schools will kick the men off the girls teams or they will lose all federal funding.”
Ironically, Trump’s remarks came a day after Senate Democrats successfully blocked a bill to strip funding from schools and universities that allow transgender athletes to compete in sports based on their gender identity.
The LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD pushed back against McNabb’s assertions that transgender players pose a greater risk to cisgender competitors, citing a study finding that more than 214,000 high school and college female volleyball players have reported injuries including head trauma since 2012.
The majority of those incidents involved cisgender competitors, and yet, GLAAD noted, there have been no calls for those players involved in such incidents to be banned from sports or to “protect” women by preventing them from playing volleyball.
Trump also accused the Biden administration of having wasted taxpayer dollars on various programs or initiatives, which he claimed the new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk, would seek to end.
Trump claimed DOGE had found “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud,” and attacked the Biden administration for allegedly spending $8 million to “promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” and another $8 million on “making mice transgender.”
Those assertions appear to be half-truths, with the Lesotho-related expenses appearing to refer to money sent to Sub-Saharan African countries in 2023 to fund a number of educational, health, anti-discrimination, and anti-violence initiatives, including some aimed at addressing HIV prevention, promoting sexual health, and combating substance abuse, as reported by LGBTQ Nation.
Meanwhile, the “transgender mice” claim stems from a $477,121 grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health between 2021 and 2022, which went toward three projects — utilizing animals as test subjects — analyzing whether feminizing hormone therapy might weaken the immune system and make individuals more susceptible to HIV. In fact-checking Trump’s claim of an $8 million price tag for the project, CNN reporter Deirdre McPhillips called his assertion “false.”
Kevin Jennings, the CEO of the LGBTQ legal organization Lambda Legal, denounced Trump’s anti-transgender remarks as “pathetic and ignorant.”
“[Trump’s] rhetoric attacked the identities and lives of the LGBTQ+ community, particularly trans and nonbinary people and youth, by falsely insinuating they don’t even exist,” Jennings said. “It is an affront to the very core of what this nation should stand for: respect, equality, and humanity…. Trump’s words and policies are an assault on decades of civil rights progress and anti-discrimination protections.”
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