Nearly every week since President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has announced a policy to target the rights of transgender people, both through executive orders and by slipping anti-trans language into policies presented by unusual federal agencies.
It’s a lot to keep track of, even for the most dedicated legal observers. It’s even more challenging when you consider the myriad state laws that may be affected by changes at the federal level.
Not having a way to make sense of all those changes was dangerous, said Khadijah Silver, a civil rights attorney with the nonprofit legal group Lawyers for Good Government.
So Silver created the Policy Resource Hub for Transgender Rights to give other attorneys, health care providers and families of transgender youth a clear understanding of their rights around gender and sexual orientation, and what legal tools they still had to fight back.
The public online database, which launched Tuesday, tracks and analyzes state policies around access to gender-affirming care, education and public accommodations, as well as constitutional protections for LGBTQ+ people, in all 50 states and six territories.
There are numerous examples of states complying with Trump’s anti-trans executive orders while skirting state laws or court orders, Silver said.
Silver pointed to Utah’s High School Activities Association, which recently adopted a policy to exclude trans girls from playing in sports, by citing Trump’s executive order to bar federally funded K-12 schools from allowing trans athletes. But in 2022, a Utah district court had blocked the state’s law banning trans athletes from competing in girls’ sports from going into effect. Attorneys representing trans athletes and their families said the athletic association ran afoul of court orders, but a Utah judge declined to hold the association in contempt of court, saying that it “could not fail to comply with the presidential mandate.”
Executive orders, however, are not laws and are only binding on the executive branch.
“[The court] treated it as though the federal executive order preempted the state court decision, which I’ve never seen a judge do before,” Silver said. “We’re in wild times.”
About 500 attorneys from different types of firms and practices volunteer pro bono hours to monitor policy changes and update Lawyers for Good Government’s research hub.
The project gives attorneys with various legal backgrounds the opportunity to contribute expertise without having to put the name of their firm on the line, which is especially important as Trump has targeted several prominent law firms over their pro bono work and challenges to policies from his first administration. Silver said Trump’s penchant to punish Big Law is already “having a chilling effect on certain types of pro bono work” they can provide, especially work that centers around trans and immigrant rights.
“I didn’t see [Trump] coming for the law firms that hard,” Silver said. They noted that while Trump has tried to muzzle Big Law’s pro bono work, he hasn’t been entirely successful. Many attorneys from larger firms, who had asked for such better research on trans policy for their pro bono litigation, have volunteered their time to the research project.
Instead, they said, law firms and nonprofits are being subpoenaed by the federal government for any details about lawsuits against the Trump administration.
“Suing the government is a totally legal and appropriate thing for law firms to be doing,” Silver said. “It is surreal that they now have to question whether they can deliver that as pro bono support.”
When Lawyers for Good Government put out a call for volunteers for the trans resource hub, Marlena Schultz, an attorney and pro-bono coordinator at Clean Energy Counsel, a California firm focused on sustainable energy, immediately signed up. So did six of her colleagues from her 40-person firm.
“It was just seeing in the news these kinds of attacks that seem nonsensical,” she said. “I have a really good friend in Florida, a gay couple, and their children can’t go to school and do projects about [LGBTQ+ issues]. These laws affect people in a real way and anything we can do to help make it transparent is super important.”
Schultz and the other volunteers at her law firm research state policy in Nevada. Every day, attorneys spend an hour researching updates to state laws and policy, as well as bills that are in the pipeline. If there are any changes, they update the resource hub.
Silver sees the resource hub as a complement to other legislation trackers and threat assessment maps created by legal organizations and trans advocates. One tracker from the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, shows 604 anti-LGBTQ+ laws introduced in 2025 alone.
These trackers “can be very overwhelming and intimidating” to some readers who assume that proposed bills are law, Silver said. “[They have] convinced many people, including many members of our community, that it’s over, that there’s no fight left.”
The Lawyers for Good Government resource hub attempts to combat this impression by breaking down complicated laws in “an accessible and gender-affirming way,” Silver said. The goal is for the hub and its analyses to be easily understood by people of all backgrounds and generations.
Initially, the resource hub, which was modeled after a similar Lawyers for Good Government project about abortion, was going to solely focus on state laws around access to gender-affirming care for minors, as 26 states have passed such bans since 2020.
But after Trump was re-elected, and after the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care this summer, Silver decided to expand the hub to include questions about the ability to update one’s ID documents and use public sex-segregated accommodations, and whether state constitutions explicitly protected or excluded trans people.
Silver hopes the project will soon broaden its scope to also include the Trump administration’s attacks on incarcerated trans people, trans people in the military and trans federal workers.
This work is “highly personal” for Silver, a trans parent of two kids. They said that tracking this period of intense hostility toward trans people helps inform not only their family but many others across the country about what rights their children have and which states will be the safest to raise their kids.
“I do not believe we have a tenable path forward if we just end up with a patchwork” of rights, Silver said. “The second our nation said, ‘Well, I don’t think we can get the Equality Act, we can protect gay marriage,’ we lost as a nation. The second Alabama was able to say, ‘You can’t drive unless you’ve had bottom surgery and you’re not allowed health care till 19’ to young trans women, we lost as a nation.”
Another goal of the project is to educate attorneys who may not be familiar with legal issues impacting trans and gender-nonconforming people.
“I did a trans 101 video for our pro bono attorneys, talking about gender and sex, and getting folks thinking about what it might be like if you didn’t spend your entire life feeling that alignment between your identity and your body,” Silver said.
Silver hopes that with proper training, attorneys can use the resource hub more effectively to understand how to protect their clients, both in states where trans rights are codified into state constitutions and in states where there may be “untapped legal leverage.”
And Silver has been heartened to see that some states with explicit constitutional protections for trans people have used their state powers to stand up to the Trump administration.
Earlier this month, a coalition of attorneys general from 16 states and Washington D.C. filed a lawsuit accusing Trump of circumventing state police powers to regulate health and welfare within their borders. Many of those states, like New Mexico, California and Nevada, have state constitutions that explicitly include gender identity as a protected class and shield people who travel from out-of-state for abortions or gender-affirming care from outside investigations.
The suit came months after the Justice Department demanded that hospitals hand over sensitive information related to gender-affirming care for people under 19 — including patient names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers — according to a copy of a hospital subpoena. At least 25 hospitals in states that do not have bans on gender care shuttered their services for trans youth, HuffPost found. The state attorneys general said the Trump administration was creating an “unconstitutional pressure campaign” against such care.
“If the federal government is encroaching on a state’s citizenry, their health and welfare, the state actually has real teeth to fight back,” Silver said. “Right now, what we’re trying to do is claw back some basic protections while we see the war coming. I’m not going to be happy until trans people can be free and live with full civil rights across the entire country.”