News Analysis
A.I., TikTok, big tech, and the 2024 elections: Experts break down the risks
Chris Bronk and Barb McQuade call for stronger tech regulations
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could decide whether government actors can pressure social media companies to remove certain harmful content from their platforms. A ruling is expected to come in June, just a few months ahead of the 2024 elections.
Meanwhile, as America’s relationship with China has become more strained than ever, the U.S. Congress may force a divestiture of TikTok from Chinese parent ByteDance over concerns with how the platform’s use in the U.S. could imperil national security. The bill would ban TikTok’s use in the U.S. if a sale is not completed within six months.
At the same time, the spread of misinformation and disinformation through online platforms, while not a new phenomenon, is abetted by increasingly sophisticated A.I. technologies that are now capable of generating “deepfake” audio and video content. The associated risks to the information ecosystem could influence American elections in ways that were not possible in years past.
In conversations this week with the Washington Blade, two experts outlined the threat landscape with respect to Big Tech, identifying election-related risks that are both preexisting and new. They also shared ideas for regulatory solutions and thoughts about the advantages and disadvantages of various moves that have been undertaken by U.S. lawmakers and other officials.
Chris Bronk is an associate professor with tenure at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs, having previously directed the university’s graduate cybersecurity program and served on the faculty of the College of Technology. He previously held high-profile positions, including a senior adviser role, at the U.S. Department of State. Bronk’s areas of expertise include internet censorship, online surveillance, border security, public diplomacy, organization information technology, and critical infrastructure protection.
Barbara (“Barb”) McQuade is a lawyer who served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017, becoming deputy chief of the National Security Unit and prosecuting high-profile cases from public corruption and bank fraud involving elected officials to the theft of trade secrets. She is a professor of practice at the University of Michigan Law School as well as a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. McQuade’s areas of expertise include criminal law and procedure, national security, data privacy, and civil rights.
Is TikTok more dangerous than American tech platforms?
Some critics of the TikTok bill feel the platform has been unfairly singled out, especially since the major American-owned competitors in online social media or short-form video sharing platforms have themselves faced scrutiny over many of the same issues lawmakers have identified with TikTok, from risks associated with the improper collection and misuse of data to design features that knowingly amplify the spread of harmful content.
The difference, McQuade said, is that when it comes to American tech platforms, the “U.S. government could impose laws that could control their bad behavior” whereas because foreign owned entities largely operate beyond the reach of U.S. regulations, “we have to be extra mindful when a social media platform that has so much power is outside of the control of American government.”
“There are a lot of things we just don’t have visibility into,” she said. “So it could be that [foreign actors are] engaging in influence campaigns by putting certain videos online,” and even though “we don’t know that that’s happening,” McQuade noted “it’s a possibility and we lack recourse.”
“With regard to scraping data, I mean, we know Facebook is doing this, scraping our data and giving it away to researchers or selling it, but we have some recourse if we choose to exercise it,” McQuade said. “If it is the government of China who is doing that, we don’t have visibility into what they’re doing with it.”
She added, “Maybe they’re only using [the data] for helpful purposes, like in the same way Netflix suggests content that we like and we look at it and say, ‘yes, in fact I do’ — or is it being used to build dossiers on [users] so that we can be recruited for and leveraged and extorted to engage in espionage?”
“People make a lot of, essentially, the intelligence and information gathering aspect of TikTok, and I don’t know if it’s a whole lot different than what people do on Facebook,” Bronk said, adding that there is probably “too little” concern about Facebook’s conduct and influence among U.S. lawmakers and government officials.
At the same time, he said, “the issue I have with TikTok is that it’s a social media tool from China, or a social media platform from China, and U.S. social media platforms are banned in China,” which has long enforced prohibitions against the use of products made by companies like Google, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook.
In the U.S., Bronk said, free speech and expression, including criticism of the U.S. government, are protected (so long as the conduct does not involve, say, leading an insurrection by storming the U.S. Capitol Building). By contrast, he said, “when we were doing our censorship research on China, you know, if you complain about pollution in China, on any given day, no big deal; if you do it for two days in a row, maybe not a problem; but on the third day, you’re gonna get censored because you’re complaining too much.”
Likewise, Bronk said, the information ecosystem in the U.S. is shaped, at least to some extent, by a free and independent press, while China’s is not — further complicating the role played by social media and online platforms in the dissemination of news. And the two countries also have very different records with respect to human rights, Bronk added, noting that LGBTQ Americans enjoy many freedoms and protections that are not available to their Chinese counterparts.
“We’re pretty tolerant and China is not,” Bronk said. “So the idea that China exports this social media platform that it attempts to control very vigorously at home, I think that’s the issue I have, that it’s not a level playing field. And as long as it’s not a level playing field, the question is why should we play at all?”
Part of the problem, Bronk said, stems from the worsening geopolitical relationship between the two countries. “We in diplomacy circles hear this term, ‘no guardrails; no bottom’ — so we don’t know how much worse it can get, and we don’t really have the guideposts that we would have on a relationship like that that we had during the Cold War, through summits and things like that.”
The tussle now unfolding over TikTok, he said, “is part of a much larger geopolitical contest between the West and China. And not even just the West and China, now, but with China and its friends, which means North Korea, which is the only country that has a pact with China, and Russia and Iran. And so the question really becomes, how much are we going to delink the United States from China?”
TikTok’s algorithmic recommendation engine is owned and controlled by ByteDance, and the company would have to obtain permission from the Chinese government to license or sell the technology, which is likely to complicate negotiations over a divestiture.
Should TikTok’s ownership change hands, Bronk said the company would still face an uncertain future — partly because the sale would cause a “forking of the algorithm,” with the underlying software being developed simultaneously by ByteDance in China and by a different firm in the U.S., and also partly because TikTok’s success relies on the scale of its user base and volume of content hosted on the platform.
“Even if the ownership changes, platforms die,” he said. “Facebook is decidedly uncool for a generation of Americans now. X’s usership has declined precipitously since its purchase. MySpace is dead and buried. So what’s to say that TikTok isn’t bought by American buyers who spend billions of dollars and then the train wrecks?”
Election interference, misinformation, disinformation, and A.I.
“This idea that that they have all the interest in the world to try to manipulate — the Chinese and the Russians — to manipulate electoral behavior in the United States to get the candidate they want, I find it very frightening,” Bronk said. “And I think we’re very poorly prepared to monitor the situation.”
However, 2024 would not be the first time in which individuals and groups overseas, acting in the interest of foreign governments hostile to the U.S., have sought to influence American elections through social media and other channels.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, which was released in 2019, “identified a lot of Russian influence actors,” McQuade said, pointing to the propaganda-peddling Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” financed by an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin with ties to Russian intelligence that supported former President (then-candidate) Donald Trump’s bid for the White House.
She noted that the firm was known to publish fake posts on social media and build large online followings for fake accounts like “Blacktivist,” which posed “as a very reasonable, interesting, Black activist” and “then when it came close to the election said things like, ‘we should not vote for Hillary Clinton because she’s taken our vote for granted. Let’s send a message that we should not be ignored by not showing up at the polls and voting for her.'”
McQuade was quick to point out that these tactics to subvert American elections have been used by American actors, too. She noted, for example, a campaign in which U.S.-based political operatives sought to suppress the vote in Black communities during the 2016 presidential election by telling Black voters voters that they could cast their ballots via SMS text messages.
Drawing a distinction between the various different methods by which American elections might be manipulated, McQuade noted that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has declared election-related “hardware-software processes ‘critical infrastructure'” and is therefore “looking to anything that might intrude upon that or hack into that.”
“Equally important are influence campaigns that peddle in false information and use information as a weapon,” she said. “And I think that’s something that our Department of Homeland Security, our FBI, needs to be looking at” alongside the “private actors who look at disinformation at all of the social media companies.”
Anti-LGBTQ misinformation is an example of how “the far right extreme portion of the Republican Party is trying to sow discord in society” with influence campaigns designed to exploit differences between different people and different groups for political gain.
“This false narrative that the LGBTQ community wants to groom your children for pedophilia,” she said, is evidence of the extent to which rhetoric that was once considered hyperbolic and out-of-bounds for political discourse is no longer taboo. “I used to joke,” McQuade said, that politicians would say to voters, “my opponent wants to eat your children.”
When online content is false or deceptive, McQuade said, “it’s really about flagging, and one hopes that the social media companies” will take steps like directing users “to accurate information rather than taking down information that [they] might find misleading.”
“The other brand, I think, is actual disinformation about the process of voting and I worry about that, which could cause people to become confused about the rules for voting or exhausted by trying to figure it out and discouraged from casting a ballot altogether,” she said.
McQuade said A.I. technologies might continue to play a role in this type of election interference, pointing to a scam in January, days before the 2024 New Hampshire primary elections, in which residents received robocalls in which an A.I.-generated clone of President Joe Biden’s voice urged them not to vote.
It can be difficult to convince people who have been duped by a convincing artificially generated deepfake, McQuade warned, which could show audio or video “evidence” of a candidate saying or doing something objectionable.
Bronk agreed, noting “every generation of those Nvidia chips that gets better, I mean, things look more and more real.” The company on Monday introduced its Blackwell B200 GPU, which according to The Verge is “the ‘world’s most powerful chip’ for AI” and according to Bronk is “30 times more powerful than the prior version.”
How can individuals defend themselves?
When asked how best to mitigate these attacks on elections, McQuade and Bronk agreed the American public must learn how to identify trusted and trustworthy sources of news and information and develop the skills to spot online content that might be false, misleading, manipulative, or artificially generated.
“What we need to do is push people in the direction of credible sources of information so that if and when this wave of disinformation comes around elections, people know their trusted sources online,” like the official government websites for the offices of secretaries of state or content published by nonprofit groups like the League of Women Voters, McQuade said.
“Some of this we’re doing to ourselves,” Bronk said, pointing to the fact that televised ads for political candidates are required to include disclaimers to indicate whether, for instance, the ad was authorized by the candidate or her campaign but funded by a political action committee (PAC), whereas political advertising on social media is regulated much more loosely.
Education is key, McQuade said, so that “when people are reading things online, they are able to be appropriately skeptical. They’re able to ask good questions, you know not just looking at the headline [but] looking for a second source, looking to a sizable data set if there’s a statistical study, understanding the difference between causation and correlation — there are a lot of things that we could all use to learn to build resilience against disinformation.”
She and Bronk both pointed to Finland as an example of a country that has sought to address the scourge of misinformation and disinformation spread by social media and online platforms by promoting digital and media literacy.
McQuade noted that, “in Finland, a country that has been affected by disinformation for a long time because of their proximity to Russia, they have introduced media literacy into their school curriculum to great success.”
The Supreme Court steps in
On Monday, The New York Times reported that the Supreme Court justices largely seemed receptive to arguments that U.S. government actors are free to contact social media companies over concerns about content on their platforms that may be harmful, so long as there is no coercion involved.
McQuade said this analysis “strikes me as the correct outcome” because so long as the government is not urging the platforms to take action by “coercing” them or making demands “with repercussions and consequences and threats, then I think it does not amount to any sort of prior restraint where they’re telling them what they can and cannot publish.”
In many cases, she said, the government is simply flagging content that runs afoul of — or seems likely to violate — the companies’ own terms of service or community standards, which would include, for instance, materials for the recruitment of users into terrorist groups like ISIS or promoting “purported cures for Covid that are, in fact, fatal.”
“Sometimes,” McQuade said, “there are statements that have a grain of truth, and then are pitched in a misleading way to advance a political agenda, and that’s where it gets tricky, because I think the government doesn’t want to be in the business of suggesting any sort of message that would favor one political party over another or one political candidate over another.”
Ultimately, though, responsibility over how to handle content moderation decisions lies with the social media company or online platform, McQuade said. “I don’t think that the government should be telling social media platforms what to do really in any circumstance,” but instead should be “merely flagging things which can be problematic and then letting the social media companies decide for themselves how they want to deal with it.”
Stronger regulation is needed
“We can regulate social media without running afoul of our First Amendment rights,” McQuade said. She suggested, as a “first step,” regulating the algorithms used by the tech platforms, pointing to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s 2021 testimony before Congress about how the platform’s software was deliberately designed to amplify content that drives outrage and, therefore, engagement.
“Why couldn’t we regulate the algorithms,” McQuade asked, “to either prevent them from stoking outrage or at least requiring them to disclose the way they’re stoking outrage so that people would know when they’re being manipulated and could choose to avoid it?”
“When you look at other industrial processes, like oil fracking, the federal government and state governments have a pretty accurate idea of how it works and what they’re doing with it, what chemicals they put in the fluids, all the processes — the oil companies have to explain all this stuff,” Bronk said.
By contrast, he said, “we don’t have transparency into any” of the algorithms used by large digital platforms. “We don’t know what the Facebook algorithms look like; we don’t know what the Google algorithms look like.”
Online platforms and social media companies “don’t want to be regulated,” Bronk said. “This is where we live now: We have all this technology that we don’t really understand how it works, we don’t know what the second and third-order effects of it are gonna be. And, you know, basically the companies are saying, ‘trust us, it’ll be fine,’ and I don’t think that’s necessarily the truth.”
The government could also establish stronger guardrails around how social media companies collect user data and sell it for purposes of micro-targeted advertising, whether for products or electoral candidates, McQuade said. “There are a number of things we can do without running afoul of the First Amendment.”
Additionally, while the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC established that “corporations and other organizations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on campaigns,” McQuade said “we could require disclosure of how they are spending that money.”
“All we see are these big ads with Super PACs, with names like The Red, White, and Blue Grandmothers of America, and we don’t know who they are,” she said. So, “bringing some transparency to campaign finance would be a really good first step to avoiding the influence of big money” from individual donors or special interest groups whose campaign funding apparatuses and lobbying efforts are often deliberately disguised to look like popular grassroots organizing efforts.
The practice is often called “astroturfing.” “The internet makes it so easy,” Bronk said.
***
Bronk is the author of “Cyber Threat: The Rise of Information Geopolitics in U.S. National Security.”
McQuade is the author of “Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America.”
Research/Study
Glisten report details hostile climate for LGBTQ students
Survey details persistent harassment, feeling unsafe in classroom
The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (now referred to as Glisten rather than GLSEN following a February rebrand) released its 13th National School Climate Survey on Tuesday, offering an often under-evaluated and under-addressed look at the realities LGBTQ students are dealing with within America’s K-12 schools.
The revised report provides new data points that could indicate the future of the current LGBTQ youth population, highlighting rising issues within school structures that often disproportionately impact LGBTQ students, while also offering a more “nuanced portrait” of how they are maneuvering these challenges.
The most alarming piece of data shows that “two in three students” reported feeling unsafe in school during the 2023–2024 school year due to their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. That high number becomes clearer as other findings in the research corroborate the points made — especially for those who haven’t stepped into a modern American classroom recently — which seems to be the best way to get a sense of what it is like to learn in one.
An additional data point showing LGBTQ students’ heightened sense of insecurity is reinforced by the widespread and constant harassment students face for their sexuality or gender identity.
The survey found that 62 percent of students experienced verbal, physical, or online harassment based on sexual orientation, while 68 percent reported the same due to their gender identity or expression.
Fifty-three percent — slightly more than half of all respondents — said they faced LGBTQ-related discrimination, including being barred from using facilities aligned with their gender identity in schools.
The survey also highlights disparities within the community — particularly within the 2023–2024 data, which emphasizes the unique struggles faced by transgender and non-white students. Trans students reported that 86 percent of them avoided certain school spaces out of fear for their safety. Non-white LGBTQ students (including Black, Indigenous, and people of color, referred to in the data as BIPOC) face a particularly difficult time within schools, with 48 percent reporting harassment based on their race or ethnicity.
In addition to these high levels of harassment, survey respondents also noted that the broader political climate shaping Washington is impacting their daily experiences in negative ways. Many reported that school environments felt more hostile during the 2024–2025 school year amid escalating anti-LGBTQ rhetoric across the country, in the news, and within the White House as policy debates continue.
Despite these conditions — which attempt to generalize and adequately compare the discrimination, harassment, and bullying faced by LGBTQ students in K-12 schools — the report underscores that LGBTQ students are not easily categorized.
“Young people actually defy the static labels of victim or hero,” said Glisten CEO Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, speaking to the Washington Blade at a reception for the data’s release. “They are neither all downtrodden nor all resilient — they are complicated and multifaceted. What we are finding through our research is that they are actually creating solutions with and for each other. They understand they can’t rely on these systems, so they are doing something themselves.”
That dual reality — that LGBTQ students appear hyper-resilient amid systemic failure in school systems that make their experiences more difficult — is a defining theme of this year’s findings.
“There’s a resilience and a power and a clarity in young people that says there is no use in trying to change who I am because I am who I am,” Willingham-Jaggers said at the event held in the NEA building. “What is also true is that a super hostile political environment is really terrible for everyone’s mental health, including children. It ought not be on a 13-year-old or a 16-year-old to keep themselves safe. That’s what parents are for, that’s what adults in schools are for, and that’s what education is supposed to do.”
She added that the data reflects broader institutional shortcomings, especially as many attempts to fix these systemic issues continue to fall short or worsen conditions for the most marginalized. Trans people of color often face the worst instances of discrimination, harassment, and bullying, and the structures in place to alleviate these issues can sometimes make them worse.
“Unfortunately, our leaders and our institutions are failing our children,” she said, pointing out that education should serve as a pathway out of adversity and into a better future. “Education is supposed to be helping our young people connect with each other, and allow for them to envision a world so they can leave school, and come out into the world, and be leaders … I think you can take the moral temperature of a country by how they treat their children. And we are — the collective ‘we,’ personified by our leaders — failing our children.”
Despite the troubling data highlighting how difficult it is to be an LGBTQ K-12 student today, the survey points to clear pathways for improvement.
These include being upfront and inclusive with LGBTQ students in a variety of ways. When schools provide comprehensive anti-bullying policies, LGBTQ students reported they were more likely to look forward to school and feel like they belonged. This also extends to expanding sex education to include often-overlooked sexual and gender minorities. Increased instances of positive LGBTQ inclusion were linked to better academic performance, attendance, and overall belonging, while negative depictions and exclusionary practices were linked to worse outcomes.
A major positive finding of the study is that when LGBTQ students reported having access to supportive educators, inclusive curricula, explicit anti-bullying policies, and Gender and Sexuality Alliances (GSAs), they also reported higher GPAs and a stronger sense of belonging — suggesting that even small, targeted policy shifts can meaningfully improve outcomes.
In a statement accompanying the report, Willingham-Jaggers emphasized the importance of listening to students’ experiences in full, which they acknowledged can be difficult to capture.
“LGBTQ+ youth, including intersex, asexual, and two-spirit students, are whole people with complex lives that defy the tired boxes of ‘victim’ or ‘leader’ into which they are so often placed,” she said. “Safety is not just the absence of harm; it is active affirmation. At a moment when young people’s identities are being debated and restricted, this study speaks truth to a menacing power.”
Researchers behind the survey also noted a shift in methodology this year, incorporating more qualitative data through student focus groups. By broadening beyond strictly quantitative measures, the data offers a deeper understanding of students’ lived experiences and strengthens the overall findings.
“Similar to previous findings, we continue to find that schools continue to be hostile sites for LGBTQ+ students and in particular for trans and gender-expanding students and BIPOC students,” said Yu-Chi Wang and Shweta Moorthy. “Students provided us with more context and emotion behind our findings … helping us better understand what was happening in our schools and brainstorm ways we can improve it.”
For Willingham-Jaggers, the stakes extend beyond education alone and into the kind of adults these students will become — and, for some, the leaders who will shape the future. By instilling the values of understanding, equality, and democracy early, young people are better equipped to navigate future challenges and reshape the systems they inherit.
“Education is the cornerstone of democracy,” she said. “Education provides an immune system for autocracy. Democracy is born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. We need young people to be ready to build a future that is bigger than the tiny, weak vision of those currently in power.”
Even in a moment she described as “dark and frightening,” Willingham-Jaggers framed the report as both a warning and a call to action. “I feel really privileged to be leading this organization at this moment, because this moment is really critical,” she said. “I’m glad it’s me building the team and envisioning with our young people the future that we’re trying to build.”
The report concludes by recognizing the many organizations that contributed to the development of its findings. Focus group partners included Able South Carolina, Advocates for Youth, Freedom Oklahoma, interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, Louisville Youth Group, the Montrose Center, National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, National Black Justice Collective, Trans Mentor Project, and Youth Celebrate Diversity. Additional organizations — including GenderCool, Immigration Equality, interACT, SIECUS, and UnidosUS — also helped review and update the survey.
The methodology and data collection instruments used in Glisten’s 2025 National School Climate Survey were reviewed and approved by an independent Institutional Review Board, ensuring the study met established ethical standards and best practices for research involving human subjects.
The full report can be accessed at Glisten’s website at glisten.org.
Research/Study
HRC study reveals GOP efforts to undermine LGBTQ rights and services in 2026
House Republicans are pushing numerous anti-LGBTQ measures in FY26 bills, that could threaten healthcare, nondiscrimination protections, and LGBTQ rights.
A new study by the Human Rights Campaign shows House Republicans continue to push anti-LGBTQ legislation, despite overwhelming nationwide support for nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people.
The study found that Trump-supporting Republicans are attempting to pass 52 anti-LGBTQ riders—unofficial amendments to legislation with little chance of passing on their own—across 12 of the must-pass FY26 federal appropriations bills.
If enacted, these riders would become a significant vehicle for undermining LGBTQ+ equality.
The riders impose broad anti-LGBTQ measures, including blocking gender-affirming care, erasing sexual orientation and gender identity data, restricting nondiscrimination protections, limiting support for LGBTQ+ communities, targeting global LGBTQ+ rights and public health, interfering in medical decisions, and curtailing LGBTQ+ participation in sports, education, and civic life.
In addition to the riders, congressional Republicans have used the rescissions process—where the government takes back money already approved for programs deemed no longer necessary—to remove funding from Biden-era programs that have served as major lifelines for the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ community, particularly low-income individuals, transgender youth, and people living with or at high risk for HIV.
Together, these efforts, combined with an already hostile White House eager to remove funding from anything deemed too “woke” or “wasteful,” have created a sizable gap in federal funding for programs once seen as foundational. Funding for nondiscrimination, public health, housing, and civil rights is now at risk, as Republicans follow Trump’s lead.
The HRC report shows that these proposed bills would drastically affect many aspects of LGBTQ existence, highlighting actions that will harm LGBTQ Americans.
These include establishing a “First Amendment Defense Act,” which allows individuals, businesses, universities, and federally funded agencies to refuse services to LGBTQ+ people in the name of personal belief; pushing drag bans on military bases and in U.S. foreign aid programming; minimizing gender-affirming care by reducing funding and punishing medical providers; and even applying a global gag rule to gender-affirming care in U.S.-supported foreign assistance programs.
The study also highlights attempts to block Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement for gender-affirming care and efforts to restrict PrEP, HIV testing, and sexual health services—policies that will particularly harm transgender people. It details extensive Republican efforts to redefine “sex” as strictly biological in standalone bills, appearing in riders that would gut Section 1557 protections and affect access to HIV prevention, Ryan White services, Title X reproductive health, and HOPWA housing programs.
Additional bills listed criminalize or stigmatize LGBTQ identity and are informing restrictions on community health education, HIV prevention campaigns, school-based health centers, and public health research funding at the CDC and NIH.
“This country deserves leadership that uses its power to help meet the needs of the people. Instead, MAGA Republicans make everything about attacking transgender people,” said David Stacy, Human Rights Campaign Vice President of Government Affairs.
“They have now spent three years attempting to poison these must-pass bills with anti-LGBTQ+ riders that polarize the House appropriations process and weaponize the federal government against our community, while doing nothing to address the urgent needs of their constituents. The American people have been clear: anti-equality politicians should stop shirking responsibility and actually serve all of their constituents. Pro-equality members of Congress must defeat the latest wave of anti-LGBTQ+ provisions and hold the line against hate.”
On election night, HRC released a memo showing anti-trans ad campaigns are failing and Americans overwhelmingly support equality. Nearly two-thirds of Americans back federal nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people, including 58% of independents and 42% of Republicans.
Almost 7 in 10 say politicians are too uninformed about transgender youth healthcare to make fair policies, and nearly half think lawmakers shouldn’t focus on transgender issues at all. And 70% percent worry politicians are targeting LGBTQ youth to divide the country and score political points.
Research/Study
27 trans people murdered over last year
Thursday is the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance.
New data on violence against transgender people in the U.S. shows there have been at least 399 cases of fatal violence against trans people since 2013, including 27 murders in the past year alone, with no indication the trend is slowing.
In recognition of Transgender Day of Remembrance, several organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign and Advocates for Trans Equality, released updated reports documenting the disproportionate levels of violence targeting trans people, often because of their gender identity.
A4TE’s Remembrance Report, released Nov. 13, identifies at least 27 trans people known to have died by violence since November 2024.
TDoR, established on Nov. 20, 1999, by trans rights activists, honors the lives lost to anti-trans violence and brings attention to the ongoing crisis disproportionately affecting trans people who are also members of other marginalized communities.
The newly released data shows that 82.3 percent of all known fatal attacks targeted trans women; seven in 10 victims since 2013 were Black, and 71.2 percent of deaths involved firearms.
Fatal violence is not confined to any one region.
The states with the highest numbers of cases include Texas (9.8 percent), Florida (8.3 percent), California (7.1 percent), Georgia (6.1 percent), Louisiana (5.8 percent), Ohio (5.5 percent), Pennsylvania (5 percent), Illinois (4.8 percent), Maryland (4.5 percent), and North Carolina (4 percent).
The report also highlights the pervasive non-fatal discrimination trans people face.
Four in 10 trans and gender-expansive adults experienced discrimination in the past year based on sex, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity/expression.
This data comes as the Trump-Vance administration escalates its anti-trans policies within the military, as the Washington Blade reported last week. The report calls for an end to anti-trans rhetoric, misinformation, and discriminatory policies at every level of government — from federal agencies to local school boards — noting that only then will trans people achieve the safety routinely afforded to other Americans.
HRC Director for Strategic Outreach and Training Tori Cooper stressed that the issue is about real people, not statistics.
“Our transgender and gender nonconforming siblings deserve to live safe, fulfilling, joyful lives, just like every other member of our society,” Cooper said. “But this plague of violence is robbing us of so much; so many dear friends and loved ones gone too soon, especially Black trans women who continue to bear the worst of this epidemic. Our entire trans community bears the scars of these horrible losses, and it is time for our leaders to ensure that trans people, and all people, are protected by the same policies and procedures. Our lives are as valuable as everyone else.”
HRC President Kelley Robinson also spoke to the rise in violence.
“Every person deserves to feel safe, to be treated with dignity, and to live their truth without fear,” Robinson said. “The annual release of this crucial report, which honors the beloved members of the transgender and gender nonconforming community who have been taken from us in the past year, is a somber and devastating reminder of why our fight for that dream continues.”
Robinson criticized how the current political climate has worsened conditions for trans Americans.
“This year, these deaths are punctuated by a political movement and powerful politicians who have fanned the flames of hate and are driving our trans siblings even further to the margins of society, all as part of a misguided, cynical attempt to divide and conquer the country. Every anti-equality politician, from Donald Trump and his Cabinet, to those in Congress and state legislatures, needs to see these numbers, see these names and faces, and see the cost of the cruelty they have greenlit,” she said.
Robinson concluded by reaffirming HRC’s commitment to defending trans people regardless of who occupies the White House.
“HRC will continue to do everything in our power to fight for our trans siblings, hold hateful politicians to account, and build a world where reports like this are no longer needed,” she said.
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