The Resistance Brief: Wins to Hold Onto — And the Fight Continues

Blog by Ricardo Martinez (he/him), Executive Director

This week brought another harsh blow to our community from the Supreme Court, with a ruling allowing states to maintain blanket bans that exclude transgender girls from school sports. These moments are painful, but we never stop fighting. And I try to remember that along with the loss, there have been some great wins in the past couple of weeks, too. The kind where you can point to a stack of court orders and a state legislature and say, this is what fighting back looks like, and it is working. 

In Maine, a state Superior Court affirmed what the Secretary of State had found: an anti-trans ballot measure didn’t have enough valid signatures to qualify. The state’s highest court will still take up the matter, so this fight isn’t finished – but keeping a measure built to target our community, even provisionally off the ballot, is the kind of quiet, procedural win that matters. 

Two more recent wins came out of litigation protecting people the administration has tried hardest to push out of public life. In Doe v. Blanche, a US District Judge blocked the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) from transferring 14 transgender women into men’s prisons. This is the second time a judge has blocked the transfers; an appeals court had vacated an earlier injunction and sent the case back for more specific, individualized findings on the danger each woman would face. This time, working from testimony about the documented risks of placing trans women in men’s facilities, the judge found that risk real and ordered the transfers stopped. GLAD Law’s Jennifer Levi put it plainly: “Deliberately placing vulnerable people in harm’s way is not strength, it’s cowardice.” That ruling, and the extraordinary amount of work our team put in over the past few weeks to win it, will keep protecting our clients while the broader case continues. 

And in Talbott v. USA, the D.C. Circuit issued its long-awaited opinion on the preliminary injunction on June 1, blocking the transgender military ban: the court upheld it for plaintiffs currently serving. Then, just this week, the federal district court granted our motion for class certification so that our wins against the ban will apply to all transgender servicemembers going forward. 

In our Maryland case challenging a civil administrative subpoena where the federal government demanded invasive private medical records of trans children, the District Court granted relief covering all patients of Children’s National Hospital – a significant shield for families. And recently the legal team filed a new case against Stanford in our effort to stop the government from setting a precedent that weaponizing its power to obtain private health information is acceptable. Just yesterday, the judge granted a preliminary injunction, blocking the Department of Justice from seizing the medical records of any Stanford patients.

And then there’s the kind of win that doesn’t make headlines but changes lives for decades: the Massachusetts legislature passed first-in-the-country state protections for access to PrEP to prevent HIV.

It’s worth expanding on why these wins matter beyond the people named in the complaints. The kinds of records at issue in the Maryland and Stanford cases aren’t limited to trans health care. A subpoena power broad enough to turn a hospital’s patient list into a government target list today is also broad enough to come for PrEP prescriptions, HIV treatment records, or fertility care records for queer families tomorrow, whenever an administration decides those records are useful to its political ends. Whatever stops the government from weaponizing one patient’s medical records this year is the same protection the rest of the LGBTQ+ community will need the next time it decides whose records to come for. 

The Constitution’s equal protection guarantee running through the BOP and Talbott cases isn’t a transgender-specific doctrine, either. From Moreno through Romer to Windsor and Obergefell, courts have recognized that government action driven by a desire to harm a class of people rather than serve a legitimate purpose cannot survive constitutional scrutiny. That’s the same doctrine that secured the right to marriage equality, and it doesn’t distinguish between a same-sex couple denied a marriage license and a transgender servicemember denied the right to serve. It’s shared legal ground. When a court protects our BOP clients or upholds the Talbott injunction, it reinforces a principle every LGBTQ+ person depends on. 

We envision a world where every person has a fair shot at a good life – where who you are doesn’t determine whether you get to build one. The right to marry the person you love. An ID that accurately reflects who you are. The right to serve your country without animus standing between you and that choice. Legal recognition of our families, however they’re formed. Schools built for learning and belonging, not for harassment. An end to the harmful practice of conversion therapy. None of these are separate causes competing for attention – they’re the same vision, pursued one case, one statehouse vote, one client at a time. And there’s still more work ahead. 

It was a painful blow when the Supreme Court released its opinion in BPJ and Hecox earlier this week, the cases asking whether states can ban transgender girls from school sports. That ruling hurts transgender kids around the country, and it reaches directly into our own case here in New Hampshire, Tirrell and Turmelle v. Edelblut, where we represent Parker and Iris, two transgender high school students. The Court’s decision doesn’t change anything about who Parker and Iris are: their love of sports and their team, or the fact that they were denied the same experience every other student has access to at their school. We are huddling as a team to identify the appropriate next steps given the recent decision, and we’ll share what this means for our clients soon. 

Even as we work through what this ruling means for Parker, Iris, and clients like them, marriage equality is facing its own renewed pressure: our marriage defense team continues working to protect it against attacks aimed at eroding public support. That intensity says something on its own: anti-LGBTQ+ actors are betting that fear, intimidation, and exhaustion can do what honest persuasion never could – because the values under attack here, fairness, equal treatment, the freedom to marry who you love, are ones most Americans already hold.  

This is where we are: under more pressure than a year ago, and with more proof that the pressure doesn’t have to win. We’ll take the win in Maine. The order in Doe v. Blanche. The partial victory in Talbott. And regardless of the Supreme Court’s decisions in BPJ and Hecox, it doesn’t change who we’re fighting for, or that we intend to keep doing it. 

The Fourth of July arrives this week carrying a promise this country has never fully kept. The Declaration’s claim that all are created equal was written by people who didn’t mean it literally, and every expansion of who gets included since then – every amendment, every ruling, every statehouse vote – has been won by people who refused to wait for the promise to arrive on its own. Parker and Iris, the BOP clients whose stories were laid out in our court filings, the Talbottservicemembers asking a court to recognize them as a class: they’re not asking for something new. They’re asking America to be what it has always claimed to be. That gap, between the promise and the practice, is the oldest fight there is, and it’s still ours. We’ll keep working to close it. 

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What to know, what to do:

• Sign up for our July 7 free community webinar on what this term’s Supreme Court rulings mean and their impact on LGBTQ+ people, transgender youth, and their families. 
• Good news: A federal court blocked the Trump administration from ⁠stripping public service workers of eligibility for federal student loan forgiveness based on whether it approves of the organization’s mission. 
• Our summer newsletter is out: Read the Summer Briefs for the latest updates on our work and how it impacts you and your loved ones. 
• LGBTQ+ students still have rights, and we want to connect with you: If you are an LGBTQ+ student who has faced bullying or harassment at school, or an adult supporting a student who has, fill out this short form. 
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