Almost immediately after taking office, President Donald Trump started to sign a series of executive orders ending LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination protections in the workplace, blocking access to gender-affirming medical care to individuals under age 19, banning transgender individuals from serving in the military, barring trans women from engaging in federally funded women's sport, and ordering the federal government to recognize only two genders: male and female.
Presidential executive actions do not require Congressional approval but can be challenged by Congress. Our majority-conservative Congress, however, has taken no action to protect LGBTQ+ Americans in their home districts, including young people.
"Being trans is a very important part of my identity," said June Simmons. "I want people to know I am trans."
The eighteen-year-old transgender woman and Fayetteville resident, whose pronouns are she/they, is pursuing both computer science and math degrees at the University of Arkansas.
"The campus has been a really accepting, a really good place," she said. "I have an academic advisor who's been helping me out with a lot with queer issues, what with the political situation, and helping to reassure me that the campus, the school will help to protect us."
Simmons graduated from a federally funded public high school, where Trump recently banned trans accommodations, threatening to punish teachers, counselors, and school officials who allow them. But her university campus life is much different.
"I'm treated as a cis-woman," she said, grinning, due to being enrolled as a female student.
"Not all trans people necessarily want to be treated as cis," she said, "and there's some sensitivity around that topic. Personally, it fits where my identity is and it's definitely easier and safer right now."
The university offers a queer safe space in the student union, which provides secure restroom accommodations for trans students. Simmons also attends a support group on campus where she can process personal issues, including her gender-affirming medical care.
"Right now, I take hormone blockers and estradiol injections," she said. "I do them weekly, and recently my dosage was upped. I'm noticing a lot more effects. And that's quite exciting for me. It's hard to describe the psychological effects that undergoing gender-affirming care can have because it's been a sort of inherent happiness and excitement. That isn't necessarily caused directly by the medicine, but just knowing you're on it."
Simmons says she's noticing more positive physical changes as well. She will turn 19 this summer, effectively dodging Trump's executive order, “Protecting Children From Chemical And Surgical Mutilation," a title which is vastly misleading. Licensed physicians who specialize in treating trans minors only provide gender-affirming medicinal care to minors and only when patients begin to reach puberty.
Trump's order is currently blocked from taking effect after two transgender minors and their families, along with several LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, filed suit in a Maryland District Court earlier this month. We asked the region's lead LGBTQ+ nonprofit, the Northwest Arkansas Equality Center, to weigh in on all this. No response. But Jess Claire, she/they board president of The Equality Crew based in Rogers, agreed to come forward.
"The Equality Crew's mission is to provide welcoming and inclusive spaces and create a welcoming and inclusive community where LGBTQ youth and their allies can have fun and be themselves," Claire said.
Founded in the summer of 2021, The Equality Crew is volunteer-run and funded by individual donors and foundation grants.
"Our most used program currently is Dungeons and Dragons, open to youth age 13 to 18," she said. "We have a teen council that is really beneficial for high schoolers who are interested in making a difference, and we have Rainbow Families, for the families of LGBTQ youth under 12 wanting to provide a supportive environment for their child, as well as learning about how to support LGBTQ youth as they're growing up."
Claire, who identifies as queer, said The Equality Crew has connected with more than 1,200 youth since 2021 and expects that number will increase in response to current political events.
"Some of these youth are non-binary, some of them are trans, some of them are just queer youth, some of them have other really specific identities," she said. "We have lots of different folks represented, but primarily we serve youth 13 to 18. We do some work with younger youth through things like our Rainbow Families, but primarily we service youth who are in high school."
The Equality Crew hosts an annual prom, scheduled this year in April, and offers a gender-affirming therapist database and rainbow library with diverse books not available in local libraries or public schools. The Equality Crew also participates in a popular summer Queer Camp hosted by the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Fayetteville.
Pastor Clint Schnekloth recently organized a Northwest Arkansas LGBTQIA+ leadership dinner at the church, which Jess Claire attended.
"You know, the power in numbers idea is really the most salient here," she said. "As legal challenges might come up for any one of our organizations, the most important thing that we can do at this point is make sure that we're all on the same page."
Area LGBTQ+ organizations tend to be isolated from one another, she said, all working to meet certain needs in the community. But the leadership gathering has changed that.
"I think that now more than ever that's true," she said. "Hope is something that we have to continue to cultivate and having spaces where we can all come together and talk honestly about the state of things, as well as how we can realistically prepare for the challenges that are coming for us."
Sadie Ragan, she/they, who is cisgender, attended the gathering at the church. She's founder and executive director of the Cocoon Collective, which provides housing and healing for trans and queer adolescents. The nonprofit has helped 36 youths since it was founded in the autumn of 2021. Ragan said the current anti-LGBTQ+ political climate is taking a major toll.
"A lot of us are cycling through different layers of grief. There's definitely been anger and denial and kind of a numbness because it has been such an information overload. I know that a lot of us are really struggling with the balance between being informed and staying sane."
Ragan said she and her staff, all volunteers, are grappling with projected funding shortages, how to reduce public visibility to remain safe, and responding to fear among clients and their families.
"I have helped three different family units leave the state," she said, "and we've had a big increase in people asking for aid to leave the state."
Cathy Renna, she/her, is communications director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, as well as the Task Force Action Fund, headquartered in Washington, D.C.
"The idea of all these executive orders coming down has really created a tremendous amount of fear, anxiety and just chaos," Renna said.
The Task Force is working to educate stakeholders on the potential consequences of executive mandates and about the most productive responses, she said, including engaging with representatives at local, state and federal levels.
"The really horrifying part of this is that the first wave of attacks that are happening are against children, against young people who identify as trans, non-binary or are gender creative or gender queer," she said. "And so you know for our community, it is about literally standing up to these kinds of attacks."
Including in the public sphere, where an anti-trans slur was voiced by right-wing U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) during a House Oversight Committee meeting earlier this month in Washington, D.C.
"It allows people room to say the things that they know are not socially acceptable, or mean or hateful or hurtful," Renna said, "creating this climate that escalates from language to action. So we will see increases in hate crimes, we will see increases in discrimination. And that's because we now live in a climate where even at the highest level of government -- which is absolutely appalling -- that we have folks who feel free to misgender, to say slurs. So imagine how folks who carry these views feel free to do it on social media, or in the street, or in their workplace, or school. I mean this is where the danger really comes in for those of us who are part of the LGBTQ community."
We asked Lisa Corrigan, a Professor of Communication and director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, why the new Trump administration is aggressively targeting LGBTQ+ people, who comprise, data show, a scant percentage of the American population.
"They don't pose a threat at all," Corrigan said. "They're just a convenient scapegoat to focus the public's attention while his administration dismantles the administrative state. So, this is a classic sex panic: find a sexual minority, focus all of the attention and anxiety of the moment on them. And then people will not pay attention to tariffs, rising costs of goods, dismantling public education, eroding the social safety net, undermining Medicare and Medicaid, and erasing Social Security."
Corrigan cites, as an example, Trump's executive order banning trans athletes in federally funded school sports. Of 510,000 collegiate athletes competing, she said, fewer than ten publicly identify as transgender.
