Ben Garcia thinks of himself as a typical high school senior. He plays Fortnite in a room his mom says is too messy. He watches TV with her on weeknights in their Rogers Park apartment — “Severance” and “Will Trent” are their current favorites. And every so often, he goes to Olive Garden with his friends for what they call an “old man dinner.”
But these days, the 18-year-old feels like his mere existence is seen as a threat by a U.S. government that wants to force him to return to a time when something as simple as using a public bathroom could cause debilitating anxiety.
“I just don’t get it,” he said, tugging at the sleeve of his Lane Tech High School sweatshirt. “I think if a lot of people met a trans person, and I’m sure they have and just didn’t know, they would see that it’s not this big scheme to try to do whatever it is they think trans people are doing. It’s just that this is how I am most comfortable, and that’s it.”
Garcia is one of an estimated 1.6 million transgender Americans targeted in a series of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump during his first month in office.
The wide-ranging orders seek to strip transgender, nonbinary and intersex people of the ability to change their gender markers on passports or to serve in the military. They aim to force transgender women in federal prison to be housed with men and to bar them from participation in female sports.
The orders also attempt to end gender-affirming care for transgender people younger than 19, and prohibit federal spending on the promotion of “gender ideology,” a vague directive that could have implications for anywhere from schools to rape crisis centers.
“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers,” Trump wrote in an executive order titled, “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government,” issued on Jan. 20 following his inauguration.
“This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
The fallout has been swift. Pages with resources and information for the trans and nonbinary communities were altered or in some cases deleted from federal websites belonging to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Education and the State Department.
The NCAA enacted a policy that aligns with the president’s ban on trans athletes. Hospitals across the country have reportedly canceled appointments for gender-affirming care for young people.
Locally, Lurie Children’s Hospital announced it had halted some gender-affirming procedures for people younger than 19, while an Illinois mother said in court filings that UI Health canceled a scheduled chest surgery for her 17-year-old transgender son.
Late last month, 10 staff members with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s Trans Chicago Empowerment Center were let go after the CDC abruptly terminated two grants, totaling $600,000 a year, that funded much of the center’s efforts.
Other organizations that work with LGBTQ+ people are bracing for a similar fate, fearful that any public opposition will put them in the crosshairs of a president with a well-documented penchant for retaliation.
“It really does feel like they’re trying to make us disappear,” Garcia said, “and for people to not acknowledge that we exist.”
‘People are terrified’
It was not even a month into Trump’s second stint in the White House and Avi Rudnick could not keep up with the volume of emails flooding his inbox.
Rudnick is legal services director for Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois, which, among its services, helps transgender and gender nonconforming people legally change their names and gender markers.
Illinois has taken steps in recent years to make it easier for those changes to happen. And yet, many of the emails he’s read are from people who are scared to go through the process.
Some want to withdraw their requests for name changes, he said, fearful that the federal government will somehow discover their identities. They fear their names will end up on a government list and they and their families will be subjected to harassment or violence — research from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law suggests that transgender people are four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than cisgender people.
“People are terrified,” Rudnick said. “I can try to provide as much calm and reassurance as possible, but when the language coming from the federal government is so malicious and hateful, it’s an impossible task.”
Rudnick and other advocates have been quick to point out what a president can and cannot do via executive orders. Presidential executive orders, they say, are meant to be directives on how government agencies should operate and how laws should be enforced; those orders cannot change laws passed by the U.S. Congress or circumvent the Constitution or override laws in Illinois, which has some of the country’s strongest protections for LGBTQ+ residents, according to the Colorado-based nonprofit Movement Advancement Project.
Indeed, some trans people and advocates said they’ve taken solace in the fact that the state’s elected leaders have shown their support for the rights of residents across the spectrum of gender identities.
Gov. JB Pritzker, writing on the social platform X, formerly Twitter, earlier this month, said he’s “made it my mission to make our state the best to call home,” including, he continued, “for our LGBTQ+ community. No matter who you are or who you love, everyone deserves dignity and equality. Hate has no home here.”
Also this month, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul joined 14 of his counterparts in a statement pledging to protect gender-affirming care.
Eight days after his inauguration, about a half-dozen Illinois organizations were among the 175 signers of a letter to Trump condemning his “cruel and lawless executive order” on gender identity.
“The order, which directs the federal government to regulate, control, and police gender, does absolutely nothing to protect women and girls,” the letter reads. “We know that the true intent of this order is to demonize, stigmatize, and discriminate against transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people and to enforce gender roles and gender stereotypes. It is appalling you wage these attacks in the name of ‘defending women,’ and particularly because of your repeated attacks on women’s rights.”
Multiple lawsuits have been filed in an attempt to claw back the president’s orders. Some have led to temporary halts in the administration’s plans to end funding for gender-affirming care or to transfer transgender women in federal prison to men’s facilities. A federal judge presiding over a challenge to Trump’s ban on trans people serving in the military recently described that executive order as “unadulterated animus,” CNN reported.
Still, advocates say Trump appears to have accomplished at least part of his objectives.
“I think there are two goals driving a lot of these orders, and one is to try to undo the progress of the past five, 10 or 15 years,” said Kara Ingelhart, a clinical assistant professor of law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and director of the school’s LGBTQI+ Rights Clinic. “A very close second or parallel priority seems to be to cause fear and paralysis in doing so.”
‘A wake-up call to all of us’
It had been about a week after Trump returned to office and began his blitz of executive orders when the news started to trickle down to staff at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s Trans Chicago Empowerment Center.
Two CDC grants — one set to expire in 2026; the other in 2027 — had been terminated “in accordance with the president’s executive order,” the agency memo read.
The grants totaled $600,000 a year and paid for staff salaries, rent and supplies at its community center on West Division Street in Humboldt Park, where they offered a range of services for trans people ages 13 and up: HIV screenings and prevention, support groups and individual therapy, legal clinics and free clothing pop-ups.
Suddenly, the PRCC’s total annual budget for public health initiatives had been slashed by nearly 25%.
Ten staff members, several from the community the center serves, were let go.
“For a while, we just thought it was fear tactics or people just spewing hate for the sake of hate,” said Jai Perez, 24, one of the staffers who lost their jobs. “And then we come in one day and they’re like, we don’t have funds. It was kind of eye opening and a wake up call to all of us … we felt so liberated in our form of expression and to have a space called the trans empowerment center, and then within that week it was gone.”
Trans Chicago’s story illustrates what other advocacy organizations fear could become their reality: That the federal government will use perhaps its most powerful weapon — money — to exert tremendous pressure on any entity that doesn’t comply with the president’s orders.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, particularly in a country that has such a long history of First Amendment pride,” said one nonprofit executive director who asked to remain anonymous in fear of being stripped of federal funding, which accounts for about a quarter of the nonprofit’s revenue.
“It is striking to me how quickly it has become clear that saying something that is politically opposed to this administration could have material consequences that are much more extreme than I believe is normal in other environments.”
The executive director, and others in similar positions, say the president’s orders have left them with questions both difficult and surreal: Will they be required to prove their clients fit into Trump’s narrow definitions of male and female as a condition of federal funding? Will they be forced to revert to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the 1990s that banned gay and lesbian people from military service? Will they continue to work with transgender and nonbinary people, but do so in secret?
“If we don’t get this right, we fall apart,” the executive director said. “And then every person we serve, where do they go?”
‘We can’t lay down and die’
Since the layoffs, the now former staff at Trans Chicago Empowerment Center have looked to blunt the impact of the president’s orders. They quickly opened a mutual aid to augment lost wages. Most found positions elsewhere in the Puerto Rican Cultural Center or with other entities while they try to figure out how to find independent funding to stay in the center’s existing space or perhaps elsewhere in the PRCC.
The layoffs forced Trans Chicago to halt its behavioral health services — two counselors were among the positions covered by the CDC grants — and much of its community outreach. Other programs around HIV testing and prevention have been absorbed by the PRCC, which is bracing for the possible loss of more federal grants down the road.
Staff have pledged that the rest of the center’s work, while hobbled, will not stop.
And so, a group of Trans Chicago staffers volunteered their time on a recent Monday to open the center’s doors for a free gender-affirming haircut event. At least a dozen people signed up for haircuts from one of the three stylists who volunteered for the event.
Many were new to the center.
“I prefer to be in queer spaces every time I go out now,” said J.Y., a 22-year-old West Town resident who declined to give their full name. “It feels safer.”
At 7 p.m., the scheduled conclusion of haircuts, the barber chairs were still full. In one, barber Davtrious Sanchez guided his clippers through Santiago Troncoso’s hair as they alternated between typical barber shop talk — Troncoso’s job and how the California Clipper is a good bar for a first date — and a discussion about how Troncoso found the center’s programming last summer.
“Everyone here is so friendly,” he told Sanchez.
Next to them, barber Larissa Vetter was nearly finished trimming the last few inches from Sarah’s hair, which once flowed past their shoulders and now rested near their chin. The 24-year-old Garfield Ridge resident, who declined to give their last name, said they wanted a short haircut for some time but had been scared to do so until they saw the center’s Instagram post.
“As someone who came out later in life, finding this space has been very exciting for me,” they said. “Finding security in community is very important, especially when things are so scary.”
‘I need to be in a safer state’
On a snowy Wednesday in February, Ben Garcia and his mom sat in the waiting room inside Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago outpatient center for a routine checkup with his gender-affirming care physician.
The appointment was made three months ago. Days before the visit, they called to confirm.
“Places are canceling appointments,” Garcia said. “I’m lucky mine wasn’t one of them.”
He left with a replenished supply of weekly hormone injections and the hope it won’t be his last.
“I can tell you it would have a serious toll on my mental health,” he said when asked what would happen if forced to stop the injections. “I just can’t say for sure how serious.”
It’s not that Garcia felt a deep discomfort with his assigned sex at birth, or that there was a single, defining point in which his gender identity crystalized.
“I didn’t necessarily have that moment where I was like, ‘I’m a boy! I’m a boy!’” he said.
He was always gender nonconforming, he said. And that was met with looks from other kids and some adults, their eyes scanning his short-cropped hair before inevitably asking the same questions:
Are you a boy or a girl? If you’re a girl, why do you look like a boy?
Those inquisitions followed him into public bathrooms. One particularly traumatic encounter at Boston’s Fenway Park with a woman who accosted him in the restroom would form the basis for his college application essay.
Often, he’d stand motionless, silent, staring at his shoes, waiting for his interrogator to give up and leave. Eventually, he stopped using public restrooms, which lasted until he enrolled at Lane Tech’s Academic Center in seventh grade.
By then, he had changed his name and pronouns and had started taking puberty blockers — which involved extensive discussions with his mom, Michelle Vallet, his doctor and a therapist. Additional conversations and research led to more gender-affirming care.
“I know right-wing people always think it’s children being forced into this. And that is not the case whatsoever,” Garcia said. “(Mom) was the one doing the research and we were exploring it together and we looked at it and we talked about how I felt and what I wanted from it. We decided together we’re maybe going to try this out, and if that didn’t feel right, we could see what would work. But it turned out, that was right.”
For now, he’s trying to avoid feeling hopeless when there is still so much to look forward to. Prom is in a few months. He recently discussed suit shopping with a friend after lunch at Taco Bell.
He and his mom are heading to Vermont soon for a college visit. The state university there is his leading choice, in part because of Vermont’s political environment — schools in Indiana and Florida had been on his list, he said, but not anymore:
“I need to be in a safer state, I think.”