This is an excerpt of the full Trans Liberty Special Report - The Real Stakes: SCOTUS and LGBTQ+ Rights in 2026. To read the full report free, click here.

When the Supreme Court decides West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, the coverage will write itself. Two cases about trans athletes. Two rulings on who gets to run on a girls’ track team. The story packages itself. Fairness, competition, the politics of the playing field.

That is the story the conservative movement wants told.

The architects of these cases did not choose sports by accident. Sports is the issue where “fairness” can be invoked without anyone naming what is actually being targeted beyond this issue in the same ruling: almost every fundamental civil right for millions of trans Americans, simultaneously.

What the Court is actually deciding is the scope of a single word.

“Sex” appears, undefined, in Title VII, Title IX, the Fair Housing Act, Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

One word, and those five statutes, supports nearly the entire legal architecture of protection for trans Americans at a federal level. And many state and local laws rely on it for their basis, too.

Far-right conservatives in state legislatures across America have been rewriting the law to enable open discrimination against trans Americans.

So has the Supreme Court.

In 2025, United States v. Skrmetti upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for minors. The majority ruled the laws classify by “age and medical use,” not sex, and so deserve only the most deferential judicial review. In 2026, Chiles v. Salazar4 turned the First Amendment against conversion-therapy bans.

Running beneath both, the conservative majority has been hollowing out Bostock v. Clayton County. That 2020 decision held you cannot be fired simply for being transgender. The Court has never overruled it. Instead, it is choosing to chip away at it, and narrow the precedent so much that it will protect almost no one in practice.

The Court can say it never touched the precedent, while the impact is that the precedent protects no one.

But a broad ruling in B.P.J. and Hecox would be the most serious step in this assault yet.

If the Court holds that “sex” means ‘biological’ sex for purposes of federal education law, the consequences reach across the entire body of civil rights law. Employment. Housing. Healthcare. Public accommodations. Wherever the same undefined word does the same legal work.

And it will trip wires already laid in statutes by state legislatures. For one example of this, look to West Virginia’s bathroom ban: it’s written to activate the moment the ruling protecting trans students in the Fourth Circuit falls. The trigger is literally in the text. The mechanism is already wired, waiting for the ruling, just like abortion bans kicking in after the fall of Roe v. Wade.

Both cases reach that question through sports. The Court heard them together on January 13, 2026. Three and a half hours of argument in a single combined session.

The civil rights of trans Americans were discussed for less than half a day before the Court had heard enough to push forward.

In those three and a half hours, the justices showed where this is heading. The Court appeared ready to side with the states and uphold the bans.

The real question is how far the opinion reaches.

Read the full Special Report Here

This morning (Friday, June 5th, 2026), a federal judge in California is holding an emergency hearing on whether Stanford’s children’s hospital has to hand over the private medical records of trans minors to a grand jury in Texas.

There’s a hearing in Maryland on Tuesday. Another in Manhattan on Wednesday. Three courts in one week, all weighing the same question: can the federal government seize the medical records of a category of patients it has decided to target?

Over the last year, at least eight federal judges (appointed by presidents of both parties) have blocked the government’s earlier attempts. One called the justification a “smokescreen.” Another said the DOJ “issued the subpoena first and searched for a justification second.”

So, the administration changed tactics. Instead of administrative subpoenas, they went to a grand jury in Fort Worth, Texas and got criminal subpoenas for the same records. May 7. The hospitals have until June 10 to comply.

The subpoenas demand everything. Patient identities. Diagnoses. Treatment histories. Parent consent forms. Every record “from initial consultation to the most recent treatment provided.”

There’s no usage limitations. No restrictions on which government employees can access the files. No safeguards against the information being shared with state prosecutors, which in states like Texas itself, is increasingly dangerous for the parents of trans youth who are trying to get their children the support they need.

The families whose records are being sought weren’t told. They learned about the subpoenas through public reporting on other hospitals.

The Justice Department says this is about ‘healthcare fraud’ - specifically, whether providers pushed off-label drug use for hormone therapy and puberty suppression, and whether “fraudulent billing practices” occurred.

Most people are focused on the first charge. The second one is the one that I instantly zeroed in on when I read it in their statements.

For years, insurance companies have been hostile to covering gender-affirming care. So providers have coded it using diagnostic codes for endocrine disorders or hormonal imbalances - codes insurers would actually accept. This isn’t unique to trans healthcare. It happens across medicine when insurers won’t cover what a doctor has determined a patient needs.

But if the government starts prosecuting that practice specifically for trans care, it doesn’t stop at the pediatric ward. Every trans adult whose provider used a non-standard billing code to get their hormones covered is sitting on a potential fraud case. Every clinic that kept patients on medication by working around insurance denials is now a target. The DOJ is quietly building the legal framework to criminalize the workaround that makes adult transition care financially possible in the first place.

The DOJ has stressed in court filings that its probe “is not - and has never been - an investigation of patients or parents.” The investigation isn’t aimed at the people receiving care. It’s aimed at the infrastructure that provides it. Take out the providers, overwhelm the billing departments with legal exposure, and you don’t need to ban care for adults. You just make it impossible to get.

Before Dobbs, abortion wasn’t banned in most states who were pushing restrictions - it was regulated into extinction. Compliance burdens so heavy, liability so severe, that hospitals stopped offering the procedure on their own. That’s the model here. Stanford already paused its gender care program last June. NYU Langone shut its down in February. Some of the hospitals receiving these subpoenas have already stopped providing the care. The subpoenas are going to them anyway.

Today’s hearing is about six families - identified by pseudonyms - asking a judge to stop Stanford from handing over their children’s records. Their argument: the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches, the Fifth guarantees due process, and the constitutional right to informational privacy protects patients’ medical histories from compelled disclosure regardless of whether the administration thinks a category of patients deserves protection.

The Maryland judge on Tuesday will consider a nationwide ruling blocking compliance. The Manhattan judge on Wednesday will weigh a similar request.

If you’re a trans adult whose provider ever coded your care to get insurance to cover it, this investigation has you in its scope. If you’re a provider who’s ever worked around a denial to keep a patient on hormones, you too. The government isn’t going after patients. It’s going after every person and institution that make it possible for patients to survive.

The year is 1984. UK miners are deep into a strike against Margaret Thatcher’s government. The state has frozen the National Union of Mineworkers’ bank accounts. Mining towns are starving. And a young gay activist in London named Mark Ashton looks at all of it and says:

“It’s quite illogical to support lesbian and gay rights and not support the miners. It’s the same struggle.”

So at the June 1984 London Pride march, Mark and his friend Mike Jackson grab buckets and start collecting money for striking miners. They raise £150 that day. A week later, they found Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners - LGSM.

There’s a catch: nobody wants their money. The national union can’t take donations - Thatcher’s government has frozen their accounts. When LGSM calls local mining unions to ask where to send the funds, they get hung up on. Wales was one of the most socially conservative parts of the UK at the time.

But one union lodge, in Dulais Valley, says ... yes. Come visit. So a busload of London queers drives to a Welsh village hall expecting the worst. Instead, they get a standing ovation.

Over the next year, LGSM raises £22,500 for the Dulais miners and their families - around £70,000 in today’s money. Their biggest event was a benefit concert called Pits and Perverts. The tabloids had been using the phrase as a slur; LGSM took it back. Bronski Beat headlined. They cleared £5,000 in a single night.

The strike ends in March 1985. The miners lose to Thatcher.

But throughout, the miners of the Dulais Valley and their families did not starve, in large part due to the generosity and support of LGBTQ+ people they didn’t know from a whole country away.

Three months later, at the 1985 London Pride march, the Welsh miners showed up. They marched at the front of the parade, NUM banner alongside the rainbow flags, 4,000 miners from union lodges across Wales behind them.

Then in October, at the Labour Party conference, the NUM used their bloc vote to pass a resolution committing Labour to LGBT equality - the first major political party in the UK to do it. It happened because Welsh coal miners showed up for queer Londoners, then went home and made it party doctrine.

The miners lost. But then, they helped us win, anyway.

That is what solidarity means.

I think about that a lot right now. Across the nation and around the world, communities we’ve stood with for decades are standing up for us - on the ground, in the courts, in the streets, in the media, every single day.

Just like those Welsh miners in 1985, our allies today come from communities we might not expect.

They’re veterans helping us run Operation Lifeboat evacuations of trans folks out of Kansas - people who swore an oath to a Constitution and decided that oath still means something even when the people in danger are trans. They’re evangelical clergy holding sit-ins at statehouses in Idaho and Tennessee, looking at the laws being passed in their name and saying, with their bodies in the way: you will not do this in our name. They’re civil rights lawyers who could be fighting a thousand other fires, but chose this one. They’re volunteer pilots flying trans evacuees out of hostile places to safer ones for free. They’re cis, straight, lifelong Mississippians running PFLAG chapters out of their living rooms - in towns where that takes more courage than most people will ever know. They’re Colorado legislators drafting shield laws and refusing to back down. They’re even libertarians seeing the government use force against its own citizens - and holding true to their principles by showing up at city council meetings and state legislatures around the country, fighting alongside progressives to defend trans rights.

This is what coalition actually looks like.

It’s not always the same enemy. It’s rarely even the same fight at the same time. The Welsh miners weren’t losing jobs and being starved out because they were queer. Queer Londoners weren’t being beaten in pub raids because they were on strike from a coal mine. The source and shape of one community’s pain doesn’t always look like another’s, and the violence targeting one of us may never touch the person standing beside us.

Coalition is the choice to stand together anyway - to recognize that when authoritarians swing, it doesn’t matter much whose head the club lands on first. What matters is who’s willing to step in front of it. Queer Londoners didn’t need to be miners to find something familiar in police beating their distant Welsh neighbors. The miners didn’t need to share our queer identity to share our struggle. Veterans don’t need to be trans to recognize Americans that need defending from harm. Clergy don’t need to be queer to read their holy books and conclude their gospel demands they defend us.

That’s solidarity: people who don’t share each other’s identities, recognizing injustice, choosing to fight alongside each other anyway. Welsh coal miners in 1985. Veterans, clergy, lawyers, pilots, neighbors, legislators, and chosen families - everyday Americans from every walk of life - in 2026. Different fights. Same instinct.

The authoritarians always think they can isolate us. Pick us off one targeted group at a time. But as long as every time they try, we build coalitions of solidarity and show up for each other, they will never win in the end.

That’s what May Day is all about. The miners showed up in the 1980s. Many others are showing up for us right now.

If you can, find a May Day march near you today. Stand with each other - the workers, the immigrants, the organizers - your fellow Americans who’ve been doing this work since long before our current moment, and will still be doing it long after. But also stand with the newcomers to the fight who are showing up to stand in solidarity with us for the first time.

To my fellow trans Americans: I know how hard it is to extend trust right now. We’ve been promised support before and watched it evaporate the second it cost something. The wariness is earned. But Dulais Valley said yes when no one else would, and that one ‘yes’ changed history. Someone has to be the lodge that picks up the phone when the call is real. Let it be us, here and now, today.

To the allies showing up: you may walk into rooms that don’t trust you yet. Show up anyway. The London queers didn’t trust the Welsh miners the first time those miners showed up in their bars to build bridges in the other direction, either. But they became family by staying anyway.

And then, keep showing up. This fight will take years. There will be losses, and moments when it feels like we’re losing more than we’re winning. The members of LGSM felt that in March 1985. Three months later, they were marching at the front of Pride alongside thousands of union miners. By October, those allies were on the floor of the Labour Party conference, casting their bloc vote to write our equality into a major party platform for the first time in British history. From the picket line to the Pride march to the halls of power, in under a year.

I couldn’t be prouder to be in this fight - with the trans community I belong to, and with every one of you who choose to stand beside us when you don’t have to. Through all the struggle and strife, we will be victorious in the end, as long as we stand together.

Solidarity forever, and victory to trans Americans!

💙🩷🤍🩷💙

Samantha Boucher
She/they
Founder & Executive Director,
Trans Liberty