WASHINGTON — Nicolas Talbott, a graduate student at Kent State University in Ohio who is transgender, was told in May that because of President Trump’s transgender ban in the military, he would no longer be eligible for placement as an Army officer. He could continue participating in the Reserve Officers Training Corps program, but the benefits that he joined for — health insurance and student loan forgiveness — were no longer available to him.
“Everyone else would walk away with a job in the United States Army, and I would walk away with just more student loan debt,” Mr. Talbott said.
Mr. Talbott’s experience is just one version of a broader story unfolding across vast portions of the federal government as the Trump administration has rolled back a wide array of protections for transgender people, many of them put in place during the Obama administration. The Obama White House used its powers to declare that legal and legislative efforts to defend against sex discrimination should apply to gender identity. The Trump White House called that executive overreach — and reversed course wherever it could.
Across the country, transgender people and groups that are advocates for them have wrestled with the effect of that shift as they have learned of policy changes from the departments of Education and Labor to the departments of Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development, from the Pentagon to the Justice Department to the Office of Personnel Management.
Last month, a United States district judge struck down a Health and Human Services Department rule that would, among other changes, expand the protections for health care workers who refuse to treat transgender patients if it clashed with their beliefs, the third judge to do so.
But so many similar regulations are in place or pending that advocates for transgender rights are hardly relieved.
“We’ve been a priority for this administration since the day they got in the door,” said Gillian Branstetter, a former spokeswoman for the National Center for Transgender Equality, who is transgender.
White House officials reject any implication that the policies are motivated by intolerance. Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Trump became the first Republican president to celebrate Pride Month in June. He has backed gay marriage, and started a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality.
“President Trump has never considered L.G.B.T. Americans second-class citizens and has opposed discrimination of any kind against them,” Mr. Deere said.
Current and former White House officials say the multiagency efforts to roll back legal protections for transgender people have been run out of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, though it is still unclear who has spearheaded the effort.
A White House official said those efforts were merely correcting efforts by the Obama administration that exceeded presidential authority and to ensure that agencies were following the letter of the law.
While socially conservative policies have been mainstays of the Trump White House, what distinguishes the transgender initiative is its sweep.
The Education Department has rescinded Obama-era rules that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice or participate in sports corresponding with their gender identity.
The Defense Department has established restrictions on transgender troops that largely prohibit them from transitioning while in uniform. Transgender people who came out before the policy, which went into effect in April, may continue to serve, but that will depend on how four lawsuits play out.
And while the Department of Health and Human Services’ proposed “conscience” rule regarding health care workers was just rejected by its third court, another proposal from the department would replace Obama-era safeguards that banned discrimination against transgender medical patients and health insurance customers under the Affordable Care Act.
The Justice Department has moved to roll back protections for transgender people in federal prisons, while the Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to reverse protections for transgender people in homeless shelters. The Office of Personnel Management has suspended protections for transgender employees of federal contractors.
Last month, the Education Department drafted a “statement of interest” with the Justice Department to defend a Christian private school in Maryland that was kicked out of a state voucher program in part because it says “God immutably bestows gender upon each person at birth as male or female to reflect His image.”
Administration officials and their allies say they are protecting the rights of people who do not want to share bathrooms or sleeping accommodations with transgender people, while safeguarding the religious and moral freedoms of medical professionals and others. Civil rights cuts two ways, and the administration is merely shifting the emphasis, supporters say.
“I think that’s a principle that all Americans benefit from: not being forced to violate their conscience,” said Emilie Kao, the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
But to the people who identify as transgender, less than 1 percent of the population, the comprehensive nature of the policies feels mystifying.
For the Trump administration, the targeting of transgender protections may be politically advantageous. American society has shifted quickly to embrace gay marriage since President George W. Bush ran on it as a wedge issue in his successful re-election bid in 2004. But support for transgender rights lags among conservative Republicans, Mr. Trump’s base.
The shifts in federal policy come at a time when harassment and violence against transgender people are increasing. New hate crimes data released in mid-November by the F.B.I. showed that hate crimes dipped slightly in 2018, but crimes directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people nudged up almost 6 percent. Crimes against transgender people leapt 34 percent, to 142 in 2018 from 106 in 2017, and those are only the crimes reported to the police or recorded as an attack on a transgender victim.
At least 22 transgender people have been fatally shot or killed in 2019, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Nearly all of them were black women. Some fear that the Trump administration’s policies could be interpreted by some as a signal that such attacks are acceptable.
“The rhetoric that these policy changes promote is that we aren’t people, but some toxic plague trying to destroy America’s family values,” said Tiara Kelley, a black transgender woman living in Colorado.
Ash Penn, who lives in North Carolina and is black and transgender, said, “To be queer, to be black, to be trans in America today, you constantly live in fear.”
Mimi Lemay, who lives in Massachusetts with a 9-year-old transgender son, said Washington policies were having a real-world impact. Some transgender children, in the face of bullying and ostracism, will avoid going to the bathroom at school if they cannot choose the one that matches their gender identity.
“I’ve spoken to people who have developed infections at school,” she said.
After the administration moved to expand protections of health care workers who deny procedures to transgender patients on religious or moral grounds, Ari Murphy, a Louisianian who is transgender and does not identify as exclusively a man or a woman, stopped correcting doctors who use alienating or upsetting pronouns.
Uninsured, with several chronic illnesses and genetic disorders, Ari fears being honest and open with health care workers “could negatively impact my care.”
Alek Mitterbach, a transgender man in Huntsville, Ala., decided to move up his chest reconstruction surgery to December because he feared that the Trump administration could define “transgender” out of existence — and cost him his health insurance. “I’ve got to hurry up and get this done, or else, come next year I may not be able to afford it,” he said.
Mr. Mitterbach estimated that with insurance, the surgery will most likely cost around $500. Without it, the bill could be 10 times higher.
For Allison Scott, the decision late last year by the Office of Personnel Management to withdraw protection for transgender employees of federal contractors had her thinking back to 2014.
Ms. Scott came out as a transgender woman that year, 15 years after she started working at a federal contractor in North Carolina. Company management and human resources said she could not dress as a woman or use the women’s restrooms. They openly doubted her continued employment and questioned her family life.
But company lawyers said she was protected by an Obama-era contracting guidance.
“I know what having that policy in place did for me,” she said. “That could have, most likely, been the last day of my employment.”
In May, Equality Florida, an L.G.B.T. rights group, organized a conference of homeless-shelter managers and housing policymakers to go over the Obama administration’s protections for transgender people in shelters. Later that same week, the Trump administration proposed rolling back those protections.
Gina Duncan, the group’s director of transgender equality, who is transgender, said she went back to the conference’s attendees to urge them to “do the right thing” and disregard Washington’s actions.
The administration’s policy changes keep coming. Beyond withdrawing bathroom protections, the Education Department also scrapped Obama-era guidance that told schools to interpret federal civil rights protections as covering gender identity.
The judicial setbacks for the Health and Human Services Department rule to help health care workers who refuse to help transgender patients did not stop the department from proposing last month to scrap regulations that currently prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation in programs that receive grants from the department. The public comment period is still open.
Before announcing its plan to weaken protections for transgender people who are homeless, the Department of Housing and Urban Development removed links to documents that listed best practices for emergency shelters serving transgender people. Ben Carson, the housing secretary, repeated concerns from advocates who expressed worry in September that “big, hairy men” pretending to be women would try to get into women’s shelters, The Washington Post reported.
Ms. Lemay has been having conversations with her son about the administration’s actions. She said she tells him that the administration does not understand transgender people, but that families like theirs can change people’s hearts and minds by telling their stories.
“I don’t think deep down most Americans agree with what the Trump administration is doing in regards to L.G.B.T. people,” she said. “I think most people know what’s fair, and they have a sense of empathy.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.
