[24] On February 24, the right-wing Heritage Foundation issued a tweet stating that the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act "protects young children from sexual grooming".

[27] Since then, numerous right wing pundits have described the behavior of parents and teachers who support minors in their transgender identities as grooming, and the term "groomer" has widely been used by conservative media and politicians who want to denounce the LGBTQ community and its allies by implying that they are pedophiles or pedophile-enablers.

[25] In March 2022, Fox News host Laura Ingraham claimed that schools were becoming "grooming centers for gender identity radicals", dedicating an entire segment of her show to the topic a couple of weeks later.

[40] In California (where state law requires students to learn about the "role and contributions" of LGBTQ people in history), multiple protests against the inclusion of LGBTQ-friendly curriculum resulted in violence.

[86] The conservative organization Do No Harm was influential in developing model legislation that appeared starting in 2022 in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, and West Virginia legislatures.

In response, the Attorney General's office filed an appeal with the Texas Supreme Court, a move that automatically pauses the judge's injunction and allowed the law to go into effect on September 1, 2023, as originally planned.

[182] These restrictions ranged from requiring sterilization to obtain amended documents, to making it a criminal offense to carry a state ID not matching one's assigned gender at birth.

[85] Several state bills are based on and closely resemble model legislation provided by the conservative lobbying organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has been classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.

[217][218][219] The ADF's model legislation proposes giving any public school or university student the right to sue for $2,500 for each time they encountered a transgender classmate in a locker room or bathroom.

[223][224] State legislatures in Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have proposed bathroom bills.

"[243] The provisions include: On January 28, 2025, Trump ordered a freeze on all federal funding grants, loans, and aid while those receiving them were assessed to make sure they weren't promoting "advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies".

"[252] On June 11, 2022, during the pride event, law enforcement arrested 31 members of the white nationalist and hate group Patriot Front, charging them with conspiracy to riot.

[266][267][268][269] In response to a concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization arguing the Court should reconsider Obergefell v. Hodges, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022.

[274] In Texas, McLennan County Justice of the Peace Dianne Hensley filed a lawsuit to allow her to refuse to marry gay couples, citing the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court case 303 Creative LLC v.

[280] An example of such bans is that passed by Florida in March 2022, which created a list of sanctioned reading material for students in educational settings, and punished any teacher or school librarian whose classrooms or libraries contained unsanctioned books with felony charges.

[283] Some of the most well-known examples included the boycott against Bud Light for a sponsorship with actress and TikToker Dylan Mulvaney,[284] and the campaign against Disney by Florida governor Ron DeSantis for publicly opposing the state's anti-LGBTQ curriculum law.

[283] In May 2023, Target removed several Pride Month items from stores in the Southern United States after anti-LGBTQ hate groups threatened violence against its employees.

[286] Following the election of Donald Trump in 2024, Disney removed from several shows set to air, storylines, episodes, and lines of dialogue that involved transgender characters.

As a result, pollsters and strategists from both parties warned that Republican's intense focus on restricting the rights and health care of about 0.6 percent of the American population could risk putting off independents and swing voters in the next election.

[307][308] A September 2023 poll by 19th News/SurveyMonkey found that 39 percent of American adults supported transgender minors having access to any kind of gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers, hormones, therapy, and surgery.

[313] A March 2024 poll by GLAAD found that more than half of both registered and likely voters surveyed said they would not support a candidate who "speaks frequently about restricting access to health care and participation in sports for transgender youth.

[319][320] In January 2025, a New York Times/Ipsos poll showed 71% of Americans believed that no trans person under 18 should have access to gender-affirming care and 79% of respondents supported a ban on transgender athletes from women's sports.

[330] David Rochkind, the CEO of Ground Media, gave a press release saying "What this demonstrates is that attacking the trans community isn't just a weak and feckless political strategy — it's a deeply cynical one.

[336] Another poll by Data for Progress found that a majority of voters from all parties agree with the statement "the government should be less involved in regulating what transgender people are allowed to do, including the health care they can receive."

[340] Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, called the ads "desperate" and accused Republicans of focusing on "sowing fear and chaos" instead of talking about other issues like the economy.

Jay Brown, chief of staff at the Human Rights Campaign said that the ads have had a negative impact on the mental health of trans people due to it being "in their faces all the time."

[341][342] After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, two other Democrat politicians, Tom Suozzi and Seth Moulton, partially blamed their party's loss on their support for trans issues.

However, Blueprint's lead pollster, Evan Roth Smith, said in a interview that with the Rolling Stone that people were misunderstanding the poll, saying that other issues like the economy and immigration ranked as much bigger priorities to swing voters.

However, some political analysts note that asylum applications will likely be denied, as no federal law exists restricting LGBT safety and because transgender individuals can likely move to a safer state in their own country.

The evidence shows that, without exception, these actions rely on prejudiced and stigmatising views of LGBT persons, in particular transgender children and youth, and seek to leverage their lives as props for political profit.