On day one of President Donald Trump’s second term, a transition anxiously anticipated by many LGBTQ+ advocates, things were “business as usual” at Brave Space Alliance (BSA), a trans-led LGBTQ+ center in Hyde Park. 

That day, as Trump declared the federal government would only recognize two sexes – male and female, as assigned at birth – and signed a slew of executive orders rolling back policies and programs for transgender people, BSA CEO Channyn Parker said the organization continued to distribute goods through its pantry, conduct HIV testing and help members draft resumes.

“The individuals who we serve are experiencing food instability no matter who is in government, they are experiencing medical emergencies no matter who is in government, they are experiencing housing crises no matter who is in government,” Parker said. “Thus has been the same for decades for people who live at the margins.” 

Nevertheless, her nonprofit organization, and many others that serve LGBTQ+ individuals, are watching the newest administration cautiously. As in Trump’s first term, Republicans have control of both the House and Senate, giving his administration leeway in its war on so-called “gender ideology extremism.” 

Indeed, the administration has in the last two weeks doubled down on these efforts. Since inauguration day, Trump has repealed executive orders that end at least a dozen measures supporting racial equity and combating discrimination against LGBTQ-identifying people. In a flurry of his own executive orders, Trump banned transgender troops from serving openly in the U.S. military, mandated the transfer of transgender women in federal prisons to mens’ facilities and moved to restrict gender-affirming care for minors. 

Aisha N. Davis, president of the board of directors for Affinity Community Services, a Black- and queer-led social justice organization based in Bronzeville, speculated that the flurry of changes is intended to “overwhelm” groups like hers. 

“It’s an attempt to make it so that people are so afraid that they feel stuck or paralyzed,” Davis said. “(But) we don’t plan on being scared, we don’t plan on stopping, we don’t plan on turning anything back.”

For the 30-year-old, mostly volunteer-run organization, this means carrying on the work of running a “stable community space” for LGBTQ+ individuals amidst the uncertainty, whether it be their various weekly meetings for different groups, connections to mental health care or education programs. 

“At the end of the day, Affinity is really just a space where we are hoping that people don’t feel like they need to have the armor that they have to wear around out in the world,” Davis said. “It’s a way for us to put things down, because you don’t have to worry as much about how you’re being perceived.”

Rollbacks begin, misinformation spreads

Executive orders do not have the ability to override the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes or legal precedent, and experts say many of these orders may be difficult to implement or will be challenged in the courts. 

As of Friday, a federal judge has blocked the reassignment of a transgender woman incarcerated in Massachusetts to a men’s facility following a lawsuit. Elsewhere this week, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, along with 20 other Democratic attorneys general, announced a plan to file suit over Trump’s federal grant funding freeze. 

(That freeze, intended to halt spending to make sure programs comply with Trump’s wide-ranging wave of executive orders, has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.) 

Nevertheless, Parker said the BSA team is looking for ways to increase its resources to mitigate the worst of the rollbacks that do go into effect. 

“(We’re) really thinking of how we expand our programs to counter the potential impact of what could be some really regressive policies,” she said. 

Since Election Day in November, Parker said BSA has ramped up efforts to provide direct services such as mental health support, housing assistance and legal aid for name and gender marker changes – changes that are already becoming more difficult to make under the new administration. 

Last year, the organization opened its Jasmine Alexander Housing building in South Shore, which provides a few units of free, temporary housing for LGBTQ+ individuals experiencing homelessness and housing instability. 

Combating misinformation is also top of mind for these organizations. 

Trump has a history of spreading misinformation about HIV/AIDS, according to GLAAD, a leading LGBTQ+ rights organization in the U.S., and spreading false statements about transgender women and girls participating in sports. 

In another executive order Trump signed this week, the Department of Health and Human Services has been advised to halt gender-affirming care – which includes puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery – under Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act for individuals below age 19. 

The order, which labeled the World Professional Association of Transgender Health “junk science,” called this care a “horrifying tragedy” that “countless children soon regret.” Medical studies, however, show that rates of depression and suicide among transgender and nonbinary youths are significantly lower when youth receive gender-affirming care. 

Parker and Davis said it’s up to their organizations to debunk myths like these and keep their members informed. Parker suggested this could be done through workshops, campaigns and community discussions. 

“Misinformation thrives on dehumanization,” Parker said. “We have to just do the best we can to combat it by amplifying the voices of LGBTQ+ individuals.”

Funding concerns 

Access to federal funding is also an existential threat for many nonprofits and institutions providing services to LGBTQ+ people. On the campaign trail, NPR reported that Trump threatened to cut federal funding to public schools that “promote ideas related to gender transitioning or transgender people,” as well as to hospitals and health care providers that perform gender-affirming surgeries or other kinds of affirming care for minors. 

If that happens, Parker said, organizations like BSA, which don’t rely on federal funding, may need to take on more responsibilities. 

“It is very possible that organizations like ours will have to support with overflow from organizations that cannot provide that level of care without having their funding streams attacked,” Parker said. This, she continued, could look like hosting health care providers who may not be able to operate in their own spaces but could in BSA’s facility. 

Joli Robinson, the CEO of Center on Halsted, a Lakeview-based LGBTQ+ community center with a location in Woodlawn, said funding concerns for her nonprofit are amplified by the possibility that the organization could soon see an influx of need.  

Center on Halsted typically receives around $2.2 million a year in federal funds, which amounts to more than a third of its annual revenue. These funds support HIV testing and prevention, behavioral health services, counseling, youth and senior programming and housing support. Though the organization serves more than 5,000 people annually, Robinson said the center is far from meeting all the community’s needs.

“The funding isn’t able to cover all the need that we see,” Robinson told the Herald. “We continue to see a growing need in our community for these critical services.”

Illinois has for several years been a relatively safe state for transgender Americans. As neighboring states moved to pass anti-transgender laws restricting health care and other rights – among them access to school sports teams and bathrooms in-line with one’s gender – Illinois moved to expand them. Since January 2023, protections for reproductive rights and gender-affirming care have been enshrined in state law. This law also requires insurance providers in the state to cover gender-affirming care, and prohibits the prosecution of health care providers by other states that have banned such care. 

These protections make places like Illinois a magnet for transgender youth and adults who live in restrictive states. According to a 2023 study from the Human Rights Foundation Campaign, more than half of transgender and non-binary adults surveyed said they would leave or have left states that enacted bans on gender-affirming care. 

“We are keeping our eyes and our ears open to think about how we can best serve those populations,” Robinson said. 

Parker is hopeful that the administration gets stymied by lawsuits. But it’s a waiting game in the meantime. 

“The hardest thing to digest about all of this is none of us know for sure” what’s to come, she said.