‘We’ve seen a lot more hate’: Trans people are already terrified

Now, after Trump’s comments and actions on the first day of his presidency, the group’s crisis hotline is once again receiving a flood of calls. Sixty-two percent of the incoming calls this week, the group tells Wired, are from trans and genderqueer teens ages 14 to 17.

Callers are expressing varying degrees of emotional and mental distress, often expressing feelings of hopelessness and fear. One of the most common sentiments shared is “My country doesn’t want me to exist.”

While the Trump administration’s actions are causing great distress for the trans community and their families, a marked increase in attacks, both online and offline, are already coming from Trump supporters who feel emboldened.

“We’ve already seen an increase in hate against us,” Fisher says. “We had someone come to our house last Tuesday and put a note in our mailbox that said, ‘He’s your dad now, he’s your president. You will no longer exist. So yeah, they’re definitely emboldened.”

A trans pride flag they had hung on their porch has been stolen twice in the space of a week. At his local hangout, a supermarket, he overheard people at an adjacent table talking about how glad they were that Trump had “got rid of” trans people.

“He didn’t get rid of them, they’re always going to exist, but damn, so he put a target on them, especially my teenage son,” Fisher said.

And the attacks are also directed at groups that are trying to help the LGBTQ+ community.

“We’ve seen a lot more hate,” Lance Preston, executive director of the Rainbow Youth Project, tells Wired. “We’ve been getting a lot of messages, crazy shit, like ‘Trump is your president, now everyone’s going to have to disappear. We don’t want you here. We get contact submission forms every day, and since the election it has just grown exponentially. It’s really sad.”

Some activists also worry that those who have always encountered the LGBTQ+ community might be too scared to speak out under the new Trump administration.

“Every time something like this happens, we notice that supporters back off and calm down,” Chris Sederburg, who helps Wired, tells Wired. “Not all, but many of them do it because they are afraid of what is happening. They’re afraid of what might happen to them or they might hate it.”

Sederburg, a trans man who works as a truck driver, communicates with trans youth on social media and says the response this week from the community has been one of “intense and immediate fear.”

For Jamie Anderson, a 40-year-old teacher who lives in Texas, her biggest fear is that the Trump administration will force her daughter Dawn, who came out as trans last year, to make a traumatic decision.

“My biggest worry is that he’s going to have to live a lie again, like not being who he’s supposed to be,” Anderson says. “Now he is happy, he is much happier than he was right before he left. She was super depressed. We had no idea what was happening. And finally he comes out, and he’s this whole new, amazing, loving kid.”