Donald Trump said in an interview that transgender people will "end" if Republicans keep control of Congress after the 2026 midterms. I want to take that sentence at face value, because I think we owe it to trans people not to soften it or explain it away. When a sitting president names a group of people as something to be ended, that is not campaign noise. It is a declared aim. And the people it targets are real.

What Trump actually said

Asked by Fox News host Trey Gowdy about the upcoming midterms, Trump made his pitch for Republican voters to turn out as though he were personally on the ballot. Then, listing what would happen if they did not, he said: "You're going to have the taxes raised, you're gonna have crazy things happening like the men in women's sports will never end. None of this. Transgender will never end."

He was saying that under a Democratic-controlled Congress, trans people would continue to exist. He was offering the end of trans existence as a reason to vote Republican. Gowdy did not ask him to clarify what he meant. The interview moved on.

The president of the United States said, on television, that one of the things his administration is working towards is the end of transgender people, and the Fox News host sitting across from him treated it as an unremarkable campaign point.

This is not new, but it is escalating

Trump's comments echo what he said at AmericaFest in December 2024, before his inauguration, where he promised to "stop the transgender lunacy" and declared that the official policy of his government would be that there are only two genders. He followed through: on his first day in office he ordered federal agencies to stop acknowledging that trans people exist, moved to remove trans service members from the military, signed an executive order barring trans children from competing in school sport as their gender, and began using federal investigative offices to pressure hospitals, schools, and other institutions into withdrawing trans-affirming care and policies.

All of that has already happened. So what does "ending transgender" mean from here? The LGBTQ Nation piece asks that question honestly and does not have a clean answer, because it is not clear what further steps the federal government could take. What is clear is that the intent is being stated openly, repeatedly, and without any of the careful hedging that politicians usually deploy when they sense they may have gone too far.

The pattern is familiar. In 2023, the pundit Michael Knowles said "transgenderism must be eradicated," and then clarified that he meant eliminating it "ontologically" rather than killing trans people. The distinction did not make the statement safer. It made it vaguer, which gave it more room to move.

What "ending" a group of people actually means

Trans people have existed across every recorded culture, every political system, and every era of human history. Being trans is not a trend, not a contagion, and not something that can be legislated out of existence. Conversion therapy has never been shown to change anyone's gender identity. What it has been shown to do is cause severe psychological harm.

What a government can do is make trans lives harder, more frightening, more hidden, and more dangerous. It can remove the legal protections that allow trans people to exist openly. It can defund the medical care that allows trans people to live in their own bodies. It can create a climate in which discrimination, harassment, and violence feel permitted. None of that ends trans people. It just makes their lives worse, sometimes catastrophically so.

That is what is actually on offer here. Not the impossible elimination of a natural part of human diversity, but the sustained, deliberate removal of the conditions that allow trans people to live well. The framing of "ending" is worth naming for what it is: a political goal that treats trans existence as the problem, and trans people's suffering as the acceptable cost of solving it.

The people this is about

I keep coming back to the trans people I have spoken with over the years. The teenager who finally had a word for what they had always known about themselves. The parent who watched their child become recognisably themselves after years of watching them struggle. The adult who transitioned in their fifties and said it was like finally breathing properly. These are not abstractions. They are people living their lives, and a president has just told a television audience that one of his government's goals is to make that stop.

Trans people are still here. They were here before this administration and they will be here after it. But the harm being done in the meantime is real and it is accumulating, and the people experiencing it deserve to have that named plainly, without the softening of "rhetoric" or "politics" or "the culture war."

This was a president saying, on television, that trans people should end, and the host did not push back. We should.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.