What's next for trans rights after the midterms

What actually happened at the ballot box

Arizona, Colorado, and Washington all passed measures restricting trans students from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity. Colorado went further, also approving a ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors. For the people behind those campaigns, they represent something to celebrate. Conservatives are already describing them as a playbook for future elections, and Carrie Lukas of Independent Women's Voice has said her organisation plans to go straight to the states rather than waiting on Washington. The language is deliberate: "protecting women's sports", framed as something beyond party, something voters across the aisle can be recruited into.

A ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors in Colorado is not an abstract policy position. It is a decision, made by majority vote, to withhold healthcare from children. Those children still exist. Their need for care does not go away because a ballot measure passed. Every month of an unwanted puberty is a permanent physical change, and nothing in a yes vote undoes that reality.

The margins tell a different story

Here is what the headlines missed. Polling before the vote suggested that nearly 80% of voters supported trans sports bans. The actual result in Colorado was around 52%. Nadine Bridges, who organised the "Families, Not Politics" campaign against the measures, said they moved voters by almost 30 points, largely through direct, human conversations, neighbours talking to neighbours, people explaining what these decisions actually mean for real families. "We're going to continue to have to do that," she said, and she is right. It is slower than a ballot measure, and it is the only thing that works.

Meanwhile, in Missouri, a ballot measure that would have banned both abortion and gender-affirming healthcare for trans minors was rejected. Missouri is not a blue state. That matters. And across the country, six transgender and nonbinary candidates won races, including, for the first time, in conservative-leaning Alabama and in battleground Georgia. Those are not footnotes; those are people, elected by their communities, who went out and asked for trust and received it.

Conservatives spent $400 million on anti-trans advertising

Roughly $400 million in anti-trans ads across this election cycle, and Republicans still lost seats nationwide. Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the Transgender Law Center, put it plainly: "What I want to stress is that we didn't lose by much." Given what was spent to push voters in one direction, that is a remarkable thing to be able to say.

The Trevor Project's Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen drew a comparison that I find genuinely useful: the marriage equality movement in the early 2000s. "That was a time when we were losing and losing and losing," he said. "Marriage equality used to be considered impossible." Roughly fifteen years later, Virginia passed it at the ballot box, and the conversation had completely changed. I am not offering that as comfort. I am offering it as evidence that the arc of this is not predetermined, and that the work being done now is not wasted.

What comes next is a fight over Title IX

The Trump administration has been moving to define sex under Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination, based on what it calls biological sex. If that definition is finalised, it will force every Democrat in office to take a public position, and it will put pressure on a party that is not entirely unified on trans issues. Lanae Erickson of the centre-left think tank Third Way acknowledged as much, noting friction between progressive and moderate wings over sports participation in particular. "In a blue state you have to contend with a messy coalition," she said.

That messiness is real, and it has costs for trans people caught in the middle of it. But the picture from this election is not one of collapse. It is one of a movement that is learning, adapting, and in some places winning against serious odds and serious money. The ballot measures that passed are damaging and wrong, and they will be challenged. The wins, in Alabama, in Georgia, in Missouri, are real.

Trans people have always been here. They will continue to be. The question is not whether trans rights survive this moment. It is how much harm is done while the politics catches up with the people.

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

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Expert, Medical Educator, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP.