Nurses condemn Trump administration attacks on trans people and patients

The following statement by National Nurses United (NNU), the largest U.S. union of registered nurses, is a reaction to the Trump administration’s ongoing policy attacks against trans people, their communities, and their health care:

Nurses across the country are outraged by the Trump administration’s rollout of several policies attacking and endangering transgender Americans’ health, safety, and lives. President Donald Trump made clear during his campaign that this small group of people were a top target for demonization, and his policy agenda so far has demonstrated his willingness to not only target trans people with dangerous rhetoric, but also with dangerous policies not backed by science or medicine.

Health care is a human right. Policies seeking to bar patients from accessing medically sound forms of health care, including gender-affirming care and reproductive care, are obvious and deliberate attempts to worsen, not improve, the lives of patients.

In particular, several recent executive orders from the Trump administration are cause for alarm, despite unclear legal standing:

• Attempting to bar institutions receiving federal funding from providing gender-affirming care to those under age 19.
• Attemting to criminalize education workers who support trans students at schools that receive federal funding.
• Attempting to erase transgender and nonbinary people from recognition in federal policy, which has halted the ability to update federal identity documents with gender marker changes and is forcing trans people into sex-segregated federal prisons and detention facilities based on sex assigned at birth and reportedly denying them gender-affirming care.
• Expelling transgender personnel from the U.S. military.
• Removing protections against discrimination on the basis of sex in educational environments.

On their own, any one of these measures would be a serious attack on trans Americans. Taken together, these orders make clear that the Trump administration is intent on escalating its attacks on trans people through policy.

As nurses, our first and most important responsibility is to our patients — to provide them with high-quality, safe health care and treat them with dignity as people. We know that gender-affirming care is health care, and health care is a human right. We reject Trump’s political and ideological interference in patient care, in trans people’s employment, or in any workers’ ability to do their jobs with basic respect for the people they serve.

Trans people are our patients, our colleagues, our neighbors, our family members, and members of our communities and our profession. They will not be erased, ignored, demonized, or ostracized so long as there are nurses in this country with the hearts to care for them.

To trans people everywhere: National Nurses United stands with you.