Ten things you've been told about kids, trans people and immigrants.

The modern version starts with a December 21, 2021 school board meeting in Midland, Michigan, where a resident said she was "furious" to learn litter boxes had been placed in a unisex bathroom. She had been told this by someone. The superintendent checked and said there had never been one. The Michigan Republican Party's co-chair shared the video anyway in January 2022, Libs of TikTok amplified it, and within three months it had been repeated by legislators in Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota, each naming a different school, each school denying it.

By the fall it was a campaign line. Marjorie Taylor Greene said it at a Trump rally on September 3; Colorado's Republican nominee for governor said students were "identifying as cats" on September 26 and, pressed for evidence, pointed to Jefferson County's lockdown buckets; Minnesota's nominee for governor, New Hampshire's nominee for Senate and Lauren Boebert all repeated it in October. Joe Rogan told it on a podcast October 13 and said three weeks later that there was no proof. Tony Dungy tweeted it in January 2023 and apologized.

The pattern is the point. Nobody who repeated the claim had seen a litter box. Each repetition cited the one before. When officials went looking (a Hannibal, Missouri superintendent checked every bathroom in the district in June 2022), they found nothing, and the finding never traveled as far as the claim. Candidates who leaned on it lost in New Hampshire, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and Maine; the members of Congress who repeated it won.

The claim has since been exported to Canada, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand and Australia, where school authorities have issued the same denials, and it has been turned into legislation: an Oklahoma bill in 2024 and a Texas "FURRIES Act" in 2025 to ban non-human behavior in schools, both aimed at a problem no school has reported.

The ladder

Care for a transgender minor in the U.S. has four rungs, and almost everyone stops on the first. Social transition (a name, pronouns, clothes) involves no medicine. Puberty blockers, used for decades for early puberty, pause development at the start of adolescence; the national study found a rate of about 15 to 21 per 100,000 insured youths. Hormones (testosterone or estrogen) are typically started at 16 or later; the rate peaks at 17-year-olds, around 82 to 140 per 100,000. Surgery is rare before 18 and essentially limited to chest procedures on 15-to-17-year-olds.

The real debate

Serious people disagree about the second and third rungs. Britain's Cass Review (2024) and the U.S. HHS review (May 2025) both found the evidence base for blockers and hormones in adolescents to be low quality and urged caution; the HHS report went further, recommending psychotherapy over medication, and the major U.S. medical associations rejected it. That is a dispute about evidence standards and how to weigh risks for a small number of adolescents. It is not a dispute about whether thousands of children are being surgically altered, which no dataset supports.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

Executive Order 14187 told agencies to cut research and education funding to hospitals providing the care and directed HHS to use Medicare and Medicaid rules against it; hospitals in Washington, Virginia, Colorado and elsewhere paused care within days, and by 2026 even hospitals in states without bans, such as Baystate in Massachusetts, had stopped under threat of losing federal funding. The Supreme Court upheld Tennessee's ban in United States v. Skrmetti on June 18, 2025, which effectively secured the other 26 state bans. Six states make providing the care a felony. Half of American transgender teenagers now live where the care is illegal for them.

The real policy question is narrow and hard. A 14-year-old asks a teacher to use a new name. Does the school tell the parents? Fifteen states now say yes in at least some circumstances (seven on any disclosure to staff, six before staff may use the name, two when a parent asks). Thirty-five do not require it, and some districts in those states have policies against disclosure without the student's consent, reasoning that a student who is not safe at home should not be outed by the school. California made that the statewide rule in 2024; a conservative legal group challenged it, and the Supreme Court paused the law in March 2026 while the case proceeds. The Trump administration separately found in January 2026 that California's policy violated federal parental-records law.

Reasonable people land in different places on this, and polls show parents want to be told. What the claim does is take that disagreement about a name on a roster and describe it as a surgery. The gap between the two is the whole distance between a school policy debate and a child's body.

The documented cases

Lia Thomas swam for Penn's women's team in 2021–22 after three seasons on the men's team and a year of hormone therapy under NCAA rules; she won the 500 free at nationals, placed fifth in the 200 and last in the 100 final. Penn later settled a Title IX complaint with the Trump administration by stripping her records. At the high school level the known cases are counted in ones: AB Hernandez won California's girls' high jump and triple jump in 2025 under a rule change that awarded duplicate medals; a Spokane Valley runner won a 400-meter title in Washington; Maine's governor said the state had two transgender girls in school sports when the administration moved to cut the state's funding over them. Advocacy groups keep lists of trans athletes who placed; the lists are short, and most entries are not champions.

The science

Testosterone during male puberty increases height, muscle mass, heart and lung size and bone density. Hormone therapy reduces muscle mass and hemoglobin over one to three years but does not reverse skeletal differences. How much residual advantage remains, and whether it matters in a given sport, is contested in the literature; the honest summary is "some, sport-dependent, and smaller for athletes who never went through male puberty." That argument is about eligibility rules for a handful of people. It does not support the word "takeover."

The laws

Idaho passed the first ban in 2020. By October 2026 there were 27 state laws and two agency policies (Alaska, Virginia). The NCAA barred athletes assigned male at birth from women's teams on February 6, 2025, the day after the executive order. On June 30, 2026 the Supreme Court held that Idaho's and West Virginia's laws violate neither the Equal Protection Clause nor Title IX; Justice Kavanaugh wrote that states "may maintain women's and girls' sports for biological females," and Justice Sotomayor's dissent objected that the laws apply even where an individual athlete has no advantage. Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska and Washington decide ballot measures on the question in November 2026.

The Williams Institute study (Hasenbush, Flores and Herman, 2018) used Massachusetts, where some cities adopted gender-identity public accommodation ordinances before the 2016 statewide law. It matched those localities to similar ones without ordinances and compared police reports of assault, sex crimes, voyeurism and other privacy violations in restrooms and locker rooms before and after. The passage of the ordinances "is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in these spaces." Such incidents were rare in all localities. The authors note the obvious limit: it is one state and the incidents are too rare to detect small effects. It remains the only controlled test anyone has run, because no state passing a bathroom law has commissioned one.

The laws themselves range widely. Three states cover K-12 schools only; nine cover schools and some government buildings; nine, plus Puerto Rico, cover every government-owned building including universities; four make using the "wrong" facility a crime in some circumstances, and Idaho's 2026 law made it a felony. What they share is an enforcement problem: nobody checks, so in practice they are enforced by other users' suspicion, which falls on anyone who looks gender-nonconforming, including cisgender women. The one measurable effect in the data is on transgender people, who report avoiding public restrooms, and whose victimization rate is four times the average.

The claim surfaces after specific shootings: Nashville in March 2023, Minneapolis in August 2025, and a British Columbia shooting in February 2026, each involving a perpetrator identified in reporting as transgender or nonbinary. Three cases in three years feel like a pattern to anyone who hears about them and never hears about the other 190. That is the mechanism of most of the claims on this page: a vivid case, a category, and no denominator. The denominator here is well documented. Of 200 Violence Project shooters, 192 were men who were not transgender; the FBI's 2023 active-shooter report listed 49 shooters, 48 of them men. Ohio State criminologist Laura Dugan's summary: relative to their population share, transgender people appear underrepresented. Several databases, including the AP/USA Today/Northeastern count, do not record gender identity at all, which is one reason the viral chart could not have been built from them.

Three different things get called "detransition." Regret is a stated wish not to have had treatment. Discontinuation is stopping medication, for any reason, including cost, side effects, pregnancy plans or reaching a desired point. Identity change is ceasing to identify as transgender. The 2021 meta-analysis of surgical regret (Bustos et al.) pooled 7,928 patients and found about 1%, with wide confidence intervals and the authors' own warning about inconsistent definitions; a published rebuttal argued one included study's sample was overstated. A 2025 systematic review of discontinuation found adolescent hormone discontinuation ranging from 1.6% to 9.8% across studies and blocker discontinuation from 1% to 7.6%. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found 13.1% of respondents had detransitioned at some point, 82.5% of them citing at least one external reason; a separate survey recruited from online detransitioner communities found the opposite emphasis, with 70% citing a realization that their dysphoria had other causes. Both are self-selected samples. The fair reading is that detransition is a minority outcome measured in single-digit percentages, that the people who experience it are poorly served by both sides of the argument, and that nobody has the long-term data that would settle it.