2010 Legal Medical US Tax Court rules that a person can deduct gender confirmation surgery costs and hormone therapy costs as medical expenses and not consider them cosmetic
2010 Legal by executive order Obama banned gender identity discrimination on some federal jobs
2010 Culture Mira Bellwether published the [NSFW] zine F***ing Trans Women, a How-to guide.
2010 Phyllis Frye was appointed an Associate Judge for Houston, the first openly transgender judge in the U.S.
2010 October: Legal Medical In the UK, The Equality act of 2010 removed the requirement for medical supervision for legal qualification of gender reassignment and extended non-discrimination protections on the basis of gender reassignment to private clubs for such things as bathroom and changing room use, sports participation, gender segregated shelters, and prisons.
2010s Legal- A _lot_ happened. Really… we hit a revolution here in the United States in legal rights -- and the Trump administration pushed back hard.
2010s Culture A lot of openly trans people started being elected to public office
2010-2014 Legal Medical The Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) went into effect in stages.
2011 Legal Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada passed legislation adding gender identity as a protected class for purposes of housing, employment, public education, and credit. In Massachusetts this went into effect July 1, 2012. In Massachusetts, public accommodations protections were specifically excluded due to controversies about this being a “bathroom bill”. Those protections were encoded into law four years later in 2016.
2011 Justice Trans Student Equality Resources (Trans Student Educational Resources since 2014) or TSER was co-founded by high school students including Eli Erlick.
2011 Justice The National Black Transgender Advocacy Coalition (BTAC) was founded.
2011 May Culture Author Janet Mock, came out as a trans woman in an article in Marie Claire magazine.
2011 November Culture Having appeared on a 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters at age six in 2007, at age eleven, trans girl Jazz Jennings was the subject of a documentary on the Oprah Winfrey Network titled “I Am Jazz”. A similarly named reality show following her transition and teen years followed a few years later, running for several seasons, and an autobiographical children’s book with the same title came out in 2015.
2012 Medical WPATH published the seventh version of the Standards of Care
2012 July Medical Legal The Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services clarified that its anti-discrimination protections for healthcare under the Affordable Care Act protect from discrimination based on gender identity and gender presentation as a subset of discrimination based on sex.
2013 Medical DSM V: “Gender Identity Disorder” diagnosis was removed and renamed “Gender Dysphoria”, effectively depathologizing transgender identities in the United States. However “Transvestic Disorder” replaced “Transvestic Fetishism” and now problematically explicitly has a connection to Blanchard’s “autogynophilia” as well as “autoandrophilia”.
It appears to significantly undercount the people who experience Gender Dysphoria:
“The DSM-5 indicates that the prevalence of gender dysphoria is 0.005-0.014% for adult born as males, whereas it is 0.002-0.003% for adult born as females (American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013). Among children, it is higher in those born as boys, where it is 2-4.5 times greater than those born as girls. Among teenagers, there is no real difference between males and females.” - Current surveys suggest between 0.3 and 2.1% (most often given as 0.6% to 1.3%) of people are trans - though the higher skew among the younger population suggests that the true numbers may be closer to or even beyond the higher end, with younger folks having less social suppression of the idea that they could be trans and more awareness of what being trans means, the gender skew being minimal, and a lower selective attrition rate due to the AIDS crisis’s and health care discrimination’s disproportionate effect on Boomer & older GenX trans folks. Part of the lower rates of identification of trans males may be related to the more challenging aspects of gender confirmation surgery.
2013 August Justice Chelsea Manning, after being convicted of espionage, disclosed her trans status to the world via her attorney. Attention to her case began to draw to public attention, the mistreatment of trans prisoners.
2013 Legal The Social Security Administration no longer required surgical intervention in order to make gender marker changes.
2013 Legal France repealed a law forbidding women from wearing pants, having been on the books since 1800.
2013 Legal Sweden repealed its policy of sterilizing trans people.
2013 November Legal Arizona failed to pass an anti-trans “bathroom bill”.
2014 Jan 1: Medical Legal Under the ACA, being transgender is no longer considered a pre-existing condition for insurance purposes.
2014 January: Culture Orange is the New Black actor Laverne Cox and model/activist Carmen Carrera were interviewed by Katie Couric and Cox called attention to how Couric’s common line of questioning focused on genitalia and surgeries was objectifying of trans people.
2014: July Legal President Obama’s executive orders added gender identity as a protected class for federal civilian jobs and for federal contractor and subcontractor jobs.
2014: Legal Medical Federal Employee Benefits no longer banned from covering transition related services and in 2016 Federal employee insurers are required to cover transition related services
2014: February Culture Redefining Realness by Janet Mock
2014: May Culture Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time Magazine which declared that year to be the “Transgender Tipping Point”.
2014 July Culture Laverne Cox became the first out transgender person to be nominated for a primetime Emmy Award (for her work in a supporting role on Orange is the New Black).
2014 December Legal The Obama administration’s Justice Department policy under Eric Holder considered gender identity to be protected under Title VII’s sex discrimination protections,
2015 Legal Nine states considered anti-trans bathroom bills and none passed.
2015 Culture In San Francisco, Michelle Tea, launched Drag Queen Story Hour (Later "Drag Story Hour") as a non-profit series of reading events for children in libraries and elsewhere. Such events later became a focus for the ire of transphobes.
2015 April Culture Caitlin Jenner came out as a trans woman, perhaps the highest profile celebrity to do so at the time.
2015 June: Legal SCOTUS released the Obergefell v. Hodges decision on marriage equality, rendering same sex marriages legal across the United States.
2015 August: Justice The last Michigan Womyn’s Festival was held having never changed its policy against admitting trans women. Its organizers announced its impending closure in April.
2015 August Justice Cherno Biko, Aaryn Lang and Joshua Allen organized Black Trans Liberation Tuesday on August 25 in response to the murders of Black trans women
2015 August Justice Raquel Willis created the Black Trans Flag to center the experiences of all Black trans people for Black Liberation Tuesday. It is similar to the Trans flag designed by Monica Helms, but with a black stripe in the center replacing the white of Helms’s flag
2015 November Legal Houston, Texas passed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) a non-discrimination ordinance to protect LGBTQ people, specifically including trans people, but the Texas Supreme Court ordered it to be put on the ballot and it was overturned in the election.
2016 Legal Medical The American College of Pediatricians, a fringe group meant to sound like they were of similar standing to the primary professional organization for U.S. pediatricians, the American Academy of Pediatrics was founded in 2002. In 2016 they began to take up anti-trans conversion therapy advocacy and over the following five years a dozen other organizations with similar goals sprung up pushing conversion therapy under the guise of "Gender Exploration Therapy". Those organizations shared many ties.
2016 March: Legal Nineteen state legislatures proposed “bathroom bills” to limit the use of single sex bathrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms to those whose birth assigned sex aligns with them. North Carolina’s Public Facility, Privacy & Security Act passed and became law but was revoked the following year. It was the subject of a number of protests including business boycotts. South Dakota’s legislature passed a similar bill but it was vetoed by the governor. Several companies boycotted the state in protest.
2016 May: Legal Medical The Obama administration’s Department of Health & Human Services issues regulations against discrimination against LGBT folks, particularly transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming people for healthcare as part of the ACA. This and the ACA in general help guarantee coverage for services connected to medical transitioning, as well as penalize discrimination during general care. The Obama administration’s Departments of Justice and of Education issued directives that schools treat students’ gender as a protected class according to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act as falling within the named protected class of sex.
2016 July: Legal The Massachusetts Legislature added gender identity as a protected class for public accommodations.
2016 August: Dr. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist previously in charge of Johns Hopkins’ Gender Identity Clinic, who had it shut down in 1979 under the belief that being transgender was purely psychological and should not be addressed through hormone therapy or surgery, co-authored a 144 page report for The New Atlantis on Sexuality and Gender Identity, a publication of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative Christian think tank. It contended that both sexual orientation and gender identity were not biologically determined. These theories had long been discredited, but the article began to be cited as justification for anti-trans policies and legislation.
2016 November Roy Cooper won the governorship of North Carolina from the sitting Republican governor, having pushed him to repeal the bathroom bill.
2017 A number of states proposed anti-trans legislation this cycle. Sixteen states attempted to follow North Carolina’s lead on transgender bathroom restrictions but their bills failed to pass. Fourteen states attempted laws restricting trans students’ freedoms in schools but they failed to pass. North Carolina passed bills to stop local municipalities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances contrary to state laws, to prevent an end run around the bathroom ban.
2017 January: The Trump administration removed mentions of LGBTQ people from the websites of the White House and the State and Labor departments.
2017 February: Legal The Trump administration’s Department of Education revoked the previous administration's guidance on gender identity discrimination in schools.
2017 March The Trump administration’s
Justice Department:
failed to appeal an injunction blocking the ACA protections against transgender discrimination.
dropped its request for an injunction against NC’s bathroom bill
canceled its broadcast to the National Institute of Corrections regarding transgender inmates
HHS:
Removed demographic questions about LGBTQ+ people from its Centers for Independent Living performance assessments
announced it would not collect information on LGBT people in its annual survey of the service needs of older people
HUD:
withdrew required postering of emergency shelters informing residents of their HUD anti-LGBT discrimination protections
shut down a report on the outcomes of three year program fighting against LGBT youth homelessness
removed links to four key resource documents from its website, which informed emergency shelters on best practices for serving transgender people facing homelessness and complying with HUD regulations.
State Department: announced its delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women conference would include two anti-LGBT organizations
Census: retracted a proposal to collect LGBT demographics
2017 April. The Trump administration’s Justice department dropped its suit against NC’s bathroom bill
2017 May. The Trump administration’s HHS announced plans to remove nondiscrimination protections for trans people under the ACA.
2017 June Justice Phildelphia’s Pride flag added a black and a brown stripe to explicitly be more inclusive of Black and Brown POC’s. Racism in a number of Gay organizations have often kept BIPOCs from leadership roles and in some cases from participation in general.
2017 June The Trump administration’s Department of Education withdrew its finding that an Ohio school district discriminated against a trans girl.
2017 June after 39 years, Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic reopened.
2017 October At the Values Voters Summit, panelists who had been fighting against transgender inclusion in a Virgina school district since 2015, recommended that in order to push back against LGBTQ gains to “Focus on gender identity to divide and conquer…. For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile, and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.” They talked about appealing to progressive groups positioning trans women as the ultimate misogyny. Looking back, Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project noted that pushing against trans girls and trans women in sports was an issue which could get broader traction.
2018 March: Legal A federal court struck down Idaho’s prohibition on trans people changing their birth certificates.
2018 June: Justice Progress Pride flag was designed by Daniel Quasar to include the colors from Helms’s Trans flag along with the black and brown from the Philadelphia Pride flag as a chevron on top of the six-stripe rainbow Pride flag from San Francisco, 1979.
2018 June: MassResistance and the Alliance Defending Freedom promoted language and policy aims to remove trans rights in schools, in gender affirming care, and in overall social acceptance.
2018 November Justice Massachuestts voters denied an attempt to roll back the 2016 protection from discrimination in public accommodations based on gender identity via a ballot question.
2019 Medical Transgender identities were depathologized by the W.H.O.’s ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases – 11th Revision) and in doing so replaced diagnostic categories like ICD-10’s “transsexualism” and “gender identity disorder of children” with “gender incongruence of adolescence and adulthood” and “gender incongruence of childhood”, respectively. Gender incongruence has thus broadly been moved out of the “Mental and behavioural disorders” chapter and into the new “Conditions related to sexual health” chapter. While the U.S. relies on the DSM 5, that manual references the analogous diagnoses within the IDC-10 and U.S. medical record keeping relies on the codes and names from the IDC rather than the DSM.
2019 August Legal South Dakota Senator Deutsch, began coordinating with several anti-trans organizations to construct a gender affirming health care ban for minors which, when introduced, was called the Vulnerable Child Protection Act. It failed on first introduction but served as a template for future efforts and the megagroup continued to co-ordinate its legislative efforts. South Dakota did pass such a ban in February 2023.
2019 October Justice In the UK, hate group disguised as a progressive non-profit, LGB Alliance was formed.