In a presidency defined by perpetual attention — meetings bleeding into photo ops, policy announcements collapsing into monologue — few refrains have proved as durable for President Donald Trump as the line “transgender for everybody.” It arrives in his remarks like a reflex, surfacing in moments where it has no organic relevance, signaling not policy precision but the durability of a grievance. For Trump, the phrase functions as shorthand: a cultural alarm designed to stoke anxiety about transgender people’s existence while casting Democrats as the agents of social disorder.
GLAAD has noted more than 50 times since January that Trump has deployed the phrase “transgender for everybody” or “transgender for everyone” in public events and interviews, usually in answers to unrelated questions or topics that have nothing to do with LGBTQ+ people.
The Advocate contacted the White House to ask what Trump means when he uses the phrase.
“President Trump was resoundingly elected by the American people to restore common sense in our government – and that includes dropping Democrats’ bizarre obsession with transgenderism,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said. "From cracking down on unscientific transgender procedures for minors to protecting girls’ sports, the Trump administration will continue to put an end to transgender-for-everybody policies.”
On Day One of his second administration, Trump signed a sweeping executive order redefining federal civil rights law interpretation to recognize only two sexes, effectively erasing transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people from federal recognition. That directive, now embedded across agencies from Health and Human Services to the Department of Justice to the Department of Education, has reshaped everything from data collection to nondiscrimination rules, creating a government-wide mandate to treat transgender Americans as legally nonexistent.
A GLAAD spokesperson criticized Trump’s constant invocation of transgender people.
“The president’s rhetoric against transgender people in isolation makes no sense, but GLAAD’s documentation paints the bigger picture for the press and the American people. Every time the President cruelly disparages LGBTQ people and our allies is also another time when he fails to focus on the problems of every American. Everyone needs food and health insurance that won’t break the bank,” the spokesperson told The Advocate. "We all worry about skyrocketing power bills to keep the heat and lights on. The President’s campaign against transgender Americans is deeply harmful to the trans community, and it’s also hurting every American who wants solutions to real problems in their lives. It’s a profound waste and abuse of his platform, and does nothing to make our country great.”
GLAAD’s Trump Accountability Tracker has cataloged more than 300 anti-LGBTQ+ actions, statements, and policies under Trump, offering a clear view of how his rhetoric aligns with the machinery of his administration. And the instances of Trump repeating “transgender for everybody” span not only high-profile speeches, including Oval Office press gaggles, bill signings, and routine presidential remarks.
Yet the power Trump imagines this rhetoric to hold, its supposed ability to animate voters, to tip elections, to function as political kryptonite for Democrats, rests on shaky ground. As writer Katherine Alejandra Cross argued in Liberal Currents, the political class has spent years internalizing the myth that anti-trans messaging wins elections, treating the 2024 “Kamala is for they/them; Donald Trump is for you” ad as campaign gospel. That narrative hardened into orthodoxy among strategists and pundits, even as real-world evidence kept undermining it. The 2025 elections delivered a decisive rejection: in Virginia, where Republicans spent 57 percent of their ad budget on trans panic, voters handed Democrats a sweeping landslide.
What follows is a slideshow documenting instances when Trump brought up transgender people in unrelated contexts. Viewed together, they form a portrait of a presidency in which transgender people, who, according to the Williams Institute, make up 1 percent of the population, have become a central axis of political storytelling.
During a conversation on national security and immigration, Trump veered suddenly into gender politics, pairing “transgender for everybody” with grievances about housing and interest rates.
Asked about layoffs tied to a potential shutdown, Trump answered with an attack on Democrats unrelated to the question.
Pivoting from pharmaceutical partnerships to gender-affirming care, Trump repeated the line while falsely describing medical treatments for trans people as dangerous—contradicting every major medical association in the country.
In remarks heavy with apocalyptic rhetoric, Trump suggested the nation would have been “dead” without the 2024 election result, citing “transgender for everyone” alongside border policy.
Trump joked with players from the Italian professional soccer club Juventus about whether a woman could make their team. The athletes appeared uneasy, and their manager quickly chimed in, saying they have an excellent women’s team.
Another version of the riff—this time in a short aside during an event about his newly-installed White House flag poles.
Trump used the phrase four times in one meeting. This is the first.
This is the second time he used the phrase in the same cabinet meeting.
In all, Trump returned to the line four different times, including in a riff about women’s sports.
What the White House promoted as a policy address on affordability quickly unraveled into a familiar cultural broadside. As voters across Pennsylvania continue to struggle with punishing housing, grocery, and medical costs, Trump used the October 9 speech to belittle those concerns as a Democratic “hoax” before drifting into a now-routine attack on transgender people. “We don’t have to sell transgender to everybody,” he told supporters, later escalating into open mockery with a jab about families “changing their sex” if they “weren’t feeling well that night.”
Speaking before international investors, Trump claimed he avoids the topic—seconds before repeating it at length, he mocked transgender athletes and assured the crowd he would weaponize the issue “two weeks before” the election.
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