Trans people can not afford to wait for anyone else to save us. We take up the mantle and burden of championing this fight both individually and collectively because the absence of institutional courage has forced us to find our own. We reach further. We dare more audaciously. We exist more brazenly. Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) in 2025 is no longer just a memorial for lives lost; it is an acknowledgment of the strength of our numbers and the urgency of our resistance in an era where lawmaking has become one of the central weapons used against us.The anti-trans bills, the speeches, the slander, and the hearings are not idle talk but accelerants poured onto a house that has been burning for years. Legislative hate is not speech; it is complicity in murder. By now, it is no secret that Congress has become a theater of cruelty where mockery and legislative warfare merge into a single show. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has become one of its most visible performers, not because she is uniquely hateful but because she is uniquely willing to say aloud what others keep coded. Related The U.S.s first out trans diplomat was once considered a hero. Now she may never come home. During a House Oversight hearing in February, Mace repeatedly used a well-known anti-trans slur. When challenged by a Democratic colleague, she laughed and replied, I dont really care. The pattern did not begin there. In April, she used the same slur on stage in Iowa, asking, Can I say tr***y? Can I say it three times? Also in April, while at the University of South Carolina, she dismissed a trans students attempt to explain the harm of that language and then returned to mocking the concern. LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD now maintains a public profile of her ongoing use of anti trans rhetoric and the policy agenda that accompanies it. Dive deeper every day Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues Subscribe to our Newsletter today These are not slips of the tongue. They are deliberate political choices. When a sitting member of Congress turns trans people into a punchline, the impact does not stay within the hearing room or auditorium; it ripples into streets and schools and workplaces. Trans people already navigate fear, harassment, and isolation in these spaces, and now, the people there who wish us harm can hear her clearly. Candles tacked with photographs of those lost illuminate during a candlelight vigil held at the Haynies Corner Fountain hosted by Trans and Queer HOPE on Transgender Day of Remembrance in Evansville, Ind., Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024. | MaCabe Brown / Courier & Press / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn ImagesWords spoken by lawmakers are not inert. They set the cultural tone. They signal who is valued and who is expendable. When hateful language is reinforced by policy, the rhetorical violence becomes state-sanctioned violence. Civil rights analysts told NPR in 2024 that many of the anti trans bills moving across the country had no purpose other than discrimination, a conclusion echoed by Human Rights Watch, which warns that the escalation of anti LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States is producing measurable harms in safety, healthcare, and civil rights.The numbers bear this out. Advocates for Trans Equality reported that in the 118th Congress (which took place during the final two years of the Biden administration), more than one hundred federal bills were introduced to restrict gender affirming care, dismantle nondiscrimination protections, and curtail public participation by transgender people, a pattern documented in their Congressional Champions Report. Even the bills that never became law mattered. The federal Defining Male and Female Act of 2024, which ultimately did not pass, was one of the clearest examples of how symbolism becomes strategy. The bill would have rewritten federal civil rights protections by collapsing sex into a biological category observable at birth, language spelled out in both the House version, H.R. 9218, and the Senate version, S. 5356. The bill would have upended gender-inclusive interpretations across education, healthcare, housing, employment, and public accommodations. Even in failing, the bill did its work. It became a blueprint. It told states exactly how to circumvent Title IX, the Affordable Care Act, and equal protection frameworks without directly invoking discrimination.By 2025, that blueprint became a national model. The so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act has passed the House multiple times since 2023, including once earlier this year. The legislation seeks to amend Title IX to define sex as reproductive biology and genetics at birth and threatens federal funding for schools that allow trans girls and women to compete according to their gender identity.The End Taxpayer Funding of Gender Experimentation Act, introduced in 2024 and reintroduced in 2025, seeks to bar all federal dollars from supporting gender-affirming care through Medicaid, federal employee health plans, and other programs. And in Texas, where legislators wasted no time converting congressional fantasies into enforceable law, H.B. 229 was enacted in spring 2025, defining sex exclusively in biological terms and instructing every state agency to classify Texans accordingly on identification documents and administrative records.State legislatures nationwide escalated in tandem. The American Civil Liberties Union has tracked more than 600 anti-LGBTQ+ billsintroduced in 2025 alone, with a heavy focus on gender-affirming care, documentation, education, and public participation. Independent trackers like the Trans Legislation Tracker and TransLashs legislation dashboard indicate that the actual number of anti-trans bills introduced in 2025 may exceed 1,000. Journalist Erin Reed, whose work is widely relied upon by policymakers and attorneys, documented over 850 anti-LGBTQ+ bills by mid-year and produced a national legal risk assessment showing that many states are now legally dangerous for trans adults as well as trans youth.Judah Clayton speaks during the Transgender Day of Remembrance service at King Avenue United Methodist Church on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024 in Columbus, Ohio. | Samantha Madar/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images All of this has unfolded publicly, and none of it has happened by accident.Supporters of Mace and others like her often claim constitutional protection for their speech under the Speech or Debate Clause, but that clause was never written to absolve the intentional creation of hostile environments for targeted groups. When lawmakers use their platform to spread falsehoods about trans people, to mock our existence, to propose legislation that strips away our healthcare, our documentation, our participation in public life, they are not participating in legitimate debate. They are weaponizing public office. We must name that reality for what it is, legislative violence, a form of political harm that runs parallel to physical violence and often prepares the ground for it. Because words from lawmakers influence courts, school boards, police departments, healthcare systems, and hateful individuals, who believe those words are a personal invitation for them to police our existence themselves. It is no longer enough to condemn hateful rhetoric in the abstract. We must name those who spread it. We must understand that for every trans person murdered or driven into despair, there are policies and politicians who made their lives more precarious than they had to be.This TDOR, we remember our dead, but we also remember our living, and we vow to fight until no new names are added to this day of mourning. For the dead, we honor. For the living, we defend. For every trans person erased or maligned or legislated out of public participation, we stand together. The fight is not over. The fire is still burning.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.