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With the 2024 presidential election behind us, Donald Trump has begun announcing names for his Cabinet and other White House positions — and the candidates already look like a Who’s Who of far-right transphobia.
Just like it was back in 2016, Trump’s slate of nominees is already shaping up to be a true nightmare blunt rotation, with a dusting of cronyism on top for flavor (nothing says “I will surround myself with yes-men” like nominating Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense). The nominees are still being announced, but so far the list reads like a bracket to determine who’s the worst for transgender people in the U.S. When Tulsi Gabbard, who in 2020 introduced a dangerous anti-trans sports bill, is the presumptive nominee for National Intelligence director and one of the most moderate voices on board, you know things are looking bad.
The President-elect’s nominees for cabinet positions like Secretary of State and Attorney General will need to be confirmed by the Senate, but the names announced this week are already cause for concern. Below, we’ve highlighted some of the biggest threats to trans rights among Trump’s first wave of nominees — not that we want them to prove it to us or anything.
Marco Rubio — Secretary of State
Trump named Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his pick for secretary of state on Tuesday, in a nomination that pointed to leaks and infighting within the campaign and consternation among advisors, Politico reported. An opponent of abortion even in cases of rape, Rubio has made a considerable name for himself on the anti-trans right in the last few years: he proposed banning anyone with a history of gender dysphoria from the U.S. military (effectively reinstating the Trump-era ban), accused USA Boxing of “allowing men to punch women” by allowing trans women to compete, and joined with vice president-elect J.D. Vance to demand questions about gender identity be removed from the U.S. Census last year.
Matt Gaetz — Attorney General
Although Gaetz has been a Florida representative since 2010, he’s perhaps best known these days for getting roasted with memes online over what looked to be a fresh Botox job at the Republican National Convention and fending off multiple accusations of sex trafficking. In Trump’s calculus, that last part apparently means he’s perfect for the office of attorney general.
Gaetz has been one of the most anti-trans voices in Congress for years, denouncing “degenerate LGBT and anti-White propaganda” while pushing for Christian prayers in public schools. He also voted against the Violence Against Women Act in 2021, and supported a bill from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to make providing gender-affirming medical care to trans youth a felony. Gaetz has also campaigned against the Equality Act, claiming in 2019 it would allow Trump to declare himself “the first female president.”
Kristi Noem — Department of Homeland Security
Trump announced on Tuesday that he had selected South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Created in 2002 in reaction to 9/11, DHS is now one of the federal government’s largest agencies and oversees, boasting a 2024 budget of over $103 billion for border policing and anti-terrorism surveillance.
As governor, Noem issued an executive order banning trans girls from school sports, and signed a law allowing religious discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in the workplace in 2021. She then signed a law banning “divisive concepts” from public schools in 2022, including Native American history and LGBTQ+ topics, as well as another law codifying her sports ban. Last year, Noem also signed a ban on gender-affirming medical care for trans youth — shortly after South Carolina was forced to apologize and pay $300,000 to a trans-led nonprofit for contract discrimination.
Stephen Miller — Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy
So far, one of the few returning faces from the first Trump administration (we can’t imagine why) is Stephen Miller, previously Trump’s senior advisor and speechwriting director, who will become deputy chief of policy in January.
Since 2021, the rabidly anti-immigration Miller has headed up America First Legal, a conservative nonprofit that produced targeted waves of anti-trans propaganda throughout the 2022 midterm elections, helped draft portions of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” and unsuccessfully tried to oust a trans tennis coach in Pennsylvania last year. Miller’s AFL also filed a federal civil rights complaint against Kellogg’s in 2023 for its allegedly “woke ideology,” manifested in the form of RuPaul Cheez-Its.
Mike Huckabee — Ambassador to Israel
The former governor of Arkansas turned down a cabinet position in the first Trump administration but will be nominated as ambassador to Israel for the second go-round. If he’s confirmed by the Senate, it could be an ill omen for Palestinians, as Huckabee is a longtime pro-Israel hawk who once called U.S. military support for Israel “a biblical mandate.”
Huckabee has also been an opponent of LGBTQ+ rights for his entire political career, dating back to his 1992 campaign for Senate, when he called being gay “an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle” which “can pose a dangerous public health risk.” He has staunchly opposed same-sex marriage, comparing it to “asking someone who’s Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.” That fundamentalist Christian ideology extends to trans rights, too, of course: in 2015, Huckabee declared that the U.S. was “under threat” from trans people, and bizarrely “joked” that he would have “found [his] feminine side” in order to ogle girls in the school showers. Since 2017, Huckabee has hosted his own talk show on the Christian cable channel Trinity Broadcasting Network, where he has frequently attacked trans athletes and platformed anti-trans mouthpieces like Riley Gaines.
Elise Stefanik — Ambassador to the United Nations
New York Rep. Elise Stefanik will be nominated as ambassador to the United Nations, a further sign that Trump likely intends to increase military support for Israel. If confirmed, Stefanik will vacate her House seat for the first time in 10 years.
Stefanik has taken hard anti-trans stances on numerous fronts while in office. She voted against the Equality Act, the LGBTQI+ Data Inclusion Act, and other LGBTQ+ rights bills while cosponsoring a federal “Parents’ Bill of Rights” — which would have effectively required schools to out trans students — and proposed a ban on trans women in women’s sports, condemning what she called “the woke gender fluidity agenda.”
Donald Trump’s 10 Worst Attacks on the LGBTQ+ Community
Healthcare access. Unsafe schools. Transphobic propaganda. Trump has endangered LGBTQ+ lives in countless ways.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — Department of Government Efficiency
As nominees to Trump’s brand-new “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE, unfortunately) it’s not exactly clear what Musk and Ramaswamy, both wealthy business owners, will be doing from day to day — though according to Trump, they’ll “pave the way” to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Whatever it is they actually get up to, Ramaswamy and Musk will constantly be vying to be the most transphobic guy in the room. Ramaswamy campaigned hard on anti-trans sentiment during the Republican primaries last year; he falsely called gender-affirming care “genital mutilation or chemical castration” and said that gender dysphoria in youth was merely “a kid’s confusion” during one debate, and claimed “transgenderism is a mental health disorder” in another. But he’s got stiff competition from SpaceX billionaire Musk, whose plunge into far-right conspiracies and bigotry is apparently part of his ongoing meltdown over being estranged from his adult trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson.
In a series of posts on Threads last week, Wilson called Musk “a delusional and grubby little control freak who hasn’t matured as a person for 38 years,” adding, “[h]owever, last time I checked that’s not my fucking problem.” Sadly, it looks like it’s about to become everybody’s problem come January.
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