Trans kids in SLO County head back to school facing new year of challenges
Sitting on the porch of their Atascadero home with their mother, Selby looks and acts like any young teenager.
Sporting an oversize shirt emblazoned with designs by gay artist Keith Haring and skateboarding shoes, Selby’s interest in art and activity are apparent, the driveway scattered with leftover chalk.
But Selby, 13, who uses they/them pronouns and founded Atascadero Middle School’s first Gay Straight Alliance when they were in the sixth grade, isn’t like other kids.
From a young age, Selby, who is a part of the LGBTQ+ community, and their mother Darcy — both of whom declined to share their last names in the name of privacy — have participated in political protests, a background that has become only more relevant as Selby has gotten older and learned more about themselves.
“It’s hard enough being a tween and teen going through middle school, and to have any additional burden on top of that — of just not fitting into the perfect, straight, binary kind of roles — is hard,” Darcy said. “Any way that kids are different, it makes it really rough.”
Heading into the 2025-26 school year, transgender youths are facing new levels of uncertainty about how they will be treated by their government and community.
Selby said in the wake of the election of President Donald Trump, they’re more concerned than ever that the LGBTQ+ community is under attack — with trans youth bearing the initial brunt.
“The rhetoric that we’re seeing at the national level and the hate that is being normalized is definitely reflected in the way people yell at me in the hallways and the things they’re emboldened to say,” Selby told The Tribune. “The people that are elected are supposed to be leaders and role models, but then they’re doing things like saying slurs and just being completely unprofessional and disrespectful. And then my classmates think it’s OK to do the same thing.”
The Tribune looked into the challenges facing trans kids as part of its Parents Central series.
Anti-transgender sentiments on the rise
Selby said since starting middle school, they’ve had to endure more than their fair share of unkindness from fellow students.
“There is some ... I don’t know if I would say harassment, but yelling in the hallways,” Selby said. “Not really anything super offensive, just jokes that aren’t really funny.”
But in the wake of President Trump’s second inauguration earlier this year, anti-transgender sentiments have grown bolder, both from Trump’s supporters and from elected officials, Selby said.
Prior to Trump’s election, transgender people were also the target of more than $215 million in political ads run by Republican-affiliated political action committees in the run-up to the 2024 election, according to tracking firm AdImpact and reported by PBS.
Since then, from executive orders that declare the federal government will only recognize two genders, restrict gender-affirming care for minors, ban trans people from the military and eliminate transgender activism from even queer history, to elected officials such as Rep. Nancy Mace, R-South Carolina, screaming transphobic slurs at a fellow member of Congress, anti-transgender sentiment has reached a historic high in the United States.
In 2025, incidents of hate, harassment and violence against queer people were disproportionately targeted at transgender people and other gender minorities, according to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s 2025 anti-LGBTQ+ extremism tracker.
Of 932 incidents of hatred, harassment or violence against queer people of any identity tracked by GLAAD between May 1, 2024, and May 1, 2025, 52% of all incidents targeted transgender and gender non-conforming people.
“I really just hope to continue getting progressively more and more involved and learning more things,” Selby said. “I would like to, at some point, be mentored by some adult activists and learn more about the planning that really goes into making a rally or a campaign or a movement.”
Trans youth in sports used as political wedge
One of the more notable ways that transgender youth have been targeted is through youth sports programs, including in San Luis Obispo County.
Last month, the federal Department of Justice sued the California Interscholastic Federation and California Department of Education, claiming they violated Title IX by not restricting girls’ sports teams to exclusively cisgender girls.
In the lawsuit, a transgender girl’s participation on the Arroyo Grande High School girls track and field team was cited under “Student 3’s Displacement of Girl Athletes” as an example of alleged discrimination against cisgender athletes.
Though trans athletes are still allowed to compete while the lawsuit progresses, districts such as Lucia Mar are keeping an eye on the CIF’s bylaws and following the lawsuit to determine how they should proceed, a spokesperson for the district previously said.
Dr. Denise Taylor, a San Luis Obispo-based physician and endocrinologist who provides care for transgender youth and adults, said this line of attack preys on misconceptions that the public may have about how trans medicine — and trans peoples’ bodies — actually work.
Taylor said particularly in the case of transgender girls, who often use a puberty blocker to stop or delay male puberty while using estrogen to go through female puberty instead, there’s no noticeable difference in strength between them and a cisgender girl.
“It’s not like some burly dude gets to one day say, ‘Haha, I want to go into the girls gym now that I’m a girl,’” Taylor said. “The fearmongers would have you believe otherwise, but that’s not how it works.”
In an effort to capitulate to the demands of anti-transgender voices within and outside of youth sports, the CIF started structuring state track and field championships to allow “biological female student-athletes who would have earned the next qualifying mark” to participate in state championships in the event that a trans athlete places higher than the cisgender athlete.
That move didn’t stop the federal Department of Justice from filing a lawsuit and creates a stepping stone for anti-transgender views to inform policies that govern transgender adults, San Luis Obispo attorney Doug Heumann said.
Heumann, who is a transgender man, is an organizer of the Central Coast Coalition for Inclusive Schools, a group of parents and activists who support anti-bullying initiatives and oppose exclusionary school board policies. He said opponents of trans youth and their participation in sports often guard their arguments under the idea of “parental rights” but fail to consider the parental and individual rights of trans youth and their parents.
“The adults are next, of course, and all of the stuff that goes with it,” Heumann said. “The next step is same-sex marriage.”
Can institutions withstand transphobic policies?
Both Taylor and Heumann said one of their top concerns for trans youth stems from the idea of anticipatory compliance — moves by medical associations and school boards that seek to comply with executive orders on transgender people regardless of whether those orders are enforceable or not, so as to avoid drawing the federal government’s ire.
Heumann said he expects attacks against the transgender community to intensify so long as Trump is in office, with trans youth serving as a testing ground for the public’s appetite for cruelty against the community.
Already, anticipatory compliance is affecting access to gender-affirming care for young trans people in California, he said.
In the past month, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, University of Chicago Medicine and Children’s National in Washington, D.C., all shuttered their programs that provide puberty blockers, hormones and surgical procedures to transgender youth, with some hospitals even cutting gender-affirming care for people under 19.
In San Luis Obispo County, many transgender youth get their gender-affirming care from Planned Parenthood, which offers care starting at 16, but with the aforementioned hospitals closing their doors to trans youth, pediatricians have fewer options for referrals to these larger, more specialized clinics, Taylor said.
Discontinuing hormone replacement therapy with no replacement can have harmful effects on trans patients young and old, Taylor said.
“To have this done by, say, an executive order that’s being obeyed — I would say, illegally — by a physician or a program, this could have really devastating consequences for a kid’s mental health,” Taylor said. “It possibly could lead to not only anxiety, depression or even suicide.”
Selby said this concerted anti-transgender push by the far right has shown why finding and protecting the relatively small queer community is so important while Trump is in office.
“I truly believe that joy is resistance, and that when our communities and other communities threatened by the Trump administration can continue to be happy and find community, that is the most effective form of resistance,” Selby said. “If we can just keep being ourselves, I think that’s what really makes them mad.”
