Dr. Jane Fernandes
In 2023 alone, over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced across U.S. state legislatures, the majority targeting transgender youth and adults. These laws ban gender-affirming care, criminalize parents and providers, and force trans people to use facilities that don’t match their gender. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and dozens of other professional health organizations have condemned these bills as medically unsound and deeply harmful. As one trans teenager in Missouri shared during a legislative hearing: "I’m not trying to hurt anyone—I’m just trying to grow up. Why do you keep trying to stop me?"
Across the country, transgender people are living remarkable, creative, and deeply ordinary lives. They are teachers, artists, health care workers, entrepreneurs, caregivers, students, and neighbors. They are inventing technologies, building communities, raising children, and transforming what it means to live honestly and fully. Their lives are not "debates"—they are evidence of possibility, resilience, and joy. And yet, against this reality, an unrelenting political and cultural campaign seeks to deny them not only recognition, but rights, movement, and care.
This contradiction—between the beauty of how people live and the cruelty of how systems respond—goes beyond the trans community. We see something similar but different in the lives of immigrants and international students whose talents and contributions are widely recognized but they are being denied by arbitrary visa revocations, long bureaucratic delays, and hostile rhetoric categorizing them as criminal and dangerous. It echoes in the lives of disabled people, especially Deaf and neurodivergent people, whose insights are essential to many fields in school and college education, design, and accessibility, yet who are too often excluded from schools, jobs, and public life. What unites these groups is not their sameness, but the way society responds to them—with fear, suspicion, and control. Whether through bathroom bans, medical restrictions, inaccessible systems, or unjust immigration enforcement, we are watching a politics of removal take hold: an attempt to erase certain people from public life under the guise of "order," "protection," or "tradition." It is a politics rooted in the false belief that only certain bodies, identities, or ways of being belong here. These communities do not simply endure—they shape our future. A country that welcomes trans people, immigrants, and disabled people is not just one more just; it is more imaginative, more skilled, more capable of responding to the challenges we face. The question before us is not whether these individuals can contribute—they already are. The question is whether we will build systems and policies that recognize their humanity, intelligence and creativity and will make room for their flourishing.
International students, meanwhile, contribute more than $40 billion annually to the U.S. economy. They support nearly 400,000 jobs and fuel research and innovation in fields ranging from medicine to AI. And yet, shifting immigration policies—including travel bans, delays in Optional Practical Training (OPT), abrupt visa denials, entire families disappearing and unaccounted for, and the sudden removal of students from campuses for no reason—have made studying and staying in the U.S. increasingly precarious. One student from India pursuing a STEM degree at a liberal arts college put it bluntly: "They want our minds, but not our lives." For disabled people, data tells a story of exclusion baked into the system. Disabled workers face an unemployment rate nearly double the national average. One in four adults in the U.S. lives with a disability, yet schools remain underfunded for special education, and accessibility in public spaces is inconsistent more than three decades after the ADA was passed. A Deaf student in Ohio described it this way: "I’m not disabled by my body. I’m disabled by people not being willing to communicate with me." These voices—alongside the data—remind us that what’s at stake isn’t just access, but dignity. The policies harming these communities are not just oversights. They are choices.
This is not utopia—it is the unfinished promise of democracy. And it begins with choosing belonging over removal, solidarity over suspicion, and justice over convenience. We must insist that our lawmakers repeal harmful bans, enforce accessibility standards, and expand pathways to citizenship and healthcare. We must also expect more of our institutions: schools, employers, media, and places of worship must commit to not only protecting people’s rights but affirming their worth. And we must ask more of ourselves—because belonging is built not only in law, but in everyday gestures of care, welcome, and recognition. To fight for trans rights, immigrant justice, and disability inclusion is not to fight three separate battles, though we sometimes are made to feel that way. It is to insist that a just society does not make people prove they deserve to stay. It welcomes them home.
Dr. Jane Fernandes is president of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She is one of very few deaf college presidents in the United States.
