Following the news has been overwhelming. The Trump administration has taken so many actions in the past 15 months that it’s hard to keep track of them all. This is a conscious strategy called “flooding the zone.” The Trump administration is doing everything on its agenda and avoiding consequences because some actions will go unnoticed.
For example, some news that has gone under the radar includes the closure of the Kennedy Center in Washington. The center, now called the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center, will close this summer for renovations. The East Wing of the White House is also still being renovated. You might have missed it, but in July 2025, the Department of Education investigated school districts in Northern Virginia for allowing transgender girls to enter women-only spaces.
This is part of the Trump administration’s larger agenda with respect to trans rights: it does not believe that transgender people are real.
The administration has taken several actions to write trans people out of existence and avoid supporting their rights, especially in education. Over time, this part of the administration’s agenda has fallen out of the public eye.
Last year, people were discussing an executive order that defined “male” and “female” based on sex “at conception.” Biological sex is more nuanced and complicated than that, as the parody song “Everyone In America Is Female” explains.
Recently, the administration removed resources for transgender people from the Internet, insisting that transgender identity is “inaccurate” and “disconnected from … immutable biological reality.” Since then, I have not seen nearly as much response online.
I only found out about these actions when I was doing research for a paper and visited the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) page. I had learned about how the OCR Back in March, a link with the words “Know Your Rights” took users to a blank page. When I looked again a few weeks ago, the link itself was gone. On the LGBTQI+ section under the Department of Health and Human Services’ website, a note at the bottom claims that any content in the page “promoting gender ideology” is “extremely inaccurate.”
Recently, the Trump administration announced that it no longer has to enforce Title IX guidelines connected to gender identity and transphobia. In 2025, a federal court “set aside” a reading of Title IX that included protections for transgender people, which was also the justification for the administration’s investigation of the Northern Virginia school districts.
The disappearance of a resource prevents people who are unsure if their rights are being respected from getting the support they need. That is by design.
Some people I’ve shared this information with have been blindsided. Others, especially transgender individuals and people with transgender friends, were completely updated on the story. This seems to be a trend in how people are following the news right now: we focus on stories that we have a personal connection to because it’s exhausting to follow everything at once. It works, but it creates blind spots.
A good way to avoid these blind spots is to work with other people. If everyone focuses on different issues and talks to their friends and family about them, it will be harder to completely miss an important story.
Ben Lapin can be reached at [email protected].
