The Numbers Behind America's Trans Rights Rollback, as of Late May 2026

It is easy, covering the steady stream of anti-trans legislation in the United States, to lose the thread in the volume. A bill advances in one state; a court blocks one in another; a third becomes law with little notice. Each individual story is small. The cumulative picture is not, and every so often the trackers that monitor this produce a number that makes the scale legible. This week produced two of them, a day apart.

What the data shows

According to the Movement Advancement Project, which maintains the most-cited maps of U.S. LGBTQ+ policy, data current as of May 22, 2026 shows that 40% of transgender youth aged 13 to 17 now live in states with laws barring trans students from playing school sports consistent with their gender identity. The following day, May 23, a second MAP figure landed: 18% of the transgender population aged 13 and older — close to one in five — now lives in a state that bans trans people from using restrooms and facilities consistent with their gender identity in government-owned buildings, a category that includes public schools, universities, and other public spaces.

Those two percentages describe different things, and the gap between them is informative. Sports bans have spread faster and reach further because they were the first front in this legislative wave and because they are framed around a narrow, sympathetic-sounding population — school athletes. Bathroom bans are newer as a mass phenomenon and reach a wider group of people, since they apply to adults as well as minors, but fewer states have enacted the most sweeping versions. Read together, they show a rollback that is both broad and still expanding.

The wider legislative landscape

The two MAP figures sit inside a much larger count. The American Civil Liberties Union, which tracks anti-LGBTQ+ legislation nationally, has logged just under 400 bills targeting LGBTQ+ people in U.S. state legislatures in the 2026 sessions. Not all of those will pass — most will not — but the count itself is the point. A volume of 400 bills is not a series of isolated local disputes. It is a coordinated national strategy, with model legislation circulated between states and a relatively small number of advocacy organisations behind a large share of the text.

The bills cluster around a recognisable set of targets: school sports, restroom access, gender-affirming healthcare for minors, identification documents, curriculum and library content, and drag performance. Healthcare restrictions have drawn the most litigation, and the documentary trail behind some of them has been revealing — reporting in Florida, for instance, surfaced emails showing an influential national anti-trans group drafting language for a bill aimed at gender-affirming care providers. The bills are local in form and national in origin.

Why these numbers, and why now

Late May is when this data tends to crystallise, because most state legislatures hold their main sessions from January into the spring. By the end of May, the year’s laws are mostly known: what passed has passed, what died has died, and the trackers can recalculate how many people live under each kind of restriction. The May 22 and May 23 figures are, in effect, a near-final scoreboard for the 2026 legislative year.

The percentages also matter because they reframe the debate away from abstraction. “A state passed a sports ban” is a political sentence. “40% of trans teenagers in the country cannot play on a team that matches who they are” is a sentence about children, and it is the more accurate one. Behind the second figure are roughly one in five trans Americans who must now think about which public restroom is legally available to them before they leave the house — at school, at a public university, at a government office.

The counter-pressure

The picture is not static in only one direction. Courts have blocked or narrowed a number of these laws, and litigation over healthcare bans and identification policies continues to move through the federal system. A bloc of states has moved the other way, strengthening protections and, in some cases, positioning themselves as refuges for trans families relocating from states where care is restricted. The United States in 2026 is not converging on a single policy; it is splitting into two, with the line a trans person’s rights now depend heavily on the state where they happen to live.

That is the real meaning of this week’s two numbers. They are not a forecast and not an argument — they are a measurement. As of late May 2026, this is simply where things stand. The trackers will update the figures again next year, and the only open question is which direction the percentages move.

This article discusses legislation affecting transgender people’s access to healthcare, public facilities, and school sports. If you are LGBTQ+ and struggling, support is available — and you are not alone.