The outcome is this project's own coding of how a case turned out, made from the court's record; it is not the court's finding. How it is coded, and how to ask for a correction, is on the About page.
Court cases about transgender and other LGBTQ+ people · federal & state courts
Cases tracked
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Case
Court
Level
Cir.
Year
Issue / type
Outcome
Docs
Every case in the corpus. Click a case name for its
overview; click any column to sort, again to reverse. Each case has one
main issue and may raise others (shown as "also…"); the Issue filter finds
a case by either. Issues were checked case by case in September 2026.
Level, circuit and outcome come from the coded caselaw dataset, so some
rows are blank where a case hasn't been coded yet.
Archive stats
Direct counts from the archive index — instant and exact.
Counts are FILINGS (docket entries); the
distinct-case figure is shown alongside.
Cases by issue
Every tracked case once, under its main issue, split by
the coded direction of its final ruling (the same reading as "Reached a
final ruling" below): favorable or adverse to the LGBTQ-rights claim, or
mixed. The empty part of each bar is cases with no coded ruling at the
trial, circuit or Supreme Court stage yet, which is most of them; it is
not a claim that they have no outcome. Choose a bar to list its cases.
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Reached a final ruling
The coded direction at the HIGHEST stage a case
reached — trial-level, circuit-court or Supreme Court only. A
preliminary-injunction ruling never counts as final, and a
"procedural, no direction" or "unclear" coding is excluded rather than
shown as an outcome.
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Case duration
Filed to terminated, from real CourtListener docket
dates, among cases where EVERY tracked docket has terminated (an open
appellate docket alongside a closed district one is pending, not
resolved). No stage-by-stage date exists in this corpus, so only this
one span is shown; dates cover only the tracked-docket tier — see the
coverage note below the numbers.
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Cases by circuit
A real geographic map, states shaded by their
circuit's case count relative to the busiest circuit (linear). The
Federal Circuit has no state territory of its own (its jurisdiction is
subject matter, not geography) and so never paints here, but still
appears in the list and the table. Select a circuit below for its
final-ruling mix.
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Table view (stages, durations and circuits)
Expert witnesses
A curated roster of the recurring expert witnesses in this
litigation, with every declaration, expert report, affidavit, deposition
and trial-testimony document the corpus holds for each, grouped by case.
Coverage is limited by what has been pulled: expert
material is heavily attachment-borne, so a witness who testified in ten
cases may show fewer here, and some documents are marked
in a larger filing — the testimony sits inside an appendix or
exhibit set rather than as its own entry.
Judges
The record counts how the judge voted, not
how the case came out. Dissents and concurrences are parsed from the
opinions themselves ("NIEMEYER, Circuit Judge, dissenting"), so a judge who
dissented is scored against the panel's result — without that, Judge
Niemeyer read 4–3 favorable to trans claimants. Partial dissents are
shown but left out of the tally.
Votes come from separate-writing headings and from
the opinion's own joinder block ("Judge Richardson wrote a dissenting
opinion, in which Judge Wilkinson, Judge Niemeyer… joined"), so a
judge who joins a dissent without writing one still counts. Judges are
resolved to real people against the Federal Judicial Center directory
using the deciding court — there are 32 federal judges named Smith, and
two Judge Pryors on the Eleventh Circuit. 195 ambiguous name/court pairs
were dropped rather than merged, and a case with no opinion text in the
corpus keeps the panel result for want of anything better.
Small numbers are small numbers: three rulings is not a
tendency.