By DAVID CRARY

Among transgender-rights activists, there’s a powerful mix of hope and fear heading toward the Nov. 3 election. They’re yearning for President Donald Trump’s defeat but dreading the possibility that his administration might win four more years and continue targeting them with hostile policies.

“The stakes are extremely high,” said Shannon Minter, a transgender attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “It seems clear that President Trump intends to use the full power of the presidency and the executive branch to inflict maximum damage on the transgender community.”

Among the administration’s moves that have been decried by activists:

A near-total ban on military service by transgender people.
Support from administration attorneys for efforts to prevent transgender girls from competing in Idaho K-12 girls’ sports and university women sports and from doing so in Connecticut high school girls’ sports.
A move to end health-care protections for trans people provided by Affordable Care Act.
Moves to eliminate anti-discrimination protections for trans people in homeless shelters and for trans students in schools.

Adding to activists’ anxiety is the continuing violence directed at transgender people. There have been at least 33 violent deaths of transgender or gender nonconforming people this year in the U.S., according to the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ-rights organization. That’s the highest yearly total since the group began tracking transgender killings in 2013.

On Oct. 16, former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival in the presidential election, issued what the Human Rights Campaign described as his strongest statement of the campaign supporting trans issues. He decried the anti-trans violence and asserted that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence “have fueled the flames of transphobia.”

The White House press office in an email exchange declined to comment on Biden’s statement. Read more via AP