Aug. 5, 2025, 6:56 p.m.
In early July, the Federal Trade Commission held an unusual workshop investigating alleged dangers of gender-affirming care for transgender minors and whether those who offer such care could be investigated by the agency under its jurisdiction over unfair or deceptive trade practices.
The workshop triggered a message from FTC career staffers who warned it was leading the agency down an unprecedented road. Investigating the confidential advice doctors give to their patients would be a step well beyond the agency’s mandate of protecting consumers.
“Simply put, in our judgment, this is not the FTC’s lane,” the letter said, as first reported by Reuters.
In a follow-up last week, the agency requested comments on gender-affirming care and “the harms consumers may be experiencing,” as it determines what actions to take moving forward.
The agency’s recent moves have sparked outrage among LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, civil rights advocates, and FTC staffers. But technology policy advocates see them as the perfect example of why an online safety bill expanding the power of the FTC and states to go after online content deemed harmful to children should be stopped.
“What you are creating through the FTC is a potential witch hunt, where they are able to use their authority, whether through congressional legislation or their interpretation of their statute of authority, to block people from realizing their true identity,” said Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. “The FTC as the arbiter of people’s identity could become very problematic if the law leans into their jurisdictional authority over how people choose to live their lives.”
The Kids Online Safety Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal, would require online platforms visited by children to protect against a long list of potential harms, including addictive behavior, mental health disorders that may be linked to online use, online bullying, and sexual predation. The bill hands enforcement to the FTC, as well as state attorneys general offices.
KOSA has widespread support in the halls of Congress. It passed the Senate in a 91-3 vote last summer, before dying in the lower chamber without a floor vote due to opposition from House Speaker Mike Johnson.
But critics have warned the law’s broadly defined duty of care section would give the White House or state attorneys general wide leeway in determining what is harmful to children and effectively censoring online content they disagree with.
“The real danger of KOSA is that its terms are so broad in terms of what social media and online services are supposed to sort of censor. … [I]t’s so capacious that basically any administration or any FTC leadership could put whatever priority they would like to censor into that box in KOSA and go after that speech online,” said Aaron Mackey, the free speech and transparency litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Blumenthal, the lead Democrat on the bill, has denied it would give regulators the power to censor LGBTQ-related content. He said he worked with some advocacy groups to tweak the duty of care section enough to ease their concerns.
Those adjustments include limiting the section to only apply to design features on websites and apps, such as notifications, auto-play, personalized design features, and in-game purchases, rather than all the content on a website. The bill’s authors also removed a requirement to protect children from any mental disorder listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which would have included gender dysphoria.
The changes were enough to convince several LGTBQ+ advocacy groups, including GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and the National Center for Transgender Equality, to drop their opposition to the bill and instead adopt a neutral position. That in turn led Senate Democrats to overwhelmingly support the bill.
More recently, actions by the Trump administration have prompted GLAAD to reassess its neutrality on KOSA.
“When reviewing KOSA, lawmakers must now take recent, harmful and unprecedented actions from the FTC and other federal agencies against LGBTQ people and other historically marginalized groups into consideration,” Rich Ferraro, GLAAD’s chief communications officer, told The Washington Post in June.
Not all groups have renewed their opposition, however. The Human Rights Campaign told National Journal in a Tuesday email that they remain neutral towards KOSA.
The National Center for Transgender Equality has since merged with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund to form the Advocates for Trans Equality. They also continue to remain neutral on the bill, Ash Lazarus Orr, the organization’s press manager, told National Journal.
“We are not actively opposing the KOSA bill in its current form. However, we have been and will continue to monitor its progress closely as it moves, or if it even moves through the Senate and the House,” Lazarus said. “Should any amendments or new provisions be introduced, we will obviously reassess and respond accordingly.”
For some advocates, the changes were never enough to reduce their fears that the bill could lead to censorship.
“The duty of care is the mechanism in KOSA that creates that liability for social media companies that incentivizes them to censor content,” Sarah Philips, a campaigner with the online civil rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, said. “Duty of care is the inherent part that enables censorship, and that is still in the bill.”
Fight for the Future published a letter in June signed by 2,000 LGBTQ+ activists and celebrities telling lawmakers who support KOSA to “stay home” from pride events.
Philips said the FTC workshop on gender-affirming care showed “exactly” why they are so concerned about KOSA.
“The current FTC is bent on going after trans kids, going after gender-affirming health care in a lot of ways,” she said. This “is exactly what the coalition of human rights groups, trans rights groups, LGBTQ rights groups have been saying—and also, in particular, the parents of trans kids who signed our letters to the Senate against KOSA, who warned that an FTC with the right administration would use the power that KOSA gives them to censor content that is affirming for trans kids, affirming for LGBTQ kids.”
Mackey warned that if the Trump administration, along with Republican state attorneys general, used KOSA to aggressively censor speech they disagreed with, it could lead to a censorship arms race as Democratic regulators respond in kind.
“We're talking about access to basic information about people’s physical health, sexual reproduction, or LGBTQ identity communities, health care,” Mackey said. “But we’re also talking about things like dangers with sports, someone claiming that tackle football is hazardous to your health, or access to information about guns is hazardous to your health. All those sorts of things could get caught up.”
Blumenthal agreed that “LGBTQ is under attack” by the Trump administration, but he rejected the idea that KOSA could be used to censor online speech.
“I have worked with the lawyers and civil rights leaders in the LGBTQ community for years to make sure that the Kids Online Safety Act does not empower anyone to silence or censor speech,” the senator said Tuesday in an emailed statement. “There will always be people and groups who prioritize the freedom of Big Tech over the freedom of kids to live their lives without the fear of bullying or exploitation or eating disorders. But the human cost of inaction is too great to ignore.”
