Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece called “It’s still not actually about trans people.” That blog in itself was a follow up to a blog that I’d written the summer before. Given the recent flood of anti-trans executive orders over the past couple of weeks, I thought it would be a good time to revisit this topic. After all, who doesn’t love a trilogy?
To review, we’ve seen a large number of executive orders and other federal administrative actions targeted at trans people and other marginalized communities since the inauguration. A short list (as of Jan. 31):
- A federal definition of “woman” and “man” that ironically makes it so that either everyone or no one is a woman depending on which way you read it.
- A ban on transgender people in the military, calling them dishonorable, dishonest and undisciplined.
- An executive order calling for a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 19, causing some hospitals across the nation to pause life-saving, evidence-based, best-practice medical care in advance.
- Another executive order that calls for “patriotic education,” as well as cuts to federal funding for schools that allow “social transitions” of students, and threatening arrest of teachers who refuse to out their students to their parents or otherwise support their LGBTQIA-plus students.
- The chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that a ban on transgender people using the restroom that aligns with their gender identity in privately owned businesses is a “top priority” and that she plans to roll back the guidance issued under the landmark transgender anti-discrimination case Bostock v. Clayton County.
- The Office of Personnel Management released a memo instituting a transgender restroom ban in all federal buildings, as well as removing the option for federal employees to list their pronouns on official documentation.
- As I am writing this (on Jan. 31), multiple government agencies appear to be erasing trans people from federal recognition. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials are actively scrubbing web pages of any reference to LGBTQIA-plus individuals and health care, including stats on LGBTQIA-plus youth, information about HIV/AIDS prevention, information on gender-affirming care and more. The State Department has also modified “LGBTQIA+” to only “LGB” on its travel information pages. This is the most rapidly developing area of change and will likely include more government web pages by the time this blog is published.
This is … a lot. Part of the reason this blog has taken me so long to write is because every time I start writing on something, a new thing comes up, so much so that while I think this list is complete as of writing, I very well could have missed something. This administration is moving at breakneck speed to fully erase transgender people from American society. I’ll be completely honest when I say I’ve been running primarily on espresso, energy drinks and pure rage more than anything else. It is a terrifying time to be trans in this country.
Despite all of that, I don’t think any of this is actually about trans people, and the speed at which this is happening is proof of that. Now, don’t get me wrong, I fully believe that this administration and those who support these actions are acting with pure malice towards transgender people, our families and our communities. This is transphobia plain and simple, and I will not call it anything else. But this full press attack on our rights is about something far greater than the hatred of a single minority group.
It is a testing ground.
This administration is attacking transgender rights to see what they can get away with, and to see who they can scare into complying in advance without having to do any real legislative work. The majority of these executive orders are far beyond the constitutional authority of the executive branch. Judges are going to block them just as fast as this administration is able to put them out. It’s an overreach of the highest order — and that’s precisely why they’re issuing so many all at once.
There are likely multiple strategies in play right now.
By putting out this many actions at the same time, advocacy groups are going to be stretched thin. There is only so much humanpower and financial support that can be spent on these issues all at once. There are only so many activists, lawyers and organizers, and if they can exhaust us early on, they can get away with more later.
They are also laying the groundwork for the rest of their plans. By pushing these issues into the courts, there will be some likely outcomes.
The one that they’re hoping for is that the courts will uphold the orders as legal, though as mentioned before I think this is unlikely for a large number of them. For the ones that get knocked down, however, they’re likely hoping for judges to hand them a road map for how they can legally accomplish their goals. This is not unheard of: In my very first blog for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, I pointed to Justice Samuel Alito providing a religious university with a step-by-step guide on how to ensure the Supreme Court would uphold its claim to discriminate against LGBTQIA-plus students in the future. Such institutions would then proceed to use that groundwork not only to attack transgender people, but anyone else who does not meet the standard of white Christian nationalism.
And they are hoping people will simply comply in advance, even if they don’t need to, out of pure fear. This is already happening in hospitals across the country that are canceling gender- affirming care appointments out of an abundance of legal caution. While many brave school systems have publicly refused to comply with the educational executive order, many more likely will in order to try and preserve access to federal funding in a moment where all funding is terrifyingly uncertain. This is where I think the choice to target trans people is a particularly intentional starting point.
Trans people are a minority that most Americans don’t have much personal experience with. Trans adults make up roughly 1.6 percent of U.S. adults (which, while a small percentage, is still more than 4.1 million people, and that number does not include trans youth under the age of 18). Most people could not name a trans person that they regularly interact with. Since colonization, conservative Christian theology has carried massive cultural influence in the United States, and under its framework, gender deviance is equated with sexual violence. By stoking fears around “indoctrination,” “grooming” and “harm to women,” the Christian nationalist movement is able to gain the power to institute outright Christo-fascism in the United States. It is also banking on the fact that since so few people have a trans person in their day-to-day life, they won’t be bothered enough to fight back.
Unfortunately, even among people who one might normally expect to support the right to bodily autonomy and self-determination, we are seeing this strategy start to take hold. Some have bought into the pseudoscience bought and paid for by the Christian nationalist movement, saying that they no longer trust the longstanding mainstream medical consensus on trans health care. Others say that they support trans rights, but they think that trans people have been pushing “too hard” to protect our rights, and that from a strategic standpoint we need to sacrifice trans rights on the altar of bipartisanship as a “compromise” to preserve other rights.
Let me be absolutely clear here. Abandoning trans people will not save secular democracy. It will only embolden the rising Christo-fascist movement currently overtaking large parts of our government. It is already taking very real steps to reduce women to their reproductive capacity, replacing history curriculum with propaganda and undoing over a century of civil rights progress for people of color, disabled people, LGBTQIA-plus people, non-Christians and beyond. And proponents of this ideology are wrapping it in a neat bow of transphobia because they think this will let them get away with it. If I cannot convince you to care about trans rights by nature of the fact that we are real people who merely want to live our lives free of religious cultural interference, perhaps you will care about the larger picture.
I’ll leave you with a closing reminder. On May 6, 1933, just three years after the Berlin-based Institute for Sexual Research performed the first recorded gender-affirming surgery, the Nazis raided it — an act that led to one of the largest book burnings of the entire period. Over 20,000 books, many of which were irreplaceable, were engulfed in flames, setting back by decades our understanding of gender and sexuality. Under the guise of “protecting” the German people from “sexual deviance,” tens of thousands of gay and transgender individuals were imprisoned, tortured and murdered under the Nazi regime. The exact same type of rhetoric we are seeing used against trans people in the United States today is what the Third Reich used to justify and open the door to its atrocities, not just against LGBTQIA-plus people, but anyone who did not fit their vision of a racially and sexually pure country. The best day to stop this in its tracks was yesterday. But the next best day is today, and then, and the day after that, and the day after that.
Photo by Thiago Rocha on Unsplash
Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
