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“…The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attack on Trans People
Opinion | The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attacks on Trans People
The message is that we are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.www.nytimes.com
“… Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights.
Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights.
Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights.
Arendt once said that “the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated.” As a stateless person, she experienced that loss of rights — unable to get papers, hiding from the police, interned as an “enemy alien” in France — before making it to the United States.
… A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place. In his Inaugural Address and one of his first executive orders, President Trump asserted that only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable. Trans people, in other words, do not exist. Executive orders aimed at banning any mention of transgender people from schools, banning trans athletes from women’s sports, ordering a stop to gender-affirming medical care for people under 19, and barring trans people from serving in the military followed.
The State Department stopped issuing passports with the “X” gender marker and began issuing passports consistent with the sex the applicant was assigned at birth, even if the person had legally changed gender. In his executive order on the military, Trump asserted that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.” During an address to Congress in February, Trump recognized a young woman who apparently suffered a brain injury during a volleyball game. Serious volleyball injuries are surprisingly common, but what stood out about this one was that the player who spiked the ball that hit her, the young woman said, was trans.
The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.
Last month, despite the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling that trans and nonbinary people are protected from workplace discrimination, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission started dropping lawsuits it had brought on their behalf.
The rights the Trump administration is taking away from trans people are relatively new. Only in the last few decades, for example, have clear legal procedures existed for changing the gender marker on identity documents, and only in the last few years have federal and some state authorities made the process fairly easy. But before transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people were recognized as a group — or groups — of people who had rights, many could blend in, fly below the radar.
Now, in their new rightlessness, they are exposed. …”
Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a loan, obtaining a driver’s license, and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders. I was once detained in Russia following a routine road check because an officer thought I was a teenage boy using his mother’s driver’s license.
It’s not just American identity documents that are being scrambled. Like all things American, Trump’s denationalization campaign affects people far beyond the United States. In late February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued visa guidelines, ostensibly designed to keep foreign trans athletes from competing in the United States, that seem to direct consular officers to deny entry to anyone whose gender markers appear different from their sex assigned at birth.
The new regulations require visitors, when filling out the paperwork to cross the border into the United States, to indicate the sex they were assigned at birth. Lucien Lambertz, a German curator who is trans and was planning a professional trip to the United States, told me they worried that they would be denied entry if they complied, indicating a birth sex different from the gender marker in their passport, but also if they didn’t comply.
… It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were.
The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.”
