The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attack 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. …”