Erin, you are sounding a clarion bell! As a cis man, I know many cis and gay men and women who don’t seem to understand the true depth and depravity of using trans folks as the first step in normalizing oppression of all minorities. Please keep doing your indispensable work! I hope you - and we - will break through!
Even beyond the direct impacts to classes of people is the leveraging of trans-bigotry to end other programs and safety nets. Biden admin added gender dysphoria to the list of childhood disabilities covered under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. 17 States are suing to remove 504 protections and using the Biden administration's addition as a way of killing federal education funding for children with disabilities.
They are turning us into pariahs. I really started feeling it after the election. Customers don't want to talk to me at work, my coworkers will only talk to me when they have no choice, people in my community avoid me, even people in my own family are avoiding me.
This is the most scared I have ever been in my life. It helps, knowing that you are on the front lines keeping us informed.
Academic and professional colleagues "don't know me" now, my journalist contacts have "lost my number", and I feel a pulling away from some LGB portions of our community. I feel a distinct chill towards all things Trans. It's now considered "dangerous" to be around us, because no one knows when MAGA stalwarts or Trumpist law enforcement will savagely attack us.
There's an element of ozone in the air, the sense of imminent violence, that copper scented moment right before a storm breaks and releases shattering destruction and unmitigated waste, and afterwards nothing will be the same.
I feel it.
I feel it in my bad left knee, my nerve-wrecked left leg, in my ancient and fearful heart. I feel it within the crinkle and pull of my skin as I think of the horror facing Trans kids, the kids who were supposed to have BETTER lives than us, because they wouldn't have to lie to survive like US, because they wouldn't have to constantly face down violence and death like we did, because they could just be themselves without having to go through a cross gender pubescence and then once hitting 18 begin walking it all back, spending tens of thousands of dollars, years and years of treatment. They were supposed to just grow up in their actual lived and experienced gender just as their cisgender peers get to take for granted, instead of being forced to adulthood in a gender that wasn't theirs, that was only the one assigned to them at birth after a five second visual examination.
But no, no, that's not their present or future, because fascist hatemongers stole that life away from Trans kids, with some ignorant bigoted religious fanatical idea that they can FORCE kids to adopt their gender assigned at birth and pretend to own that gender even though that's not even actually possible, you can't turn someone cisgender anymore than you could "turn someone gay", and if they just LISTENED to us, or the science, or the doctors and experts, they would KNOW, but they don't WANT the truth they don't WANT to know, they just WANT us eradicated eliminated eviscerated exterminated.
This is what keeps me from sleeping.
I imagine the life I never had, that my generation and others could never have had, the life that was supposed to belong to each and every young Trans person, a life of freedom and growth and acceptance and joy, especially most especially, the joy, the gender euphoria that was supposed to somehow secure them their future and validate all the otherwise stupid and disastrous suffering of all other generations of transgender people who lived before them, as far back as when the first he/she/they shaman polished the first piece of meteorite fallen from the sky into an Earth Goddess shape while pondering divinity and venerated her sacred image with rubbed perfume and ochre and hemp flowers on a Siberian plain 30,000 years ago.
I want that future back, for them, along with that sense of safety and security that has been stolen from them. I will sacrifice what life I have left to redeem that future for these kids, and I'm not the only one. Let fate take me and let them live in the light of their truths, feeling the air and the sun on their skin as their genuine and authentic selves, without having to lie and hide and suffer like we did.
Jana, your sense of isolation is heartbreaking. I hope you have SOME kind of support network. If you do, consider some sort of mutual assistance pact. I fear that only WE can help US.
This article is haunting. Erin, you write in a captivating manner that embodies passion and urgency. Collectively, the United States are in imminent danger and it is clear that if we are to remain a nation at all, we must enact change immediately.
I was recently thinking about this. In my 'homeland', Hungary gender affirming care was completely eliminated by making it legally very difficult and by jailing the most senior doctor in the field with false accusations. They also intimidated every doctor in the country offering GAC.
I think banning GAC will not be the end of it, reeducation camps or concentration camps are coming. That is why it is our responsibility to record everything so that we can prove it afterwards when we bring these gangsters to justice. They will have to taste final punishment by law, it is inevitable.
Thank you Erin, as always. As someone aware of that history, I wish I could say I was shocked, or even surprised, that it is being repeated here. Indeed, many of us know that the government's reactionary attacks on trans people are the prelude to much broader repression. For years it's been a stated goal to "separate the T from the LGB," and after that more will come, not only to sexual minorities but to women and people of color as well.
I fear not just for us and those others, but for the world. May the many good people out there find the courage to stand up and speak out before it's too late. Strength and courage to us all.
Various of the CIA-installed death squad dictatorships (in Bolivia, the OG Nazi Klaus Barbie was brought on for several cocaine coups & remained on the CIA payroll until 1982, shortly before his death). However, the most material I’ve seen about trans people (mostly trans women) being targeted has been from Brazil & Argentina, where disappearances, plausibly even the sort of being thrown out of helicopters the Right never stops fantasising about repeating, plausibly greatly magnify the casualty estimates (torture seriously wounds) based on survivors’ self-reports. Argentina has a YouTube channel with survivor accounts. There’s more fragmented information about Brazil, though it’s survivors of imprisonment like Argentina’s, just as part of news reports vs. a charity’s archive of oral history.
In Europe, fascism extended from Lisbon to Warsaw & Palermo to Tromsø & Franco & Salazar held out until 1974. As the mention of Klaus Barbie above may have hinted, it also spread far & wide as propagated by its original adherents. WACL, the World Anti-Communist League, featured many of the responsible dictators & could be a way to find more instances.
The reason the examples are so limited is that there hasn’t been quite as much sympathy for trans people in the past, so the extermination and/or mass imprisonment of trans people wasn’t cast as a crime against humanity or any sort of injustice by observers or commentators at the times of the events or their near sequels. However, the extermination & mass imprisonment of trans people still has been done many more times than 1930s-40s Germany and yes they were following in those footsteps as Colonia Dignidad & Klaus Barbie & much more demonstrate.
The thing that really gets me is how blatantly they're just copying the Nazis' playbook- and how it's just being completely ignored in the news. I know, I know, the banality of evil and all that... but how can so many people still not see what's happening? How is it not painfully obvious? How is it not dominating every single headline? Instead, the mainstream media is still carping on about inflation this, trade war that... 𝘸𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘶𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺! We're marching towards camps and ovens, here, and everyone who isn't among the fascists' current targets seems to be paying no attention at all to the air raid sirens. I can't help wondering if some of them 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 won't catch a clue even as they're being herded into boxcars...
Joan, The travesty (for me) is how silent our "allies" have been during all of this. I happen to be a Libertarian. MY national party (which claims to be laser focused on individual freedom) has been absolutely quiet about these assaults. My state party has likewise found nothing amiss in this obvious bulldozing of individual liberty.
The snowball of extermination is picking up speed. I saw a clip a couple of days ago in which Trump said that all of America’s economic problems were caused by trans people, specifically the government paying for trans folks’ surgeries.
The claim is beyond absurd, but that just may be the point. He can say anything at all no matter how hateful or demonstrably false it might be.
In any case, just wanted to agree that things do indeed feel different today. And I’m literally terrified.
Excellent article Erin. As abhorrent as these digital erasure efforts are, we can hope that our advocacy organizations will file lawsuits and stop this in the courts. Even more importantly, these horrid erasure efforts can’t - and won’t - stop trans people from existing. Trans people are beautiful human beings that will always exist, and NEED to exist.
I fear for what will happen when Trump and Musk and their cronies move on to openly defying the Federal Courts. If the DOJ refuses to prosecute Contempt of Court charges, will the judges refuse to try Federal charges for other (perhaps non-violent) crimes by slow-walking them a la Aileen Cannon?
What will the Supreme Court do if it gets to them?
I agree there are lots of reasons to be concerned and this article by Chris Geidner (/aka Law Dork) I think does a good job at taking stock of where we are right now with regard to the Trump administration and complying with court orders -
The historical parallels are unavoidable. What follows now is the nearly nationwide education and ultimate acceptance that transgender is equivalent to evil. Faced with evil, the common man will be encouraged to help stamp it out. People on the street will soon become emboldened to take aggressive action against "the subhuman enemy." Assault/murder will be forgiven since it was done in the name of "the cause." While WE wait for the hopefully soon arrival of adult leadership, our only defense will be ourselves. PLEASE, keep your situational awareness honed. Know your surroundings and truly practice risk management. If we're going to come out on the other side, we need to remember what we did, in days gone by, to stay invisible. Some day we'll be able to loudly proclaim our identity, but that day isn't today. The White Rose society was NAZI Germany's quiet conscience. We will need to be willing to likewise work clandestinely for true justice.
Vigilantism isn’t that common. The bodily state of being significantly medically transitioned will be made illegal & the police will do all the dirty work. The average Joe needs only to snitch, not to get their hands dirty.
Nadia, I agree that the police will do most of the dirty work, but wouldn't you agree that those who now merely talk about their hatred for us will be happy to join in the actual physical violence, once it becomes acceptable?
Magnus’ Scientific Humanitarian Committee motto was “Through Science to Justice.” He was a truly revolutionary man and the loss of the work he pioneered set us all back a century or more.
Excellent piece. People have to be made to understand that the strategy of targeting trans folks is NOT at the end of the day about trans folks. There simply aren't enough trans folks to spend this much time targeting them. No, it is about normalizing cruelty toward disfavored groups and establishing a legal and societal framework for excluding and eradicating any group of people that white Christian nationalists do not like. Instead of buying the fascist narratives and throwing transgender people under the bus, the Democratic Party needs to communicate IN CONCRETE TERMS that trans rights are human rights and that the nullification of those rights harms EVERYONE.
Erin, you are sounding a clarion bell! As a cis man, I know many cis and gay men and women who don’t seem to understand the true depth and depravity of using trans folks as the first step in normalizing oppression of all minorities. Please keep doing your indispensable work! I hope you - and we - will break through!
Even beyond the direct impacts to classes of people is the leveraging of trans-bigotry to end other programs and safety nets. Biden admin added gender dysphoria to the list of childhood disabilities covered under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. 17 States are suing to remove 504 protections and using the Biden administration's addition as a way of killing federal education funding for children with disabilities.
They are turning us into pariahs. I really started feeling it after the election. Customers don't want to talk to me at work, my coworkers will only talk to me when they have no choice, people in my community avoid me, even people in my own family are avoiding me.
This is the most scared I have ever been in my life. It helps, knowing that you are on the front lines keeping us informed.
Thank you
Jana, I feel it too.
Academic and professional colleagues "don't know me" now, my journalist contacts have "lost my number", and I feel a pulling away from some LGB portions of our community. I feel a distinct chill towards all things Trans. It's now considered "dangerous" to be around us, because no one knows when MAGA stalwarts or Trumpist law enforcement will savagely attack us.
There's an element of ozone in the air, the sense of imminent violence, that copper scented moment right before a storm breaks and releases shattering destruction and unmitigated waste, and afterwards nothing will be the same.
I feel it.
I feel it in my bad left knee, my nerve-wrecked left leg, in my ancient and fearful heart. I feel it within the crinkle and pull of my skin as I think of the horror facing Trans kids, the kids who were supposed to have BETTER lives than us, because they wouldn't have to lie to survive like US, because they wouldn't have to constantly face down violence and death like we did, because they could just be themselves without having to go through a cross gender pubescence and then once hitting 18 begin walking it all back, spending tens of thousands of dollars, years and years of treatment. They were supposed to just grow up in their actual lived and experienced gender just as their cisgender peers get to take for granted, instead of being forced to adulthood in a gender that wasn't theirs, that was only the one assigned to them at birth after a five second visual examination.
But no, no, that's not their present or future, because fascist hatemongers stole that life away from Trans kids, with some ignorant bigoted religious fanatical idea that they can FORCE kids to adopt their gender assigned at birth and pretend to own that gender even though that's not even actually possible, you can't turn someone cisgender anymore than you could "turn someone gay", and if they just LISTENED to us, or the science, or the doctors and experts, they would KNOW, but they don't WANT the truth they don't WANT to know, they just WANT us eradicated eliminated eviscerated exterminated.
This is what keeps me from sleeping.
I imagine the life I never had, that my generation and others could never have had, the life that was supposed to belong to each and every young Trans person, a life of freedom and growth and acceptance and joy, especially most especially, the joy, the gender euphoria that was supposed to somehow secure them their future and validate all the otherwise stupid and disastrous suffering of all other generations of transgender people who lived before them, as far back as when the first he/she/they shaman polished the first piece of meteorite fallen from the sky into an Earth Goddess shape while pondering divinity and venerated her sacred image with rubbed perfume and ochre and hemp flowers on a Siberian plain 30,000 years ago.
I want that future back, for them, along with that sense of safety and security that has been stolen from them. I will sacrifice what life I have left to redeem that future for these kids, and I'm not the only one. Let fate take me and let them live in the light of their truths, feeling the air and the sun on their skin as their genuine and authentic selves, without having to lie and hide and suffer like we did.
This is my prayer, my only one.
This is beautifully said. Thank you for sharing and naming the immense grief I’m feeling for my trans 12 years old and her future.
Jana, your sense of isolation is heartbreaking. I hope you have SOME kind of support network. If you do, consider some sort of mutual assistance pact. I fear that only WE can help US.
This article is haunting. Erin, you write in a captivating manner that embodies passion and urgency. Collectively, the United States are in imminent danger and it is clear that if we are to remain a nation at all, we must enact change immediately.
I was recently thinking about this. In my 'homeland', Hungary gender affirming care was completely eliminated by making it legally very difficult and by jailing the most senior doctor in the field with false accusations. They also intimidated every doctor in the country offering GAC.
I think banning GAC will not be the end of it, reeducation camps or concentration camps are coming. That is why it is our responsibility to record everything so that we can prove it afterwards when we bring these gangsters to justice. They will have to taste final punishment by law, it is inevitable.
Thank you Erin, as always. As someone aware of that history, I wish I could say I was shocked, or even surprised, that it is being repeated here. Indeed, many of us know that the government's reactionary attacks on trans people are the prelude to much broader repression. For years it's been a stated goal to "separate the T from the LGB," and after that more will come, not only to sexual minorities but to women and people of color as well.
I fear not just for us and those others, but for the world. May the many good people out there find the courage to stand up and speak out before it's too late. Strength and courage to us all.
Various of the CIA-installed death squad dictatorships (in Bolivia, the OG Nazi Klaus Barbie was brought on for several cocaine coups & remained on the CIA payroll until 1982, shortly before his death). However, the most material I’ve seen about trans people (mostly trans women) being targeted has been from Brazil & Argentina, where disappearances, plausibly even the sort of being thrown out of helicopters the Right never stops fantasising about repeating, plausibly greatly magnify the casualty estimates (torture seriously wounds) based on survivors’ self-reports. Argentina has a YouTube channel with survivor accounts. There’s more fragmented information about Brazil, though it’s survivors of imprisonment like Argentina’s, just as part of news reports vs. a charity’s archive of oral history.
In Europe, fascism extended from Lisbon to Warsaw & Palermo to Tromsø & Franco & Salazar held out until 1974. As the mention of Klaus Barbie above may have hinted, it also spread far & wide as propagated by its original adherents. WACL, the World Anti-Communist League, featured many of the responsible dictators & could be a way to find more instances.
The reason the examples are so limited is that there hasn’t been quite as much sympathy for trans people in the past, so the extermination and/or mass imprisonment of trans people wasn’t cast as a crime against humanity or any sort of injustice by observers or commentators at the times of the events or their near sequels. However, the extermination & mass imprisonment of trans people still has been done many more times than 1930s-40s Germany and yes they were following in those footsteps as Colonia Dignidad & Klaus Barbie & much more demonstrate.
The thing that really gets me is how blatantly they're just copying the Nazis' playbook- and how it's just being completely ignored in the news. I know, I know, the banality of evil and all that... but how can so many people still not see what's happening? How is it not painfully obvious? How is it not dominating every single headline? Instead, the mainstream media is still carping on about inflation this, trade war that... 𝘸𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘶𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺! We're marching towards camps and ovens, here, and everyone who isn't among the fascists' current targets seems to be paying no attention at all to the air raid sirens. I can't help wondering if some of them 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 won't catch a clue even as they're being herded into boxcars...
Joan, The travesty (for me) is how silent our "allies" have been during all of this. I happen to be a Libertarian. MY national party (which claims to be laser focused on individual freedom) has been absolutely quiet about these assaults. My state party has likewise found nothing amiss in this obvious bulldozing of individual liberty.
The snowball of extermination is picking up speed. I saw a clip a couple of days ago in which Trump said that all of America’s economic problems were caused by trans people, specifically the government paying for trans folks’ surgeries.
The claim is beyond absurd, but that just may be the point. He can say anything at all no matter how hateful or demonstrably false it might be.
In any case, just wanted to agree that things do indeed feel different today. And I’m literally terrified.
Will share this widely. Thank you, Erin , for holding strong and being an inspiring leader.
Excellent article Erin. As abhorrent as these digital erasure efforts are, we can hope that our advocacy organizations will file lawsuits and stop this in the courts. Even more importantly, these horrid erasure efforts can’t - and won’t - stop trans people from existing. Trans people are beautiful human beings that will always exist, and NEED to exist.
Thanks for your hard work, Erin.
I fear for what will happen when Trump and Musk and their cronies move on to openly defying the Federal Courts. If the DOJ refuses to prosecute Contempt of Court charges, will the judges refuse to try Federal charges for other (perhaps non-violent) crimes by slow-walking them a la Aileen Cannon?
What will the Supreme Court do if it gets to them?
I agree there are lots of reasons to be concerned and this article by Chris Geidner (/aka Law Dork) I think does a good job at taking stock of where we are right now with regard to the Trump administration and complying with court orders -
https://www.lawdork.com/p/donald-trump-elon-musk-democracy
The historical parallels are unavoidable. What follows now is the nearly nationwide education and ultimate acceptance that transgender is equivalent to evil. Faced with evil, the common man will be encouraged to help stamp it out. People on the street will soon become emboldened to take aggressive action against "the subhuman enemy." Assault/murder will be forgiven since it was done in the name of "the cause." While WE wait for the hopefully soon arrival of adult leadership, our only defense will be ourselves. PLEASE, keep your situational awareness honed. Know your surroundings and truly practice risk management. If we're going to come out on the other side, we need to remember what we did, in days gone by, to stay invisible. Some day we'll be able to loudly proclaim our identity, but that day isn't today. The White Rose society was NAZI Germany's quiet conscience. We will need to be willing to likewise work clandestinely for true justice.
"we need to remember what we did, in days gone by, to stay invisible."
Are there any details you can share on this for us newer eggs?
Vigilantism isn’t that common. The bodily state of being significantly medically transitioned will be made illegal & the police will do all the dirty work. The average Joe needs only to snitch, not to get their hands dirty.
Nadia, I agree that the police will do most of the dirty work, but wouldn't you agree that those who now merely talk about their hatred for us will be happy to join in the actual physical violence, once it becomes acceptable?
Some will, but as always, the vast majority are too much of cowards to ever act with the courage of their convictions.
Your reporting is so vital for our community right now. Thank you. No matter what they try and do we will live our lives with trans joy!!
Magnus’ Scientific Humanitarian Committee motto was “Through Science to Justice.” He was a truly revolutionary man and the loss of the work he pioneered set us all back a century or more.
For Magnus!
Excellent piece. People have to be made to understand that the strategy of targeting trans folks is NOT at the end of the day about trans folks. There simply aren't enough trans folks to spend this much time targeting them. No, it is about normalizing cruelty toward disfavored groups and establishing a legal and societal framework for excluding and eradicating any group of people that white Christian nationalists do not like. Instead of buying the fascist narratives and throwing transgender people under the bus, the Democratic Party needs to communicate IN CONCRETE TERMS that trans rights are human rights and that the nullification of those rights harms EVERYONE.
Erin, thanks so much for this critical reporting!