Trump Celebrates Women’s History Month By Issuing Anti-Trans Tirade

…so let’s take a moment to celebrate the trans people that Trump so desperately wants to erase.

Photo by Suzy Brooks on Unsplash

On Thursday, March 6, President Donald Trump issued an executive proclamation in honor of “Women’s History Month.”

“No longer will our Government promote radical ideologies that replace women with men in spaces and opportunities designed for women, or devastate families by indoctrinating our sons and daughters to begin a war with their own bodies,” the proclamation said.

Trump’s statement, which is rife with typographical errors, also went on to boast about the Administration’s promises to “secure our borders, deport illegal criminal aliens, rebuild our economy, school choice [sic], make America healthy again, and improve access to in vitro fertilization” in the name of Women’s History Month.

Meanwhile, celebrations of women’s history have reportedly been censored and shot down across the country as a result of Trump’s anti-DEI purge.

For example, the Tennessee National Guard cancelled a Women’s History Month lecture by local university professor and historian Dr. Cate LiaBraaten. “I received an email stating that because of Department of Defense changes, guest speakers are no longer allowed to focus on ‘certain groups,’” she said in a recent op-ed for The Tennessean. This tracks with a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, sent out in early February, which ended events promoting “cultural awareness months” throughout the military. And in an email obtained by NBC News back in January, State Department officials were told to remove pronouns from their email signatures or risk being fired.

Tactics like this are surface level symptoms of a deeper, more insidious trend: In order to create a future in which women are subordinate, they must construct a history in which women are obsolete. This is especially true for trans women, who are not just painted as obsolete, but quite literally erased.

This political crusade obfuscates a much more inconvenient truth: that trans and gender diverse people have always been here and always will be. In fact, trans women and gender non-conforming people (think: drag, the ballroom scene) have been at the vanguard of American culture for decades now.

Many queer activists and allies know Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, co-founders of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a hub for homeless Black and brown LGBTQ youth. They are often credited for shepherding the contemporary LGBTQ liberation movement as we know it today.

Amidst the horrendous political attacks against trans women across the country, it is important to remember that there are countless trans women whose lives, struggles, accomplishments and joys deserve recognition this month, too.

There are the Wachowski Sisters, Lilly and Lana, whose film “The Matrix” has become a cultural touchstone so pervasive that anti-trans pundits and activists routinely weaponize it without knowing that it is, in actuality, a metaphor for transness.

There was Lynn Conway, an electrical engineer who pioneered the microchip production system used in most computers and smartphones today. She is said to have “helped define the modern computing industry.”

There is CeCe McDonald, a writer who fought for the rights of incarcerated trans women while incarcerated herself, and Laverne Cox, the award-winning and barrier-breaking actress who modeled her own character on the show Orange is the New Black in Cece’s image.

There is Chelsea Manning, whose whistleblowing about American war crimes overseas changed the trajectory of the country and the world.

There are also people from our country’s past whose relationship to gender was complicated; people not easily squared away as “woman” or “man.” One such example is Pauli Murray, a Black legal scholar who played a formative role in litigating Brown v. Board of Education, which ended codified racial segregation.

Murray self-identified as a woman in some writings, but rejected womanhood in others. This may have been a product of the time — many people may not have had the lexicon to describe themselves as trans, even if they wanted to. But Murray wrote extensively about gender dysphoria — going as far as having exploratory surgery to check for evidence of undescended testes, or other physical traits that might mark Murray as someone other than the sex assigned at birth.

Murray was also a poet and writer whose words still resonate today. As Murray wrote in 1945:

“When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.”