Anti-trans hate is dangerously in vogue in the United States right now. Powerful, influential figures ranging from stand-up comedians to presidential hopefuls are using their large platforms to perpetuate and amplify decades-old myths about transgender people—they’re mentally ill, they’re grooming your kids, they’re predators trying to infiltrate women’s spaces, they’re “pushed” into transitioning and are bound to regret it—with distressingly feeble pushback from an American public that ought to know better by now. These transphobic misconceptions have been debunked by research and roundly rejected by medical associations, yet they persist in the national psyche thanks to the machinations of large anti-LGBTQ+ groups and a complacent, self-deceiving population with a long history of throwing vulnerable minorities under the bus.
To be sure, transphobia is nothing new, but in the past few years it has escalated and spread to the point that it’s now literally driving government policy. At the behest of far-right organizations like the American Principles Project and the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom—and no doubt calculating that the rest of the population is unlikely to stick up for the trans community—Republican legislators are aggressively pushing for laws that aim for nothing less than the systematic elimination of trans people from society. What began as a narrowly focused effort to ban trans women and girls from bathrooms and sports teams just a few years ago has mushroomed into an all-out assault on trans rights, with GOP state lawmakers introducing over 200 pieces of anti-trans legislation in the past month alone. That’s already more than the number of such bills in all of 2022.
These proposed laws, many of which contain near-identical language drawn from ADF-authored templates, include provisions that would:
- define gender-affirming care for minors as “child abuse” and take trans children away from their parents;
- invoke anti-obscenity laws to prohibit minors from being “exposed” to transgender people;
- ban all accommodations for transgender kids in public schools;
- criminalize doctors who provide hormone therapy, puberty blockers, or gender-affirming surgery.
Just as the number and aggressiveness of these laws have increased dramatically, the rhetoric used to support them has escalated from anti-trans dog whistles (“Stop the groomers! Protect women’s sports!”) to explicitly dehumanizing language. As trans activist Erin Reed reports, GOP legislators like North Dakota Representative Scott Dyk and conservative pundits like Tucker Carlson have compared trans people variously to “secondhand smoke,” “an infection,” and “cockroaches” within the last year. It’s significant that this language bears more than a passing resemblance to the epithets applied to minority groups in the lead-up to many a modern-day atrocity; Hutus infamously referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches” before and during the Rwandan genocide, while Donald Trump’s characterization of Latin American migrants as an “infestation” helped pave the way for separating children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Nor is the current trend of trans dehumanization limited to performative politics in state legislatures or on Fox News; thanks to the misguided platforming of transphobic writers in mainstream forums (one of the many disastrous consequences of both-sides journalism), anti-trans propaganda has acquired that most dangerous of rhetorical assets: a veneer of intellectual respectability. One of the more egregious recent examples, discussed at length here by feminist author Jude Doyle, is the 2021 Substack newsletter in which cryptofascist writer Andrew Sullivan proposed a solution to what he called—I swear am not making this up—“the trans question.” Doyle explains:
Sullivan lays forth his vision of a “truce” between trans people, who would like to exist, and transphobes, who believe we shouldn’t. This would be a world in which we don’t outlaw trans people, necessarily, but we do have laws in place to limit their numbers and render them second-class citizens.
The “reasonable” policy includes segregated public facilities. (“Separate facilities for trans people is the sanest and least dangerous option.”) It includes banning gender-affirming healthcare for most minors, and potentially for adults who don’t pass gatekeeping standards. (“There should be some measure other than simply a statement by the person to show that the transition is genuine and sustained.”) It includes forbidding teachers to tell their students that “they have a choice over whether to be a boy or a girl,” lest those kids become “confused.” In other words, the “compromise” includes everything that anti-trans groups have already placed on our legislative agenda, and goes several steps further.
If you are among the dwindling number of people who have studied the Holocaust, every aspect of Sullivan’s proposal—especially his use of a phrase so unashamedly reminiscent of “the final solution to the Jewish question”—should send chills down your spine. The genocidal echoes of Nazi Germany in Sullivan’s “solution” are neither coincidental nor superficial, and they are most certainly not hypothetical. At least one of the policies he suggests—banning gender-affirming care for trans youth—has already been signed into law in Utah and is currently advancing through legislatures in at least ten other states. Such a policy is guaranteed to have harmful and even deadly consequences for the trans community; research has shown that social, legal, and medical affirmation of trans kids’ gender significantly improves their mental health and decreases their risk of suicide by as much as 73%. By withholding and criminalizing gender-affirming care, state governments are not only denying trans youth the right to their identity but also setting the stage for a massive increase in depression and suicide rates among trans people.
Between the push to end gender affirmation, the proposals to remove trans kids from their families, and the calls to prevent trans people from even appearing in public, it’s difficult to see the current slew of bills as anything other than a comprehensive blueprint for trans erasure. And because the architects of these eliminationist policies aren’t using bullets or blades or gas chambers to accomplish their goal (yet), ordinary citizens watching this atrocity unfold might even convince themselves that it doesn’t quite rise to the level of “true” genocide. Well, guess what: Article II of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide says otherwise.
As with every humanitarian crisis, we didn’t get to this point overnight. The groups spearheading the latest onslaught of anti-trans bills have spent years laying the groundwork for what we’re seeing play out now in state legislatures, and they’re clearly prepared to play a long game. But they never would have got this far without the active support, or at least the passive complicity, of millions of Americans who repeatedly fail to acknowledge the humanity of transgender people. The anti-trans movement has capitalized not only on our willful misunderstanding of gender identity but also on our maddening habit of rewarding transphobia when we have an opportunity to condemn it. Dave Chappelle’s trans-bashing stand-up routines should have made him radioactive in the entertainment world, and instead he got a heavily promoted Netflix special and the Grammy for Best Comedy Album. Professional sadist and presidential cosplayer Donald Trump rolled back trans people’s civil rights on several occasions during his administration, and his followers roared with approval every time. Children’s author-turned-Internet-ogre J.K. Rowling continues to profit from the nostalgia of Harry Potter fans despite her monomaniacal commitment to transphobic fearmongering on Twitter. Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas won re-election by wide margins last year, long after they had made their hostility to the LGBTQ+ community (and science, and women, and Black people, and books) abundantly clear. How can we say with a straight face that we support trans people when our actions so consistently indicate the opposite?
If we’re serious about standing up for trans rights, we need to stop giving our votes and our money and our tacit approval to the voices of a hate movement that barely tries to hide its intentions behind the fig leaf of “traditional values.” Whether it’s Dave Chappelle’s smug drawl, Donald Trump’s red-faced screaming, or Matt Walsh’s smarmy “What Is a Woman?” interviews, the trans-bashing voice is one that endorses and promises violence. Every time we let it go unchallenged, every time we dismiss it as a vulgar foible of the tinfoil-hat crowd, every time we give it oxygen, we allow it to grow and thrive until it has the force of law behind it. As we’ve seen, that’s already started to happen in several states, and it’s not hard to imagine it becoming nationwide policy if someone like Ron DeSantis wins the presidency in 2024.
We still have time to stop and reverse the effort to codify gender terrorism into law, but the window is rapidly closing. Cisgender Americans need to commit to showing up for the trans community in every way possible, including:
- listening to and learning from the lived experiences of trans women and men;
- voting for LGBTQ-friendly candidates at the local, state, and national level;
- speaking out against trans-bashing online, among our families, and in our social circles;
- holding public figures accountable for transphobic rhetoric;
- showing up at legislative hearings and writing to our elected representatives to voice opposition to anti-trans laws;
- becoming more familiar with the spectrum of gender identities and the facts about transitioning;
- demolishing myths about trans women in sports;
- and, above all, making a point of treating transgender people as fully realized, complex individuals with the same interests and hopes and ambitions as the rest of us.
We all need to care. We all need to act. We all need to do a hell of a lot better. Because we know where this is headed if we don’t.
The Shellshocked Cassowary Rises 