Trump’s Attempts to Erase Transgender People: A Vindictive History

There are moments in history when conditions come together to create an impetus for great social change. Many historians and activists place the beginning of the modern movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, an asexual equality at the Stonewall Inn, a small bar frequented by trans people, lesbians, bisexuals, gay males, students, and others located at 53 Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village in late June 1969.

At Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, however, in what is known as the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, trans people and sex workers joined three years earlier in fighting police harassment and oppression in August 1966.

Out of the ashes of Compton’s Cafeteria and the Stonewall Inn came several militant groups organized primarily by young people in their teens and early twenties.

Bisexuals, who had since the beginning organized alongside gay and lesbian activists, began to organize for the rights of bisexuals by the mid- to late-1970s.

Transgender people who likewise have been there since the beginnings of the movement, have increasingly come out of another closet in large numbers. Many include young people emerging from a new generation of activists who are on the cutting edge in the movement for equality and pride.

The increased visibility and activism of transgender activists (including within popular media and academic discourse) has had the effect of shaking up traditionally dichotomous notions of male/female and gay/straight. They are creating a vision of social transformation as opposed to mere reform by contesting and exploding conventional gender constructions, most notably the limiting and destructive binary conceptualizations and definitions of “masculinity” and “femininity,” “male” and “female.”

Backlash and Scapegoating of Trans People

Donald Trump, amid his self-proclaimed “retribution” campaign, has specifically targeted members of the transgender community in his efforts to completely erase their existence from the human community. (No doubt he would attempt to wipe out gender diversity within non-human species if he could.)

Trump recently signed a vindictive and petty presidential executive order in his attempt to rewrite history by expunging trans activism and trans lives. The order demands that transgender people be deleted from New York’s Stonewall Inn National Monument website developed by the National Park Service. The acronym that once read LGBTQ+ has been reduced to LGB, standing for lesbian, gay, and bisexual.

Did the people who voted for Trump to rise to the Oval Office a second time really want him to spend his hours behind the Resolute Desk scrubbing trans people from U.S. history?

During his short second regime, another of Trump’s executive orders bans trans athletes from school and professional sports, from using the public facilities of their choice, and from choosing to have gender affirming procedures to maintain their bodily autonomy because, to Trump, “there are only two genders: male and female.” All else, to Trump, goes contrary to the natural world.

He even signed an executive order to this effect declaring that there are only two genders. With this came a series of specific policy changes. Titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the order describes biological sex as being determined by the size of one’s reproductive cells: small for men and large for women.

Government documents, including passports, visas, and employee records, can only show “male” or “female.” The government will no longer pay for trans-related health care, such as for government employees, military personnel, or federal prisoners.

In addition, all transgender women incarcerated in federal prisons will now be thrown into male prison facilities.

In another of Trump’s orders, the federal government will no longer even recognize the existence of trans people and will prevent federal funds  from being spent on any programs that do so.

The order says, “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology” and it directs the Bureau of Prisons to revise its policies to ensure that federal inmates do not receive “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”

Trump has threatened to kick out trans service members from the military. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has banned Rainbow flags from flying in U.S. embassies.

A Pattern of Anti-Trans Abuse

 While running for the U.S. presidency in 2016, Donald Trump said at campaign rallies that he would be a different kind of Republican because he would defend and strengthen LGBT protections. At the 2016 Republican convention, he posed with a rainbow flag with the words “LGBTs for Trump” scrawled across the yellow stripe.

This should have been a clue in foretelling his cowardice and deception once he took over the reins of power because during his first regime in the White House, the Trump administration declared total nuclear war on the transgender community.

When the Trump administration promoted its 2017 “American Heroes Week,” the alleged Commander-in-Chief let it be known in a torrential three-tweet series that he did not include trans people in the category of “American Heroes,” especially those then currently and previously serving in the U.S. military.

“After consideration with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow….Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military,” he announced. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming…victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.”

On April 12, 2019, this clearly discriminatory and unnecessary policy took effect.

Trump’s official policy-by-tweet contradicted Department of Defense regulations released June 30, 2016 under Defense Secretary Ash Carter permitting trans people to join and openly serve their country. At that time, the United States added its name to an ever-increasing list of 20 other nations (by 2022, that had increased to 30 nations) welcoming trans people into their military ranks, with the Netherlands as the first as far back as 1973. A sampling of others includes Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, and Spain.

A Rand Study fully debunks the Lier-in-Chief’s assertion of some sort of burdensome “tremendous medical costs” expended on trans service members. Of the Pentagon’s annual military healthcare budget of $6.28 billion, an estimated relatively minuscule $2.4 – 8.4 million accounts for transition-related health care costs.

In addition, Rand found that merely 25 – 130 active-component trans military personnel have deployment restrictions due to transition-related medical treatments. In comparison, 50,000 active-duty soldiers in one single branch, the Army, cannot deploy for medical and other reasons.

Trump’s ban of transgender military service personnel was then placed on hold since three separate federal courts of appeal found the policy unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, however, on January 22, 2019, in a 5 to 4 vote, lifted the injunction, which allowed the administration’s policy to take effect.

In another salvo during his first regime that attempted to render trans people illegitimate, invisible, and silent under the law, the Trump administration, in a memo sent to major government agencies, ordered that the definition of “gender” must be based “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

This meant that the sex of everyone must accord with the binary of “male” or “female” determined by the genitals a person is born with, unless genetic tests determine otherwise.

Though federal civil rights laws protected transgender people through such statutes as Title VII, Title IX, and the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration’s obvious intent was and remains to nullify and further excite its base by going after trans people in advance of the next midterm elections.

In an earlier memo sent from his Department of “Justice” to U.S. attorneys, department heads, and federal agencies, Trump’s then first Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, reversed an Obama-era policy that protected trans employees from discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sessions made it clear that his department would no longer interpret gender protections in Title VII to include gender identity and expression.

In Trump’s first regime, he abolished an Obama-era executive order permitting transgender students to use school facilities aligning with their gender identities, and the White House website removed reference to LGBT issues and policies from the previous administration.

It should be crystal clear to everyone that Trump’s motive in declaring war on an entire category of people has nothing to do with concerns over improving military readiness, or ending discrimination in schools and in the workplace, or improving prison conditions.

It has nothing to do with healthcare costs. It has nothing to do with some alleged and unspecific “disruption,” and it certainly has nothing to do with “religious freedom.”

Trump’s actions are intended to harden his appeal of the basest feelings with his base of support by scapegoating trans people for his failed policies and increasingly failed presidency.

It is obvious that Trump ripped out the yellow stripe from the Rainbow flag and attached it to his spine.