Nearly two years ago, in March 2022, I spoke with several parents of transgender children in Texas, where they and their children were under attack from a hostile, right-wing Christian governor and attorney general.
Weeks earlier, Texas had begun opening ‘child abuse’ investigations into loving parents who supported their trans children’s right to receive age-appropriate gender-affirming care. Bans on such care for minors had also begun to proliferate, both in that state and others, after years of right-wing agitation and escalating attacks on the rights of trans people, including through bathroom bills and school sports bans.
One of the parents I spoke with, Katie Laird, said: “At some point in the very near future, the focus will shift from trans kids to trans adults and from there it will move out into the broader queer community.” Another parent told me that his decision to speak out publicly derived from his conviction that “we need to draw a line in the sand right here, as a nation”.
But the US has failed to do so, allowing attacks on the rights of trans people and their families to continue. Last June, Laird’s prediction proved true when Florida not only banned gender-affirming care for trans minors but also caused the vast majority of the state’s transgender adults to lose their healthcare due to onerous new requirements. These include bans on receiving hormone prescriptions via telehealth visits or from nurse practitioners, despite there being no capacity or need for people to regularly see doctors for such a routine matter.
As 2024 dawns, such vicious state-level persecution of transgender Americans is only increasing. Ohio has become the latest state to ban care for trans adults via prohibitive and absurd regulations, including the head-scratching provision that the care team for any trans individual must include a bioethicist. Meanwhile, state legislators in Florida, not to be outdone, are set to consider initiatives such as an extremely broad ‘lascivious grooming’ ban that could be used to stamp out any public existence of LGBTIQ individuals, as well as a bill that would deprive trans Floridians of the right to have drivers’ licenses that show their correct gender.
In fact, as journalist and trans rights advocate Erin Reed wrote last week, five days into January, “legislators have already submitted 125 bills targeting the transgender community this year”. That’s more than double the 50 bills filed in the same period at the start of 2023.
I am not particularly surprised by these developments. As a transgender American woman, I am horrified and, yes, terrified – but not surprised. This is a crucial presidential election year, which means Republicans will be extra motivated to pursue their politics of moral panic up until November. We will likely see an uptick in political violence as the year progresses as well. But the upcoming election aside, state-level anti-trans attacks have been escalating year on year for some time now, and authoritarian movements do not arrest their own momentum – they have to be stopped.
Unfortunately, major media outlets such as The New York Times, which could do such good by giving trans people fair representation, have only fueled the right-wing moral panic by printing op-ed and article after op-ed and article taking seriously bad-faith ‘concern’ for ‘the children’. Although there is now more than ample evidence that the right’s attacks on trans rights have never been about the children, I do not expect the mainstream media to change course. And this is just one out of many ways in which the corporate media is enabling American authoritarianism.
Democracy is about maintaining the peaceful coexistence of diverse groups and individuals
Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s administration has used the anniversary of the 6 January insurrection to launch reelection campaign advertising that stresses to Americans that democracy is on the line this November. That is undoubtedly correct, and I think it is likely to be effective, although the Democrats should also stress abortion rights as early and often as they can if they want big wins in November.
But while democracy – or at least the future potential for a democracy that has not yet even been close to fully realized in the United States – is indeed at stake in the upcoming election, we need to get beyond a simplistic definition of the term. Democracy isn’t only about voting rights. It is also about maintaining functional pluralism, the peaceful coexistence of an array of very diverse groups and individuals. It is precisely this pluralism, and the threat it poses to the dominance of a white supremacist, patriarchal order, that authoritarians cannot stand.
This is the source of the right’s hostility to LGBTIQ and especially trans Americans. And given the extent of the Republican Party’s authoritarianism, it’s worth remembering that one of the Nazis’ first major acts of political violence in Weimar Germany – over five years before Kristallnacht – was ransacking pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and burning his research. Hirschfeld offered some of the first successful sex-change operations to trans people, and his institute was a safe space for a relatively thriving queer underground in Berlin that the Nazis wiped out.
‘Deviant’ sexuality and gender, not to put too fine a point on it, are not a new target for authoritarian movements, and the attacks on transgender Americans have now ramped up to a point that should be very concerning to all Americans who value democracy.
You can be sure that the right understands that their efforts to drive trans Americans underground and deprive us of life-saving medical care are part of their broader attack on pluralist democracy. By the same token, American liberals need to understand that the fight for a future that is democratic in any meaningful sense must include the robust defense of sexual and gender minorities.
