The transgender community has arguably been the greatest victim of President Donald Trump’s executive order spree, with the president aiming to annihilate every conceivable right available to trans people. The repealing of protections for all marginalized communities has been catastrophic across the board. However, individual attacks on the trans community, in the form of executive orders, have put the state of trans rights at extreme risk.
The degree of which these orders have attacked trans rights has been unprecedented, to say the very least.
Trump said in an executive order that these orders were made for a variety of reasons, but one main reason he pushed was to protect children. Trump, a man who openly bragged that he’d date his own daughter if they weren’t related, was surrounded by women when he signed an executive order banning transgender women from women’s sports, being the feminist that he is.
Funnily enough, more women were present at Trump’s signing than there are transgender women in sports. And yet, this topic has been so hotly debated that it would lead you to believe that trans athletes are transitioning solely to enter women’s sports and dominate the field instead of simply to better affirm their gender identity. After all, utilitarians like Trump and his tech-bro stooge Elon Musk can’t fathom anyone wishing to undergo medical procedures for anything other than to “succeed” in a professional sense.
This isn’t the first time transgender rights have been a contentious topic in American politics, and it likely won’t be the last. Anti-trans smear campaigns are nothing new, but it can’t all be bigotry, right?
One of Trump’s executive orders states that removing a citizen’s ability to identify as a transgender individual and removing any and all discussion of gender identity was done to “defend women.” People staunchly against medical support for trans individuals commonly argue that blocking trans women from entering women’s restrooms is done to protect women from being sexually assaulted. This argument has rarely dwindled in popularity because it is the only one transphobes can make that gives them the illusion of the moral high ground.
I have two questions:
Do bathroom signs really prevent rapists from entering bathrooms and sexually assaulting women?
When else have transphobes advocated for policies that protect women from sexual assault?
The bathroom argument is bigotry masquerading as empathy and is banal to a satirical degree.
To add insult to injury, Trump and Musk, two men that are obsessed with deadnaming trans individuals, have begged for the world to adopt their new nomenclature for a social media app and a body of water. Musk famously rebranded Twitter as “X” in a $40 billion acquisition prior to running the social media platform into the ground, and now Trump is clamoring for any other country to embrace the name “Gulf of America” for the Gulf of Mexico.
Furthermore, reporters are being penalized for not addressing the newly rebranded “Gulf of America” as such, with the Associated Press being barred from the Oval Office because they continued to address the Gulf of Mexico as such. Yet, both men refuse to recognize the existence of transgender individuals or respect their identities.
They are instead actively eradicating evidence of the existence of the trans community by removing intersex options on passports and other government documents, as well as categorizing people as “biologically male and female.” The U.S. travel advisory page has also since changed a page for LGBT travelers to now read “LGB travel advisory,” removing transgender people from travel considerations, and the national park service removed pages about transgender activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.
This categorization, of course, is also inherently flawed. Genetics are not possible to determine solely based on visible or somatic indicators. As a result, anyone taking hormonal replacement therapy is biologically more aligned with the sex they are transitioning to than the sex they were assigned at birth.
Yet, transgender women in federal custody are being moved to male prisons, transgender women have been blocked from playing in women’s sports and any form of gender identity discussion is illegal in schools.
The impact of these rights being stripped extend beyond the executive orders too. Within the first month of his presidency, Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric led to the brutal murder and mutilation of a trans man in Minnesota, who was tortured for weeks before being killed by five individuals. Statistics also reveal that crimes against the trans community are intertwined with other hate crimes – six out of 10 victims of gun homicides against transgender people are black trans women, according to a study conducted between 2017 and 2023.
There remains some hope. A federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order specifically targeting healthcare for trans youth. Protests have erupted nationwide against organizations that have been acquiescing to Trump’s anti-trans orders.
But how many will suffer in the midst of Trump’s recent power trip until legislation is passed or action is made that definitively protects transgender individuals?