In 2015, Donald Trump amused the American public by declaring his intent to run for president of the United States. People all over the media were mocking his White House aspirations, with few believing he even had a shot. After all, what does a failed businessman, turned reality TV star, know about politics? However, Trump quickly and viciously rose to the top of the polls and became the Republican nominee, finding himself directly up against Hillary Clinton. Yet, people still didn’t take his chances seriously, and pundits believed the race to be a lock for Hillary Clinton. The New York Times even gave Clinton a 92% chance to beat Trump. Nevertheless, we all know what happened on November 8, 2016. People were shocked and outraged by this result, baffled that this country would ever allow someone like Trump near the oval office.
Eight years later, it happened again, but this time people weren’t shocked. This time, the cries heard ‘round the country were more out of dispirited dread than passionate fury. We really let it happen again.
Naturally, the Democratic Party began a blame game of who was exactly at fault for this loss. Though Biden’s stubbornness to run for re-election despite all the signs in the world telling him not to, and the Biden administration’s refusal to compromise on arms sales to Israel, seem like good places to start, several Democrats expressed fears that the party’s support for trans rights contributed to their loss.
It’s true that the Trump campaign heavily attacked Kamala Harris with anti-trans rhetoric. An advertisement that was played numerous times includes clips of Harris declaring support for trans healthcare, ending with “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you”. It’s easy to see this as proof that transphobia was a big factor in Trump’s win, but the solution to electoral challenges is not, and never should be, abandoning civil rights. Thankfully, many Democrats, including Kentucky Governor Andy Besear, have pushed back against the impulsive pulling of the transphobia lever, but it’s quite frightening that it’s a thing anyone in the party is seriously considering.
It’s even more alarming when you face the reality that Donald Trump is going to make transphobia a large part of his second presidency. On day one, he signed an executive order federally defining men and women as those assigned male and female at birth, respectively. The same order prohibits trans men from women’s prisons, and trans women from men’s prisons, and calls for “intimate spaces” to be policed by sex assigned at birth and not gender identity. The next week, Trump signed an executive order banning trans soldiers from the military. This is not unexpected, as a similar order was signed in his first presidency, but this one justifies itself by claiming that simply being transgender “cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service” and “is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member”. Yet another order was signed the next day, this one attempting to ban all gender-affirming care for those under nineteen. These orders follow a House vote (passed by every Republican and two Democrats) to bar federal funding for schools that allow trans girls and women to play on women’s sports teams. All of these actions work to bring the recent surge in state-level anti-trans legislation to the national level.
Trump has made his opinion clear: he does not like that there are trans people living in America. In December, he declared his intent to “end transgender lunacy” and “get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools”. This echoes previous sentiment from the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, in which prominent conservative commentator Michael Knowles exclaimed that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”. These calls are unambiguously genocidal: Gender identity is an innate part of someone that cannot be removed. You cannot legislate “transgenderism” out of existence, because there is no separating “transgenderism” from trans people—and by extension, you cannot “eradicate” or “end” “transgenderism” without eradicating trans people.
Studies have already shown that anti-trans legislation in red states has resulted in a much higher rate of suicide attempts among trans people, and the new administration’s attack on trans rights will only make this number higher. Elon Musk, who worked with Trump throughout the end of his campaign, and is expected to work with him throughout his presidency, claimed that his trans daughter was “dead” because she transitioned, later tweeting that she was “killed” by the “woke mind virus”. He is just one of the many people in Trump’s administration who do not want trans people to exist, and are going to try their very hardest to legislate that into reality.
The future of trans rights in the United States seems very grim, which makes it all the more important to stick together as a community and as a population. The biggest killer of bigotry is a tolerant society—one where civil rights are seen as the livelihood of your neighbors, not as of a hypothetical group of people you’re warned not to like. Do your best to ensure your community, within your home, school, and elsewhere is an inclusive one. This isn’t to say that writing to politicians, organizing, protesting, and advertising aren’t urgently needed, but that the path to social progress begins with community.
