Thursday, January 30, 2025

The Trump/GOP War On the Transgender Is Just the Beginning

Having followed the misnamed "Christian Right" and white Christian nationalists for decades, part of their long term agenda was to undo the civil rights of minority groups they dislike and/or who the view as not conforming to their 1950's world view that is undergirded a 12th century view of sex and sexuality.  They have also long bristled at civil rights for nonwhites whose advances are seen as a threat to white privilege, especially white heterosexual male privilege.   The Felon and many in the Republican Party are only too happy to pander to these elements in the MAGA base and in his first week in office, the Felon has declared war not only on transgender Americans but also programs and policies that foster diversity, equity and inclusion.  In MAGA world, any nonwhite who holds a position is deemed to have received special treatment to the detriment of whites, especially straight white males. As a piece at The Atlantic lays out, the assault on transgender citizens is merely the first stage in a larger agenda to take the nation backward in time. Gays, women and nonwhites are also are targeted for a roll back of rights and protections under Project 2025 which the Felon is implementing.  The transgender are merely the first group to be stigmatized in an effort to desensitize the larger public to the rolling back of civil rights and equal protection under the law.  Here are article excerpts:

The American populism of the late 19th century was a rebellion of working people against financial elites; the American populism of this century is one of financial elites feigning rebellion while crushing the vulnerable. This is why, just a few short days into his presidency, Donald Trump is already making good on his promise to persecute trans people zealously. On Monday, Trump issued an executive order purging trans service members from the military on the grounds that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” a statement belied by the thousands serving honorably until they were singled out for discrimination by their commander in chief. A day later, Trump issued a second executive order that could make gender-affirming care for young people unavailable in most of the country.

The damage wrought by legitimizing this form of discrimination will not be limited to the trans community. Laws and legal rulings that undermine trans rights may soon be used to restrict the rights of other, less marginal groups. Anyone naive enough to think that the government can deny fundamental rights to one group without putting another’s at risk is in for some nasty surprises. That much became clear during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in December over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

The Tennessee bill declares that “this state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex,” and therefore in preventing medical treatments that “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” Implicit in this is the belief that if you don’t “appreciate your sex,” then the state should force you to. Beyond the legal jargon and pretext, the underlying conflict here is between conservatives [extremists] who have concluded that trans identity is a social contagion to be eradicated and that using state power for this cause is legitimate, and their opponents, who believe that trans people are entitled to equal protection under the law.

The law bans treatments that enable “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Because those same medications are available as long as they are not used for gender-affirming care, lawyers for the Biden administration argued that the ban constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex.

One might question why this case matters if you are not yourself trans or do not have a loved one who is. The number of trans people is objectively small—less than a fraction of 1 percent of the population. . . . . The outcome of this case has much broader implications than it might appear, because if a state can, as Prelogar put it, force people to “look and live like boys and girls,” subject to the government’s definition of what that means, then a lot more people might be affected.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out during oral argument, for many years, some states prevented women from becoming butchers or lawyers. Women could not have their own credit cards or bank accounts until the 1970s. If it’s not unconstitutional sex discrimination for the government to say that people cannot behave “inconsistent with their sex,” well now you’re really talking about a lot of people—a lot more people than the rather tiny population included in the category of “they/them” that the Trump campaign was hoping you feel disgust and contempt for.

The conservative movement’s mobilization against trans rights, however, is just one step in a wider rolling-back of other antidiscrimination protections. Conservatives have consciously targeted a diminutive, politically powerless segment of the population, trying to strip them of their constitutional rights, and then used those legal precedents to undermine laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. The trick was making Americans think that only the rights of trans people are on the chopping block, that “they/them” could be persecuted without consequences for “you.”  As Frederick Douglass once said, “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people, who persuade themselves that they are safe, though the rights of others may be struck down.”

The harm to antidiscrimination law more broadly could be immense. Many of the rationales offered by the conservative justices during oral argument echo the reasoning of those opposed to bans on racial discrimination. If they regain legitimacy, they could later be used to weaken other laws that protect Americans from bigotry.

For example, defenders of Tennessee’s ban have said that it does not discriminate based on sex, because it prohibits gender-affirming care to both boys and girls—a point Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett raised during oral argument. Similar assertions were made in defense of interracial-marriage bans, which prevented both Black and white people from marrying their chosen spouses. “If we’re reinstating the equal-application theory … that was a theory that was used historically to uphold and justify race-based distinctions,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “I don’t know how you can wall off sex discrimination from race discrimination if you’re reviving this equal-treatment claim.”

Kavanaugh suggested that because the case involved medical science, the Court should just leave it to the “democratic process,” an approach that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointedly observed would have prevented the Court from striking down bans on interracial marriage, because at the time, Virginia had argued that the “science” regarding interracial marriage “was substantially in doubt,” and therefore banning it should be up to the voters. The point of equal protection is to prevent fundamental rights from being subject to mere popularity contests . . . .

The Trump administration’s early actions make clear that exploiting voters’ fears about trans people was part of a larger plan to undermine antidiscrimination protections for many other people, even as they intend to make the lives of millions of others—including many of Trump’s own supporters—much worse. Among the first actions taken by the administration was the repeal of the Lyndon B. Johnson–era directive ordering federal contractors to avoid discriminating on the basis of race, as well as subsequent orders barring discrimination on the basis of gender. The administration has also frozen all new cases in the civil-rights division of the Justice Department. Trump has also ended all federal-government diversity efforts and intends to fire employees involved in them.

The administration’s executive order on DEI also threatens to sue companies for having diversity programs, a threat that will encourage companies to resegregate to avoid being accused of anti-white discrimination.

This agenda has, by the Republicans’ own account, been partly enabled by their success at demonizing transgender people in the November election. Trans people are a group few in number and marginalized enough that there is little political cost at the moment to persecuting them as Republicans have, or blaming them for their political misfortunes and abandoning them as Democrats have following their electoral loss.

Over the past century, many groups have successfully sought to have their rights recognized, winning, at least on paper, the same rights as white, Christian, heterosexual men. The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to reestablish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion they deem moral and foundational. Whether that’s forcing LGBTQ people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages, or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of—as Trump once put it—“Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.” To those who see the world this way, freedom means the freedom of the majority to oppress the minority. Attacking trans people first was simply their plan for getting the American people on board with taking many other freedoms away.


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