Trump's Orders Target the Transgender; Are Gays Next?

With the Felon announcing new tariffs that will drive prices higher and fuel inflation, threatening what little Middle East stability that exists with his plan to "buy" the Gaza Strip for redevelopment in Trump mode as a real estate deal, and the Felon's regime seemingly poised to claim that they can ignore court rulings, there is much for average Americans to be fear about .  Throw in the likelihood there will be a federal government shutdown if congressional Republicans cannot get their act together to raise the debt ceiling, and the economic uncertainty is even worse.  Through all this, there is even more fear in the LGBT community as the Felon seeks to reverse non-discrimination protections (including for nonwhites and women) and animus filled executive orders targeting transgender Americans. Many wonder whether a reinstitution of the sodomy laws and an end to same sex marriage are next - Clarence Thomas and Project 2025 have these on their hit list.  The source of all this animus and reactionary actions?  From the white nationalists be hind the Felon who are have redefined Christianity as something based on the rejection of science and hatred and mistreatment of others.  There is no shred of Christ's gospel message in their agenda.  Here are excerpts from a piece in the New York Times that looks at the war on transgender Americans:

On his first day back in office, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female, that a person’s sex is established at conception and that it cannot be changed.

Then, through a series of executive orders, he issued a raft of policies targeted at transgender Americans, a population of roughly 1.6 million. The orders cover many areas of life — schools, medical care, prisons, housing and passports — and pull the government back from accepting trans people in the military, allowing them to participate in sports and protecting them under anti-discrimination laws based on sex.

[T]he sheer volume of orders, and their language and tone, suggest to both transgender advocates and Mr. Trump’s supporters that the overarching intention is about more than policy — it’s about undermining the very idea that transgender identities are legitimate and should be recognized.

The transgender debate is divisive, with polls showing that many Americans want to protect trans people from discrimination, but also think that society has gone too far in accommodating them.

But the executive orders are notable for the way they try to frame the debate in moral terms, portraying trans people as lacking honesty and integrity, and thus unworthy of consideration when it comes to legal rights.

For instance, the orders use the term “biological reality” to imply a deliberate deception on the part of trans people, a trope that has historically been used to rationalize violence against them. In the first directive alone, that term appears six times.

The executive order on the military states that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”

“This is on the worse end of the range of outcomes that I had anticipated,” said Alex Chen, director of the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy clinic at Harvard Law School. “They’re frontally attacking the validity of transgender existence, right? I don’t think there’s any other way to put it.”

[M]any supporters of Mr. Trump’s trans policies, across the political spectrum, have chafed at what they see as pressure to replace sex with gender identity. . . . . The language in Mr. Trump’s orders is channeling the anger over that cultural clash, whether it is about pronoun usage or trans athletes in women’s sports.

The president’s directives came packaged in five executive orders, adding up to more than 10,000 words. To “eradicate the biological reality of sex,” his first order says, deprives women “of their dignity, safety and well-being” and ultimately has a corrosive impact “not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”

The Trump administration’s order calls the practice of medical transition for youths “a stain on our nation’s history” and the medical guidelines “junk science.” It directs federal agencies to withhold funding for hospitals and medical schools that carry out transgender medical care for patients under the age of 19, referring to it as “maiming.”

Last week, at a hearing challenging the order, Ana Reyes, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., told a government lawyer to be prepared to answer whether Mr. Trump’s language reflected a type of animus, which could factor into the arguments over its constitutionality.

Since the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, “transgender issues have been seen under the umbrella of L.G.B.T.Q.,” Mr. Chen of Harvard Law School said. “That may have obscured the fact that we never really have had a full debate about transgender identity the way we did about gay identity.”

“I always did think,” he added, “ultimately we would have to wage the battle on the merits with the public.”