As the Trump Administration continues its rampage of attacks against trans people, workers everywhere are being impacted. States that provide protections to trans people are at risk of losing federal funds that go towards workers’ paychecks and social programs. Federal workers are being policed on which bathrooms they can use while in the workplace. The current administration is laying the groundwork to punish employers in the private sector who are gender inclusive and affirming of their trans employees. This is a blatant effort to erase trans people from society.
History reminds us that in the early stages of facism, trans and queer people were among the first to have their rights and humanity stripped away. The first book burnings in Nazi Germany focused on the erasure of transgender studies and research of same-sex relationships by the Institute of Sexual Science [Institut für Sexualwissenschaft]; this is a chilling reflection of the current efforts to erase all mention of trans people from government websites and monuments today, such as the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. The removal of trans people from society would set the precedent to erode the rights of disabled people, immigrants, religious minorities, and political dissidents. We already see the administrations’ blatantly fascistic policies of “mass deportations” as the precursor to mass incarceration camps at Guantanamo Bay. We see the warning signs of future attacks against disabled, autistic, and neurodivergent people by the newly appointed HHS Secretary Ronald F. Kennedy, Jr, who has released plans for his first 100 days in office which include extensive investigations into the use of SSRIs and mood stabilizers.
Both the Biden administration’s efforts to pacify student protests of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the Trump administration’s promises to silence protests of his presidential actions, further solidify our decline into fascism by limiting our rights to free speech and peaceful protest. The United States and its citizens have entered an era of fascistic authoritarianism, and trans people are once again the canary in the coal mine. The dissolution of transgender rights in any space begins the dissolution of human rights in every space.
Upholding the gender binary only serves the needs of the bourgeoisie by categorizing and assigning value to social and reproductive labor. The ruling class relies on the rigidity of the gender binary, and the independent nuclear family, to continue producing workers for the expansion of capital. We saw this in practice during the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, when then-Representative Mike Johnson connected his anti-choice stance to the state of the economy, saying “if only women were compelled to bring more ‘able-bodied’ workers into the world, Republicans wouldn’t need to slash Social Security and Medicare.” The existence of LGBTQ+ people and their relationships fundamentally destabilizes these prescribed social roles, and demonstrates to the rest of the working class how community and fulfillment can be found by transcending the nuclear family. The decentering of the cisgender and heterosexual singular family unit empowers connections within our communities in an economic system that thrives on division and individualism.
Parallel to the right’s enthusiastic attacks on LGBTQ+ protections has been, at times, apathetic indifference on the part of establishment Democrats. As Republican congressmen are swift to restrict rights for queer people, many Democratic legislators were quick to dismiss any calls for these rights as being a “fringe topic.” Congressional Democrats were historically hesitant to enshrine same-sex marriage into law prior to the 2015 Obergefell vs. Hodges ruling, and then continued to dismiss the need because it had already been decided by SCOTUS. That ruling is now in danger as lawmakers are seeking to have it overturned and to restore DOMA. Democratic inaction plays as much of a role in the erasure of trans people today as Republican hate. We as a nation cannot depend on the two-party system to protect LGBTQ+ people, young and old.
The onslaught of attacks against trans, non-binary, and 3rd gender peoples is a test of all American people. The ruling class is determining how much we will resist the impending revocations of our civil liberties by revoking the rights of society’s most ostracized and vulnerable citizens. Republicans are testing how much they can get away with blatant erasure of trans people, and Democrats are testing how much they can get away with blatant inaction against these attacks. It is up to us as the working class to show solidarity with our trans comrades and tell our government that we will not sit idly by while our civil rights and liberties are whittled away for the sake of billionaires and corporate oligarchs.
Southern Maryland DSA 