This is not an apolitical blog. The following are my personal opinions.

Among the uncountable, immeasurably horrendous things coming out of the current administration, one of the most devastating is their concerted effort to erase trans people. It’s not new; the movement to deny transgender identity and deprive transgender people of basic human rights has existed for a long time. It seems to have taken its current form as a powerful political cudgel over the past eight years or so, and the damage it’s doing will have lasting impacts on a generational scale.

It’s bad

I was moved to write this post after reading a New York Times update (gift link) about the administration’s efforts to force people to use their birth sex on passports. It’s emblematic of their tactics to enshrine hatred and dehumanization in the fabric of government.

They’re not doing this just to make noise and deepen the divisions in our body politic. That rhetorical approach seems almost quaint at this point—the bygone Trump 1.0 era, when they telegraphed their intentions but didn’t pursue them in the way they’re doing now. By appealing the passport issue to the Supreme Court, they demonstrate the earnestness of their efforts this time around. They won’t rest until they’ve robbed people of their dignity and heaped humiliation onto a group of people whose lives and identity are at once beautiful and joyous; tenuous and under constant threat.

The hostility of the right towards trans people is mystifying to me. So much of it comes from fear of the other—amplified and weaponized by those who either know better but are harnessing it to their advantage, or are so blinded by hate or ignorance that they can’t stop to evaluate their own views.

It will get worse

Here we are, with one political party employing language like “transgenderism” and “trans ideology” to misrepresent and sow distrust and hate. It’s the tip of the iceberg.

Already we see the attempts to mold trans people into the image of a domestic terror cell. This is not hyperbole.

Lives hang in the balance. Lives of children and adults, mothers and fathers, siblings, friends, coworkers. Acquaintances who are hiding their identity for one reason or another. These lives, full of hope and promise, deserving of freedom, are invisible to most people who don’t care to notice or actively turn their backs.

When things escalate (and they will), we’re going to see a new hell unleashed in this country: torture, deprivation of basic rights, imprisonment, persecution. This will lead to loss of life for some—both self-inflicted and through violent attack—and deep, life-defining trauma for everyone else.

And we’ve done it before

Trans people are just the most recent target of this nation’s capacity for evil towards the people within and outside its borders. We spent decades dragging ourselves, kicking and screaming, towards a society that recognizes non-straight people as full individuals equally deserving of rights and recognition (and those efforts are under threat, too).

And of course we have a bloody, centuries-old history as testament to our capacity for violence towards Black people, indigenous people, and immigrants.

You just have to read about the Jim Crow era to recognize how far things can go in this country.

So we have to act

America doesn’t have to act with malice. We can define ourselves by our kindness, and we’ve done this before as well. We hold contradictory truths, and our 250-year struggle is defined by the choices we make. Sometimes we choose humanity.

Most of the people in this country—a large majority, I’d guess—are not innately hostile to the idea of transgender identity or trans people. Unfortunately, a large number of them just don’t care enough; or they’re in denial; or they’ve been driven to a hateful position enabled by their capacity for in-group/out-group ideology.

This won’t change unless those of us who know better are moved to write, speak, protest, and mobilize. The balance of many lives hangs on our willingness and ability to persuade that silent majority.