The shit show, as they say, must go on. And so we learn today that the Trump administration is working on rules to, as this New York Times headline accurately puts it, “defin[e] transgender out of existence.” Clearly driven by the ire of its religious supporters, but also fueled by a broader conservative moralism, a policy change under development by the Department of Health and Human Services would reverse recent civil rights gains made by the transgender community both through court rulings and actions taken by the Obama administration.
The new proposals embody far-right, retrograde views at odds with the reality of lived experience, and that favor ideologically-driven definitions over subjective human experience. They are also a reminder that the unflinchingly patriarchal worldview embraced by Donald Trump and the Republican Party inevitably perverts reality to keep powerful men on top. Transgender people who are subject to horrifically high rates of bullying and violence, with attendant pyschological harm, are to considered a threat to America, while presidents and supreme court justices are free to commit sexual assault without repercussion. Our common lived reality is denied and turned upside down in favor of a plain immorality.
Ironically, given conservative claims to oppose big government, they rely on the power of big government to impose abstract bureaucratic definitions on a contradicting reality; as the Times notes, the Department of Health and Human Services is arguing “that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined ‘on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.’” This hypocrisy is compounded by the new rules’ inclusion of genetic testing as the ultimate arbiter of what a person’s sex is; the government would violate your physical person in a dispute over your claimed sex, with the outcome sure to go against the transgender individual.
The reality is that transgender citizens constitute a population long subject to abuse, violence, and discrimination. But with the Trump crowd, saying that a policy helps protect a vulnerable minority against bullying and worse is incitement to dismantle the policy. To the conservative mentality, bullying and other ways of keeping non-conforming individuals reminded of their second-class citizenship is a key to their perverse vision of social order.
The logic being applied by the DHHS to transgender individuals can easily be extended to removing any recognition or protection for gays and lesbians. If the lived experience of transgender people can be discounted as irrelevant, than so surely can the idea that a man would love another man in contravention of what the government decides as normal. I don’t doubt that some in the Trump administration see this as their next move; but like bullies everywhere, they are weighing whether that community is strong enough, and supported by enough of the American population, to beat back such a move, or whether they might get away with it.
The Trump officials involved have made a judgment that they can single out the transgender population without significant political harm, and that Republican strategists view transgender rights as a wedge issue that will make Democrats appear more interested in the rights of minority groups than “normal Americans.” Unfortunately, there is some possibility of such a gambit succeeding, and why it’s essential that the Democrats and other progressives lay out the case that this is an issue of equal rights, not special treatment; of tolerance over easy prejudice; and of human experience and compassion over reflexive moralism.