Some of the most deplorable episodes in U.S. history involve the government wielding the power of the state against minority groups: Black people, Indigenous people and gay people, to name just a few. Though these campaigns might have received popular support at the time, history has consistently judged them as immoral, illegal and un-American.
Rather than understanding this history, President Trump is borrowing from the worst of it. One of the very first acts of his second term was to order the government to view gender as immutable and discriminate against transgender citizens. “As of today,” he declared in his Inaugural Address, “it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
The early days of Mr. Trump’s second term have raised any number of concerns about actions that run dangerously counter to both the laws and the best interests of the country and its people. But the chaos of these past few weeks shouldn’t mask that in this period, he has also waged as direct a campaign against a single, vulnerable minority as we’ve seen in generations.
Within hours, this language began to be codified in a series of executive orders and actions attempting to exclude transgender people from nearly every aspect of American public life: denying them accurate identification documents such as passports, imposing a nationwide restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, investigating schools with gender neutral bathrooms, criminalizing teacher support for transgender students and commanding the Federal Bureau of Prisons to force the estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men.
The broadside against transgender people was not unexpected. Anti-transgender politicians spent at least $215 million to scapegoat transgender people for a variety of social ills. The Republican Party has increasingly viewed attacking trans rights as a political winner, much as it did attacking civil rights during Richard Nixon’s presidency and attacking gay rights in George W. Bush’s. That posture was disgracefully reflected in the speed and glee with which House Republicans barred transgender women from using women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill after the election of Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress. As for Mr. Trump, he won power by caricaturing and demonizing trans people; now he is using that power to harm trans people.
The Trump administration’s attacks come half a decade after the conservative-dominated Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch.