There’s a powerful piece in the New York Times by Massa Gessen: The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attacks on Trans People. It argues that the Trump administration’s war on trans people has a goal, which is to “denationalise” trans people.

The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.

By making people “not of this nation”, you can remove all of the rights that apply to citizens of that nation.

We’re seeing exactly the same playbook here in the UK, partly because it’s being orchestrated by the same people and seeded via the press in the same way: an attempt to make trans people a group who are excluded from society, undeserving of the rights, freedoms and protections others enjoy.

Messe could make the familiar argument here – comparing the Trump administration to the Nazis and arguing that “if you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you” – but chooses not to:

It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

One of the key moments in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights was the Stonewall uprising, five nights of resistance in 1969 after the cops picked on patrons of the Stonewall Inn one time too many. Trans people and drag queens were among those targeted by the cops, who used anti-queer legislation – at the time, the law stated that people must wear at least three pieces of “appropriate” clothing according to their birth sex – to harass and humiliate them.

If you think of Stonewall, you’ll probably think of trans women: two of the most iconic figures from the LGBTQ+ rights movement, Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

This week, the US National Park Service, the US government agency that looks after the Stonewall monument, has erased all mention of trans people from its website. It then returned and removed all references to queer people too.

It’s ineptly done, leaving sentences such as “fighting for gay and rights”. But as symbolism goes, it’s hard to beat.

Parker Molloy:

This is just the latest and perhaps most symbolically potent step in the administration’s methodical campaign to eliminate trans people from public life entirely. Since January 20th, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented assault on trans existence: The State Department has frozen all transgender passport applications. The Social Security Administration has banned gender marker updates. The military ban on trans service members has been reinstated. Schools have been ordered to out trans students to their parents. Federally-funded hospitals have been banned from providing gender-affirming care to trans youth.

The scale of this is staggering. Federal agencies across the board have been ordered to scrub their websites of any content related to gender diversity. The CDC’s LGBTQ health resources? Gone. The Department of Education’s guidance for supporting LGBTQ students? Vanished. Even Census.gov temporarily went dark as they purged references to gender identity from their systems…

This matters because when you erase a group from the past, it becomes easier to erase them from the present.

With depressing predictability, the leading lights of the UK anti-trans mob and their pet journalists are celebrating the inauguration of Trump and downplaying or making jokes about copying Elon Musk’s nazi salutes. In particular they’re celebrating the newly signed executive order designed to drive trans people out of society – an order that makes it very clear, once again, that they’re turkeys voting for Christmas.

The executive order is a mess, of course, bigoted, and often horrendously unscientific. But it also contains something very important: a definition of men and women. And in the order, personhood begins not at birth, but at conception.

It’s important to read that in context. The context is:

“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female… the following definitions shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy”.

All interpretation and application of law and policy. Not just the anti-trans bits.

That’s not an accident. It’s because the people writing Trump’s policy are also coming for abortion and contraception and women’s rights, like they’ve been promising they would for the best part of a decade now, like we’ve been trying to tell you for the same period of time.

Chase Strangio, writing in TIME:

It might be easy for people to dismiss the impacts of sweeping anti-transgender policies since, despite this outsized fixation we provoke in our opponents, we only represent .6% of the U.S. population. However, none of these rhetorical, political, or legal attacks on transgender people will ultimately end with us. The anti-trans rhetoric that fueled the 2024 elections was accompanied by a larger message about how men and women are supposed to act, live, and raise families.

Strangio quotes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said of banning trans girls from sports:

“What this also opens the door for is for women to try to perform a very specific kind of femininity for the very kind of men who are drafting this bill, and to open up questioning of who is a woman because of how we look, how we present ourselves, and yes, what we choose to do with our bodies.”

The people celebrating the assault on trans women in the US have paved the way for an assault on all LGBTQ+ people and on cis women as well as trans women. And they’re trying to do the same in the UK.

Update, 23/1/25

Well, that didn’t take long: Trump’s wrecking ball has come for more of women’s protections. Trump has ordered the end of Lyndon B Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which forbade federal contractors from discriminating on grounds of race, colour, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s part of the wider destruction of diversity programmes, the biggest beneficiaries of which – for decades – have been white women.

The coverage of, and social media commentary on, a trans girl being stabbed in England is bringing back an old and poisonous trope: the gay panic defence.

The gay panic defence, and its trans equivalent, asks people to agree that gay and trans people are so disgusting, so repellent, so predatory that their very existence sends straight and/or cis people into such a panic that they commit extreme violence. In this example, the line is that sure, a young woman was sexually humiliated, lured into a trap, beaten and stabbed. But she brought it on herself because she was trans.

Even if the underlying bigotry were true, which of course it isn’t, this wasn’t a crime committed in the heat of the moment over an unwanted advance. A man received oral sex from a trans girl he wasn’t sure was trans, was embarrassed about it later, and conspired with his friends to get revenge. That’s not a panic.

Again and again the gay/trans panic has been used to excuse violent men – and it’s usually men – who’ve committed terrible acts of violence against LGBTQ+ people. And that’s exactly what’s happening around this horrific attack.

This matters more widely because there’s currently an issue – driven, inevitably, by the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade – over whether trans people are deceiving sexual partners if they don’t first disclose that they’re trans. New guidance from the CPS hasn’t really helped, as it suggests that in some cases the law might decide that it does.

One of the key cases here wasn’t about trans people; Justine McNally was a teenage cisgender girl who pretended to be a teenage cisgender boy and had penetrative sex with another cisgender girl. The court found that McNally violated consent because she had lied about her sex and gone to great lengths to deceive her sexual partner even during penetrative sex. And in the minds of the genital-obsessed weirdos, all trans women do that all the time because to them, all trans women are and will always be men irrespective of hormones, surgery or anything else.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what body parts you may or may not have or whether you’re one of the hottest women who ever walked the earth; what matters is what the hospital wrote down on the day you were born. And if you don’t disclose that to men, even if it’s just a one-night stand? Then you deserve anything bad that happens to you.

And that’s where a lot of the horrific response to the stabbed girl is coming from. In the minds of the anti-trans mob, the girl is a predator; she obtained sex by deception, performing oral sex on a boy who she had tricked into believing she was female (because for the mob, no trans girl is or can ever be female). What he and his friends did was bad. But what she did was worse.

This isn’t just incredibly bigoted. It’s incredibly dangerous, because when you combine it with the trans panic you give men a green light to be violent to any women who are trans.

Which, of course, is what the bigots want.