Trump’s Ideological Attack on the Trans Community
Hypermasculinity Guides the New Administration
The trans community is under attack. There’s no other way to view the Trump administrations series of orders that define trans individuals as others and that roll back limited protections while imposing new restrictions on the bodies and lives of trans men and women.
The goal is to root out what they are calling “gender ideology,” which is one of those nebulous concepts used by oppressors to target those they fear or hate. “Gender ideology,” according to President Donald Trump, has a specific definition and has concrete impacts. It
replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.”
The definition elides the science1, which is fluid and conflicting, setting upon a circular argument in which the premise and conclusion are the same (the unprovable claim that genders are fixed at birth is used to “prove” that anything that deviates is false, showing that genders are fixed at birth). More telling is the choice of words to name this apparent threat: ideology is a word used by the right to indicate something threatening. (See the use of “socialism” or the way “ideology” its “DEI/CRT” fear-mongering.)
The Trump administration is correct that this is about ideology, but not “gender ideology.” The ideology in question is fascistic, autocratic. It demonizes trans individuals, turns them into scapegoats for what a strand of rightwing writers see as the emasculation of America. For America to be strong, sex and gender roles need to be clear, men need to be men — meaning physically strong and heterosexual, and that they have a special responsibility to protect women (and control them). Here is Vice President J.D. Vance in the run-up to the election:
“Is there a dynamic that’s going on where if you become trans, that’s the way to reject your white privilege?” Vance said, speaking to podcaster Joe Rogan. “That’s the only social signifier, the only one that is available in the hyper-woke mindset, is if you become gender nonbinary.”
This is absurd, and a deeply disturbed and conspiratorial argument, and one Vance repeatedly makes in numerous forms — mimicking the “natalist” statements made by foreign autocrats like Viktor Orban of Hungary and Vladimir Putin of Russia. And it is an argument that ties together the various strands of white nationalism and the right’s own “gender ideology” into an all-purpose, singular demand for returning to an undefined bygone era of manly men and their doting women.
These arguments should be familiar because they echo anti-black, anti-Jew, anti-gay and general anti-immigrant rhetoric used by the white right throughout American history. White supremacists have historically used protection of traditional womanhood to justify their violence. Jews have been painted as effeminate and insidious interlopers, while gays and lesbians (and same-sex marriage) have been presented as groomers.
Each group is a threat to traditional femininity, which in turn makes it a threat to traditional male privilege and power. The existence of transgender individuals is just the latest version of this, and tied to the “manosphere” antipathy to feminism, as well.
The “one instinct that Vance and the rest of the New Right share,” writes Laura K. Field,
is a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality — or what the New Right calls “gender ideology.” Overt chauvinism that seeks to roll back much of feminism’s gains is one of the most obvious unifying threads of this varied movement, and Trump’s choice of Vance anoints and entrenches it into the culture-war side of the MAGA movement.
This is part of the political “hypermasculinity” that animates so much of the right a “hypermasculinity,” that Ruth Ben-Ghiat says,
sets the stage for homophobia by decreeing that all other models of manhood and gender identity are dangerous because they damage the family (and civilization itself!) and lead to social anarchy.
We see this in Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary, where LGBTQ people are linked “to fears of moral corruption, public order, and the safety of children.” And we can see this in the many of the efforts in the United States to prevent trans people from changing or amending their birth certificates and passports, or banning them from using the public restrooms connected to their gender identity.
“Attacking trans women,” writes Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works2
and representing the feared other as a threat to the manhood of the nation, are ways of placing the very idea of manhood at the center of political attention, gradually introducing fascist ideals of hierarchy and domination by physical power to the public sphere.”
Trump’s series of executive orders — which cover athletes, youth, federal prisoners, and soldiers — are part of this ideological war. They paint trans women, in particular, as threats to “real” American women and posit Trump and his appointees as women’s protectors — as real men. These are the same people, of course, who have targeted women’s access to abortion, birth control, and health care, and who have little to say about pay inequity or equal treatment.
These attacks are not just about the trans community, as Stanley says. They portend a much greater imposition a “Authoritarian biopolitics” that Ben-Ghiat says
is not just about encouraging the right elements of the population to procreate, but also about removing the wrong elements from the public sphere, by silencing them, locking them up, or worse.
This may seem theoretical, but the rhetorical targeting has real world consequences. The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of law reports that “transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault,.” It also reports that “households with a transgender person had higher rates of property victimization than cisgender households.” Other research over the last several years supports this finding3.
I worry about this everyday. I worry about trans family members, trans friends, about the entire community. I am tired of and angry about the glib assumptions of those who seem so certain in their bigotry, who can’t see the human beings obscured by the hateful stereotypes and political arguments pushed by people like Trump and Vance. Enough is enough.
Trans rights are human rights.
The move to ban trans women from playing women’s sports is getting most of the attention, because it allows the anti-trans community to pretend they are not bigoted against trans people. This is common sense, they say — though, the science is mixed at best (https://cces.ca/transgender-women-athletes-and-elite-sport-scientific-review). A recent study found (https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindseyedarvin/2024/04/25/transgender-athletes-could-be-at-a-physical-disadvantage-new-research-shows/) that trans women athletes may get some benefits but also suffer significantly in competition.
Ultimately, says Bradley Anawalt, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine (https://newsroom.uw.edu/blog/expert-science-wont-resolve-debates-about-trans-athletes), science is unlikely to settle the issue.
I think that at the very highest levels in these sports, where scholarships are given out and there is a lot of money or public acclaim at stake, I think science is not going to provide enough facts to make it clear what's the right thing to do. There will be questions about the fairness of including and excluding individuals.
But this is not about science. It is about fear, about defending privilege, and about using already vulnerable populations as political wedges, as tools in a broader autocratic agenda.
Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works, Random House, 2018, p. 137.
These links are just two of the many that show the dangers faced by the trans community. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117016/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20240321-SD011.pdf; https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf