When I was about 13 in 1988, and starting to get inklings of gender dysphoria, I lacked the right words to express what I was feeling. Instead, I asked my mother what it would mean if my brother or I were gay. “I’d rather you were dead,” she replied curtly with a sense of finality. As if it were something simply too awful to even be contemplated.
It should come as little surprise then that I developed an interest in how atrocities happen. I ended up doing a great deal of my advanced academic research on that topic, including my International Baccalaureate capstone paper on the end of the Weimar Republic and my graduate thesis on forecasting genocide. I wanted to understand: how do things go so horribly wrong? How does a nation collectively lose its mind, and devolve from a democratic, modern, western nation with theoretical civil rights guarantees to an abattoir of genocide in 7 short years? How did people in Germany, and outside, not see it coming? How were they not alarmed? How did the Nazis systematically strip the rights of a class of people?
Of course there was Hitler, and fascism, and populism, and simmering anti-Semitism throughout Europe and Germany. But those are far too simplistic answers. At the same time, focusing on how they did it legislatively and via policy is too narrow a focus to help us understand how it would look elsewhere; the governmental structure and laws of pre-1939 Germany do not exist anywhere today.
The important question is this: what effects did the Nazis hope to achieve with their laws and policies? For decades before WWII there had been what was called “The Jewish Question,” (Or Jewish Problem). This was effectively a debate (without Jewish input, of course) on what the appropriate status and treatment of Jews in Europe should be. The fact that this debate existed at all illustrated people’s blindness to anti-Semitism at the time.
The German answer, between 1933 and 1938, was to create conditions in Germany so hostile to Jewish people that they would effectively disappear from society, and never be seen outside their homes by other Germans. These laws and policies also encouraged Jews to leave Germany permanently. What is more important than the specifics of the policies, though, is their designed effects.
The effects of these laws and policies included the following: making it very difficult for Jews to obtain public education, removing them from the military, purging them from civil service, revoking their civil rights protections via the Nuremberg laws, banning them from most public spaces, enshrining a right for German citizens to discriminate against Jews, encouraging violence against them, and demonizing them as child predators. Near the end, in late 1938 when it was becoming clear that the world wasn’t interested in taking in the refugees they were creating, Germany revoked all Jewish passports, and only returned them with a J stamped on them to single them out.
By 1941, Germany was fighting both Britain and the USSR, and beating both. They no longer cared about world opinion in any way, shape or form. Conversely, any barrier against their hatred and evil was long gone. It was then they decided the answer to the “Jewish Question” was the Holocaust; mass murder on a scale beyond human comprehension.
This history is entirely relevant today. I no longer have any doubts that in the mid-term, the Republican party wants a “1938”-style solution to the “Transgender Question.” A sober look at the Trumpist movement shows that it bears almost all the hallmarks of fascism, whether defined by the Holocaust Museum, Eco Umberto, or the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Additionally, a recent article has also made it clear to me that, in the long run, the Republican base is deeply desirous of a transgender final solution. What’s more, the empirical evidence shows vast majority of Republicans can’t say no to Donald Trump, or their base.
Conservatives are about 40% of the US population. Only 15% of the American public falls under the moderate conservative label. Of the rest, 19% of Americans fit the mold of the Christian conservative; moralistic, patriotic, middle-class, and religious. Six percent of Americans are fit the mold of the ultra-nationalist hard right; White, nationalistic, and highly engaged. Together, these hard right elements form over 60% of the Republican base and 25% of the American population.
This taxonomy seems to pretty accurately capture who Trump’s most ardent supporters are, and seems to be confirmed by other, independent polling data. 22% of Americans would support Trump if he actually did shoot someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue. Trump’s “strong approval” rating sits pretty consistently around 25%. 60% of his supporters would approve of his actions no matter what he did.
Part of the reason I raise the issue of conservative demographics is that when push comes to shove, the impulse of Republicans leaders to appease their base on transgender people is stronger than almost any other instinct they have. When Secretary of Defense James Mattis pleaded with House Republicans not to mess with the transgender military policy, the vast majority ignored him. When corporations begged Texas, Indiana, and North Carolina Republicans not to pass anti-transgender legislation as bad for business, they universally sided anti-transgender elements. Let that sink in: Republicans are more strongly compelled to appease their religious and alt-right base, than the military or corporations.
This base wants transgender people gone, 1938-style in the sense that they wish transgender people could only exist inside their own homes, and not in public. The Family Research Council laid out a blueprint to implement a 1938-style solution in 2015, and Republican politicians are following it by the numbers.
During the 2016 election, Presidential candidate Ted Cruz (whose supporters were mostly evangelicals that ended up enthusiastically embracing Trump) let it slip that he wanted a 1938-style solution to the transgender question. “If a man wants to dress as a woman and live as a woman and to have a bathroom at home. You don’t have a right to intrude upon the rights of others.”
Trumps followers publicly echoed the idea that transgender people should not be accommodated, nor tolerated in public. Gerri Nottingham, Trump-supporting nurse from Indianapolis, recalled Mr. Trump’s saying it would be too expensive to build separate restrooms, and agreed. “If you’ve got that issue, just go home.”
The Trump Administration is moving aggressively to achieve many of the same effects used in Germany to isolate Jews prior to WWII. They are attempting to ban transgender people from the military. They are working to get a civil rights ruling that sharing a bathroom with transgender people violates the rights of others. This would effectively purge transgender students from schools and transgender employees from shared workspaces. They are attempting to argue that transgender people are not protected by law, and that other (higher caste) people have a religious right to discriminate against transgender people even if there are laws protecting them. They argue that discrimination of transgender people is a moral imperative and a social good.
They’re following the religious hate group FRC’s guidance to not recognize gender marker changes, which would have profound impacts. This includes the ability to purge transgender federal employees to revoking the passports of people who have changed their sex marker in the past. At the same time, they are tearing down the institutions that would prevent them from doing this (such as the Office of Personnel Management and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), and packing the courts with conservatives that would rubber stamp these actions in the name of “uniform practices” and “national security”.
Violence against transgender people is actively encouraged by the Republican base. Gavin McInnes has commanded his modern-day Nazi militia “Proud Boys” to, “Choke a tranny. Get your fingers around a windpipe. If they spit on you that’s assault.” James Dobson lamented to his millions of followers that 100 years ago real men would have shot transgender people.
At the same time, most of the debate over the “transgender question” is being conducted without transgender input. Aside from Jennifer Boylan, no transgender writer has a consistent platform in national media. In other places, supposedly progressive writers cluck their tongues at how transgender people are so reactionary, are such poor writers, and basically too objectionable to have a platform. They, like the German population in 1933, had no idea what was really at stake.
Which brings us to why we should believe a 1941-style final solution for transgender people is on the table. Besides the guardrails being down, and it being clear that conservatives are working relentlessly towards a 1938-style solution, there is the empirical evidence that when they talk among themselves, they readily admit they want all transgender people dead. Executed by the government.
George Godwyn recently posted a picture of a buff, mustachioed transgender man in a forum for Donald Trump supporters, and asked which bathroom this transgender person should use. He expected that they would answer he should use the women’s restroom, or similar. What he actually got was far darker.
“I thought at least some of these people will realize how silly it would be to want this man to use the ladies room. How socially awkward and alarming that would be, in so many situations. Putting aside how dangerous it would be for the man, simply on the basis of the immediate, practical effect on the other diners in the given Applebee’s or wherever it was happening.
The post got hundreds of comments, finally thousands. Immediately. The Trump supporters had a very clear answer and they were adamant about it. Almost no answered with “the men’s room”. A few said things like “if they’ve got a vagina, they use a woman’s room, if they have a penis, they use the men’s room.” But the majority of the of the commenters had an answer I hadn’t considered at all. These people had worked out a very simple solution to the problem of transgender people and the norms revolving public restrooms.
They wanted transgender people to die.
They were quite explicit about it, very blunt. “They should die.” That simple. That concise. “They should die.”
Let me be entirely clear about this – they knew what they were saying, they knew exactly what they wanted. They didn’t want a trans man in the men’s room and they didn’t want a trans man in the woman’s room. They wanted the trans man to be dead.
Of course some of them were more loquacious than that. They had reasons they should die, preferred methods, they expressed their feelings about the fantasized the deaths, but death or something similar was the most common answer. “Stop being”, essentially. A lot of other people answered “they should stay home”, maintaining the status quo without having to deal with the problem while still allowing transgender people to, you know, live, but mostly death or some sort of violence was the preferred option.”
Most GenXers, Millenials, and iGens (Gen Z) find these arguments hard to understand. How could anyone hate transgender people that much? Surely our society would never follow in the footsteps in of the most notorious regime of the 20th century? However, our elders, who survived the plague years, know better. They’re seen what happens when queer people start dying by the tens of thousands because the government refuses to stop it, or worse, members of the government see the deaths as a solution to the problem.
At the about the same time I was trying to come out to myself in 1988, unbeknownst to me, a cisgender lesbian woman 400 miles away was crying over the body of the 400th friend she had lost to AIDS. Since I met her years ago, she has been one of my closest confidantes, and she shared with me that instant and the epiphany that came with it. “I was standing in the living room having just discovered the latest death. I was bent over sobbing. In that moment it had become crystal clear that they not only didn’t care; they were overjoyed. They thought these lovely gentle people deserved it. They would kill me if they had a chance, too. I have never let that realization leave me.”
Later on, I met a transgender woman who somehow managed to transition in 1981 even though she was a lesbian. (Medical gatekeepers generally didn’t allow lesbian transgender women to medically transition back then.) She told me how it both saved her life and forced her to go stealth. She lived in New York City, and every Sunday she would have brunch with friends she knew from the clubs. Their meetings got fewer and smaller, and one morning in 1987 she showed up at the café, and realized that she was the only one left. She went stealth, and didn’t emerge for another 30 years.
LGBT people: listen to your elders. They remember, and they do not forgive; they lost an entire generation of gay men and transgender women to cruelty and indifference. Know your history. Pay close attention to what Republicans, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Family Research Council are doing and what their goals are. Understand that everything they are doing is deliberate, calculated, and motivated by sheer malice and disgust directed at transgender people. Never forget that these actions have a purpose: to get us to 1938 for transgender people in America, and open the door to 1941.
Never forgive. Never forget. Never again.
The SCOTUS Event Horizon for the LGBT Movement
Stop for a moment. Imagine how bad it will be…