Protecting democracy requires protecting trans and nonbinary people

How the autocratic playbook is deployed against trans and nonbinary communities

President Trump has spent his first weeks in office attacking vulnerable communities, sowing chaos, and undermining our democracy. Among those efforts, the new administration has zeroed in on attacking the trans and nonbinary community with particular zeal.

Scapegoating trans and nonbinary folks is right out of the authoritarian playbook, one of the tools in the kit the administration is deploying alongside other classic authoritarian tactics: spreading disinformation, attacking core freedoms, and putting all of our rights and health at risk.

Authoritarian leaders, like bullies everywhere, need scapegoats they can blame for factual or fictional problems so they can gain and consolidate power. Without substantial political and social power, vulnerable communities are easy targets. So aspiring autocrats punch down and stoke hatred that quickly morphs from slurs and inflammatory rhetoric to surging hate crimes.

The ensuing moral panic helps to consolidate power — further undermining the foundations of our democracy by targeting minority rights and eroding the separation of powers.

A catalog of Trump 2.0’s attacks on the trans and nonbinary community

The Trump administration has already unleashed a volley of executive orders trying to suppress and flat-out erase the trans and nonbinary community.

On his first day in office, President Trump issued a sweeping executive order that aimed to eviscerate the rights of trans people. That order seeks to define gender as binary and determined at conception, to halt the issuance of “X” gender markers on U.S. passports (making it unsafe for many people to travel at all), and to target basic protections for incarcerated trans people.

A week later, President Trump issued an executive order directing the federal government to restrict access to gender-affirming care for individuals under 19 years old (that order has been temporarily blocked nationwide by a federal court). And then President Trump issued an order seeking to ban transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports.

Federal agencies have acted quickly on these executive orders. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) resources on health information and scientific research for the LGBTQIA+ community were scrubbed from government websites. The Department of Justice has threatened the funding of nonprofits — such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit that fights child sexual exploitation — if they did not remove references to transgender and other LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials, and told the organization to deadname trans kids in their reports (i.e., to use their birth names, misgendering them and making it harder to actually find them). The Department of Education announced that it would investigate some high school and college athletic associations for alleged Title IX violations based on their policies on transgender athletes, and urged organizations overseeing high school and college athletics to strip records, titles, and awards from transgender athletes who competed in women’s or girls’ sports. And the Secretary of Defense issued a memo seeking to pause “all new accessions for individuals with a history of gender dysphoria” and “all unscheduled, scheduled, or planned medical procedures associated with affirming or facilitating a gender transition for Service members[.]”

That’s only a sample of the actions targeting transgender and nonbinary people over the last month, and the administration continues to escalate its efforts. Indeed, the Department of Health and Human Services recently released federal “guidance” that states “[a] person’s sex is unchangeable,” and launched a web page promoting the administration’s executive orders that target transgender and nonbinary individuals.

Trump’s executive orders, and threats to funding, have already led to an alarming rate of advance compliance. For example, the NCAA banned transgender women from competing in women’s sports just one day after Trump signed an executive order attempting to exclude transgender individuals from women’s sports, even though the NCAA is not directly regulated by the order (which has already been challenged in court). And hospitals across the country — including in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York — have postponed or stopped providing gender-affirming care for patients under 19 years old (not all hospitals have ceased such care, and three states have filed a lawsuit to restore access to these treatments).

These actions have cascading harms that threaten the existence of LGBTQIA+ individuals and their right to live free from violence and fear. Hate crimes against the LGBTQIA+ community continue to rise, and experts on extremism have long warned that governmental attacks on trans rights encourage bigotry and hate incidents and further endanger LGBTQIA+ folks.

Previous bans on trans healthcare at the state level have forced families to uproot their lives and flee to states where they can still access needed medical care. And a peer-reviewed study found that states that enacted anti-transgender laws aimed at minors saw suicide attempts by trans and nonbinary teenagers increase by as much as 72% in the years that followed those laws passing.

As experts have made quite clear, the consequences of this administration’s actions “would make life insufferable” and could even be “a death sentence.”

These attacks are a recipe for power consolidation

Again, President Trump is following an established authoritarian tactic of scapegoating gender non-conforming and queer individuals to amass power. As our colleagues explained last year:

[A]utocrats use demographic identity as a way to sow division. This tactic also allows autocrats to claim a broad mandate after coming to power with only plurality support. The creation of a guilty, threatening “them” helps mold an innocent, virtuous “us” in need of protection. The resultant antagonism, rife with anxiety, anger, and fear, creates a permission structure for measures that chip away at the foundations of democracy.

President Trump’s predecessors and contemporaries using this tactic should be a stark warning. One of the first trans health clinics in the world, the Institute in Sexual Research in Berlin, was also one of the first targets of a rising Nazi party whose Nazi Youth ransacked and burned the organization in 1933.

In recent years, authoritarian movements in Hungary, Brazil, Russia, El Salvador, Poland, and Romania among others have all stoked moral panic targeting women and the LGBTQIA+ community as part of attacks on democratic institutions. And many states have already deployed this same tactic.

To be clear, Trump hasn’t focused on just scapegoating: he has already deployed nearly all of the tactics laid out in the Authoritarian Playbook against the trans and nonbinary community.

First, the Trump administration has infringed on a range of individual rights that other Americans take for granted. Across the United States, trans and nonbinary folks are facing attacks on their right to make our own medical choices, the right of free association, the rights of families to make decisions about their health and wellbeing, the right to privacy regarding our most sensitive medical information, the right to travel (including across state lines), and the right to education. Even the basic ability to safely use the restroom — something the public and major corporations rallied to defend less than a decade ago — is under assault.

Second, the attacks are based on and spread disinformation, they politicize key independent institutions (from the CDC to local hospitals), and are designed to quash dissent. Following President Trump’s executive orders, websites across the federal government censored information about LGBTQIA+ rights and programs, including by removing critical information on travel safety from the State Department’s website, and data on adolescent health and infections disease as well as clinical guidelines on reproductive care and sexually transmitted infections from the CDC’s website. The CDC also ordered the withdrawal of pending scientific papers to ensure that no “forbidden terms” appeared in the manuscripts including terms such as “transgender,” “non-binary,” and even just “gender.”

Third, these orders abuse executive power at the expense of constitutional protections and our system of checks and balances. Thus, for example, one federal judge has already ruled that the directive to transfer trans women to all-male prisons likely violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. And as another federal judge ruled last week, the President has no authority to unilaterally freeze funding allocated by Congress for medical care — including funding for transgender youth seeking medical treatments.

What you can do

It can be tempting to lose hope. And among the trans and nonbinary community, there is a deep sense of precarity and fear about what else may come from actions by both federal and state level officials.

But members of the LGBTQIA+ community have long fought for their civil rights and for collective liberation. Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts to erase the trans and nonbinary community, that fight will go on — and all of us must join it to protect our democracy.

First, as hard as it is, remember that fear and isolation are authoritarian tools. Meanwhile, solidarity and community are tools for those who care about democracy, just as much as protest and litigation. Supporting trans and nonbinary people in our own lives and the broader community is critical, especially given the burdens faced by those folks and organizations that serve them.

We must all strive to act with humility and vigilantly to counter disinformation, including among our own communities, acknowledging our own tendencies to unintentionally empower authoritarian scapegoating when we allow disinformation to dictate the rules of engagement around transgender Americans' rights and livelihoods. This includes supporting trans journalists and those organizations with expertise and nuance covering these issues.

Second, demand that public spaces and institutions in your community protect and defend all members of our communities. Those demands can include protest, which has already prompted some hospitals in the country to resume gender-affirming treatment after initially engaging in anticipatory obedience. And staying informed about potentially harmful legislation can help any advocacy efforts.

Third, demand more from our government officials, and support those who are standing up to authoritarianism. For example, a coalition of 14 states recently issued a joint statement warning hospitals that they must not cancel appointments or risk violating state anti-discrimination laws. When opportunities arise, such as public comment periods for discriminatory rule changes, make your voice heard.

To be clear, many of the actions we have seen in the past couple of weeks are plainly illegal and have already been enjoined by courts. But the fight will not be won or lost in the courts alone. Winning the fight, and defeating the authoritarian threat, demands that we rise to the challenge of solidarity and refuse to bend to efforts to break apart our coalition by attacking our most vulnerable allies. Trans and nonbinary Americans — and our democracy — depend on it.