©2025 StopTransGenocide.site
In the first few weeks of Trump's presidency in 2025, one of the first things he did was "write" and sign a bunch of Executive Orders and make a bunch of demands with intent to erase transgender people's existence. Every time I think I'm finished writing a list, another Executive Order or other demand comes out targeting transgender people. It is extremely evident that Donald Trump--along with Elon Musk, who is exercising a great deal of influence on him--hates transgender people, and is trying to make it so unbearably hard to live our lives that we "disappear." Things have been moving fast, and new attacks have been taking place at a rapid pace, but a list of just a couple things Donald Trump has done so far includes:
A bit more on the treatment of trans people by the Nazis can be found in this article in Smithsonian Magazine, which covers the German government's acknowledgement in 2022 that trans people were victimized in the Holocaust.
This is not a comprehensive list. Trans people have recently been banned from enlisting in the Army (to add insult to injury, it was announced on Twitter), there have been active attempts to criminalize teachers who support their trans students, and more information is actively being scrubbed from government websites. A specific, alarming example: the National Parks System website for Stonewall National Monument stripped away all references to transgender people. The Stonewall Uprising not only involved trans people, but a big part of what instigated it was laws policing patrons for what gender clothing they were wearing. If you want more up-to-date information, probably the best source is Erin in the Morning.
In addition, a number of Trump's wealthy supporters have walked in lockstep to make living publicly as a transgender person more and more difficult. Both Facebook and Twitter/X have removed rules protecting transgender people from harassment, and explicitly allowed us to be called "mentally ill," while major retailers are removing protections for transgender people from their company policies. Individual states have also been making things worse through implementing healthcare bans and revocation of state identification documents showing a correct gender marker.
The intended effect of all of this is a country in which transgender people cannot navigate public society without the constant threat of having our rights stripped away, being subjected to violence, and simply having our mental health taxed by the constant fear of what he is going to do to us, next. Trying to suppress an entire population of people who have done absolutely nothing but try living our lives to the point crisis hotline calls skyrocket and our youth attempt suicide at even higher rates with each attack is attempted genocide, and it cannot be tolerated.
One of the ways people justify their lack of action is by saying, "Yeah, what's happening is bad, but is it really genocide, like, in a legal sense?" I feel that this is a cop-out--you should care about gross human rights violations even when they aren't genocide--but I will address it anyway.
The legal definition of genocide is written in a way that makes it very hard to meaningfully accuse anybody of it. Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (PDF) states:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
This legal definition poses a couple of huge problems. First, it omits a number of categorizations of people that are particularly vulnerable to attempted extermination, including during the Holocaust, which was the context this law was written in. Some of the Nazis' first victims were queer people, transgender people, and disabled people; none of these groups "count" for the purposes of genocide because, frankly, too many people still supported (and continue to support) our imprisonment, institutionalization, and killing. Second, even if we expand our vision of who "counts" in the legal definition of genocide, the phrase "with intent to destroy" does a lot of heavy lifting, giving its perpetrators the ability to essentially claim that, even if they did intend to harm a group of people, they didn't intend to destroy them.
This legal definition is unlikely to be appropriately expanded, for multiple reasons, but one big one is this: Nobody wants to accuse a country or world leader of attempting genocide, because if they do, they are legally obligated to try stopping it. Nobody wants that responsibility. So rather than call anything genocide, they just bicker over whether or not the perpetrators mean it that way and whether or not the group of people they're targeting counts.
The Lemkin Institute (named for Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide") expands who "counts" beyond the four categories in the Genocide Convention to political, social, economic, sexual identity, and gender groups. You can also find there a list of 10 Patterns of Genocide that include more information on what atrocities are considered genocidal than the five kinds of acts listed in the Genocide Convention. This organization also put out a Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement's Ideology that in part states:
While members of the gender critical movement may argue that they do not seek to kill the physical bodies of transgender people, they do openly seek to eradicate transgender identity from the world, following a genocidal logic similar to the US, Canadian, and Australian boarding schools that sought to “kill the Indian, [and] save the man.” Once it becomes acceptable for one group of people to be criminalized for expressing their identity, then society becomes vulnerable to the genocidal targeting of other groups as well. In fact, anti-trans initiatives are closely tied to assaults on the rights of women, people of color, minority religious communities, and immigrants in the US and elsewhere. The criminalization and harassment of the trans community can serve as a rehearsal for more generalized targeting of unwanted groups within a genocidal ideological structure. There is no shutting the floodgates once states and societies acquiesce to the eradication of a specific people from the earth.
And as for myself and this website: My opinion is that what Donald Trump is doing is attempted genocide, regardless of whether or not it's legally genocide. He is deliberately creating an environment in which an entire group of people is having so many basic human rights stripped away that it is increasingly becoming impossible for us to fully participate in society for fear of harassment, violence, and loss of our means to survive. Because of his actions, information about our historical existence is being actively erased, even basic references to us banned on the federal level. Terrorizing a population into fleeing, going into hiding, or suicide and erasing all evidence they existed is genocide. But even if you are still on the fence about "genocide" being the correct word here, President Trump is, at the very least, getting people killed, and he will absolutely continue to get people killed as long as those in power continue allowing him to revoke people's human rights with the stroke of a pen, assured of their compliance.
I use comparisons to the Nazis because their early treatment of trans people and the Trump Administration's treatment of trans people are too similar to ignore, but also because World War II is the baseline comparison most Americans are familiar with when it comes to genocide. This does not mean what is happening is exactly the same, that it will target precisely all of the same people, or that it will develop and end in exactly the same way. This is one of the problems with learning from history: Too many people reject the lessons of history until it's too late because they are waiting for current events to look exactly like the atrocities they learned about from the past. One of my big concerns right now is that people who aren't just straight up transphobic will refrain from thinking we are truly in danger unless we are literally put into striped uniforms and loaded onto boxcars, because the lessons they took from history are purely aesthetic, not practical. Hell, I'm concerned a lot of people will still reject these comparisons even if they do start matching the aesthetics of Nazism; we have already seen the lengths a lot of people will go to present things like Elon Musk's Nazi salute being portrayed as just a silly oopsie-doodle that people misinterpreted rather than an intentional signal of what he believes in.
It is worth mentioning that the Nazis did not come up with their ideas from whole cloth, they got significant inspiration (and support) from eugenics advocates in the United States. Their gas chambers, as well, were partially inspired by how the United States treated Mexicans at the border, where people were subjected to "gas baths" using a variety of chemicals including Zyklon B. The fact that so much of the Nazi playbook was directly inspired by American bigotry toward Latino migrants and immigrants--one of the other populations being heavily targeted by the Trump Administration--is a good illustration of why you should not wait for everything to look exactly the same to be alarmed and take action.
Trans people and the others Trump is targeting are not overreacting by pointing out these similarities. If anything, people who won't make these comparisons are underreacting.
Right now, as we speak, a number of people and organizations including healthcare systems, government agencies, and private companies have been immediately folding to Trump's demands to strip transgender people's freedoms, witholding gender-affirming care, refusing to provide updated documents, stripping information on transgender health and history from public view, misgendering their students, and much more. Trump's orders to do these things are not only immoral, many of them are illegal. He does not have the authority to sign a piece of paper and poof people's human rights away, and nothing he demands will make participating in a genocide OK. If you are in the position where you are being told to do these things, and you comply, you are a part of the problem.
In his book "On Tyranny," Timothy Snyder urges us not to obey in advance. From the excerpt on that page:
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
Trump may be making the demands, but it's ordinary people who are carrying them out. He's not going into the NASA web servers and pulling out information on diversity, NASA employees are doing that. He's not showing up to hospitals canceling trans people's prescriptions, the hospitals are doing that on their own. To be crystal clear, here: Complying with an obviously unlawful or unethical order does not absolve you of responsibility. This has come up before; people wouldn't sarcastically use the phrase "just following orders" the way they do (from the Nuremberg Trials) if we didn't collectively know that being ordered to do something evil is not an excuse.
That said, you should not be stopping at just not participating directly in anti-trans behaviors. While you definitely should not be threatening people, you should be calling out any entity you see complying, whether it's by contacting them directly via their contact forms, participating in protests, or boycotting their products and services if relevant to the situation. Other genocides were not primarily perpetrated by leaders, but by normal, everyday people who chose to comply. We need to make it so unpopular and career-damaging to comply that people don't do it. Here are a few current capitulators and their contact information.
Donald Trump is attempting genocide against transgender people. Nit-picking over legal definitions and intentions is moral cowardice while he continues to write Executive Order after Executive Order attacking our rights to self-determination, healthcare, identity, history, and the simple ability to participate publicly in society. Transgender people have existed as long as humanity has existed, and we have the right to exist.
Even if you, for whatever reason, do not care about transgender people's fate, your compliance with attacks against transgender people will embolden Trump and his Administration to continue attacking people. He has already attacked immigrants, disabled people, Black people and other people of color, and women through deportation programs, attacking of DEI programs, support for completely removing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and much more. Unless you are one of his super-rich supporters, there will be a point where you or your loved ones will be the target of his injustices, and it is our collective responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen.
©2025 StopTransGenocide.site