By Sally Jane Black
The Trump administration is continuing its assault on transgender people. Its most recent attack is the most sweeping yet: altering the definition of sex to mean what one was assigned at birth. The Department of Health and Human Services is currently leading the charge to get all major departments in the U.S. government to follow suit. This change would simply erase transgender people from existence in any legal sense, denying us any legal protections, stripping us of our legal identities, making it impossible to change our IDs, our birth certificates, our genders in any database of any kind. The bureaucratic assault will result in people losing jobs, homes, medical care, drivers licenses, passports, or more if an official decides they’re invalid.
It will mean a cementing of what the current administration has been doing since it took office. Already, they have stripped trans people of rights in schools, prisons, and on the job, and those rights were feeble and hinged not even on an official rule change but just a directive to interpret existing rules differently. No administration has taken the stance needed to actually protect trans people in the eyes of the law–defining gender as more than a biological construct (one that ignores how human biology actually works, no less). What is needed is a major legal change that would allow people to define their own genders on any legal document.
Few trans people have the resources to challenge discrimination in the courts, and the violence trans people face has never been discouraged through any law or social change. Murder rates for trans people, especially black trans women, continue to be astronomically higher than for cisgender people. The capitalist class benefits from dividing the working class. Using the smokescreen of religious freedom or fake concern for the safety of children (a laughable sentiment from an administration currently putting them in cages and kidnapping them from their parents), they inspire fear in the working class and drives them to exclude and attack trans people. We need a united working class with the freedom to be who we are and the legal protections in place to back up the diversity of gender and sexuality that exists. We cannot let the bourgeois attacks continue to drive a wedge between us at the expense of the trans people among us.