You’ve Got to Stop Picturing Camps
The violent tools the right will use to eradicate trans people are already with us, and already being used to incarcerate and institutionalize trans people.
by Evan Urquhart
What would it mean, to eradicate transgender people from public life? Over the weekend a popular far right personality, Michael Knowles, proposed eradicating “transgenderism” to a cheering CPAC crowd. Now the specifics of what eradication means and what it would look like have become a hot mainstream subject for debate. We shouldn’t have to be asking this question, but here we are, asking away.
The word eradication conjures up images of mass death. It strains credulity to imagine the Knowles did not know and intend exactly that. However, people who enjoy thinking practically about the meaning behind a conservative threat of mass death, are already pondering whether Knowles and his ilk are truly proposing some sort of camps for people who display transgenderism to be concentrated into, or whether he means something slightly less icky. “Still icky!” They will hasten to add, but not quite so tasteless as, well, that.
The truth is they are wrong: There will absolutely be mass incarceration and institutionalization of transgender people, if conservatives get their way. It most likely won’t be in camps, but in the same prisons and mental hospitals we already have. It will not look completely new. It will look like a doubling down on the use of systems which disproportionately incarcerate and institutionalize people who are trans. That there is a continuation providing the scaffold for an intesification doesn’t make it any less harsh, but it does make it more likely to work.
When we picture the coming elimination of transgender people from public life, we tend to draw on our personal experiences, and those of people like us. Most people with access to any sort of platform haven’t had experiences of incarceration, and if they have had experiences of institutionalization they know to keep quiet about those, lest these experiences discredit them in the public eye. This means that, for those of us whose voices you can hear, we’re mostly imagining we will be forced to relocate or detransition or go underground, to avoid persecution. You mostly aren’t hearing from those of us who will be jailed.
Some of us may also be contemplating suicide, which of course can lead to death, but less talked about is the fact that it can lead to institutionalization. Because of the stigma of mental illness we rarely explicitly link the threat of institutionalization mediated by breakdown from minority stress to the threat of elimination being held over our heads, but it’s an integral part of the plan to drive trans people out of public life.
On the street, homeless people are already being jailed. Survival sex workers are already being jailed. Nearly half of all Black trans women have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. For the most part, these trans women are placed in men’s jails. That’s how things stand today, not in the terrifying future conservatives are calling for which presupposes that things are too easy for trans people now, so more punishment must be leveraged to force us back underground.
If your picture of transgender eradication is of trans people being forced to move from their homes, or forced to go stealth, or of trans people feeling they must remain in the closet out of fear, you need to understand that you are choosing to picture the lucky ones. What you need to consider is that, to cause all that uprooting of lives, there needs to be something to fear. A ramp up of incarceration and institutionalization of those without the means to flee, or those unlucky enough to be made an example of, or those who cannot bear up under the stress, will be the force that drives us all, as a group, out of view.
Already, they are writing laws to make providing gender affirming care a felony. Responsible providers will close up shop, but desperate trans people will seek out meds. Testosterone is a scheduled drug. You think there will be no jails? There will be jails.
There are already jails. There are already locked wards. The proposal by the right, by Knowles, is to ratchet up the use of these tools, the same ones that have been used against gender nonconforming people since time immemorial, to lock as many of us up as it takes to force the rest out of view. It will not be polite, it will not be voluntary, and it will not be without violence. Take it from someone who was strapped to a stretcher and forcibly institutionalized, for my own good, when I was 16: None of this happens without violence. The trick will be to get you to think the types of violence they’re using don’t really count, because they look too similar to the types of violence you’ve accepted thus far.