The Shallow, Performative Outrage Over Trump’s Anti-Trans Tack
Some people will accept any attack on trans people unless it comes from Donald Trump. Get ready for the era of stupid, shallow, meaningless liberal support for trans rights.
by Evan Urquhart
In the wake of hundreds of bills targeting the trans community, Donald Trump has called for a Federal ban on gender affirming care for youth and a ban on Medicare and Medicaid coverage for gender affirming care at any age, among other equally extreme policies targeting transgender people. Now, some members of the mainstream media have joined the Washington Examiner in wondering if it might all be going a bit too far.
Attacks on trans people seem poised to enter the liminal space in American politics where a thing is absolutely horrific and beyond the pale when Donald Trump does it, and at no other time. What else can we take from this sudden interest in condemning Donald Trump specifically from the likes of David Weigel or Jesse-freaking-Singal, ie the sort of person who has never before found an anti-trans measure so extreme it’s worth making a fuss over?
Is this likely to be good for trans people or trans rights? I wish I could tell you that the singular hatred of this man was likely to help people in the American center right consensus to see sense on trans issues. In theory, it could work that way: Trump hatred would lead them to give the arguments in favor of trans rights a second look, this would lead them to become passionate defenders of trans people in the name of talking about how bad a guy Trump is, and their rhetorical defense of trans people, belated though it might be, would return the country to the generally-positive trajectory on trans issues we thought was coming way back in the early 2010s. Unfortunately, the center right’s response to Trump’s positions on other issues does not suggest this is likely to occur.
In 2017, when we began to see how Trump would govern as president, I started trying to keep track, just for myself, of which of Trump’s actions were a complete departure from previous American presidents and which were very similar to what had come before. I thought it would help me to ground myself and keep me sane through an insane time… and then I abandoned the attempt within about a month. I didn’t have the time to independently research every thing people were treating as an unprecedented outrage myself, and (to my surprise) there was no real effort by the mainstream news coverage to consistently make it clear which of the horrible things Trump was doing were American business as usual, and which were not. None of that is to say Trump was a normal president, or that the alarm that surrounded his presidency was unfair or overblown: Trump’s total disinterest in following U. S. law and his repeated toying with the idea of becoming a dictator (which started early and eventually culminated in his attempt to violently overturn the results of the 2020 election), was both horrible and actually new.
Of course, there were other departures from the norm as well; his chaotic, constantly changing staff, his seeming to decide major policy changes on a whim and announce them via tweet, his interest in using the presidential pardon power to help him get away with crimes. However, many of the abuses of his administration, including some of the things people responded the most emotionally to, were either continuations of past Republican policies or things Presidents from both parties had often done.
Trump’s proposals relating to trans people are like that. They remind me a lot of his approach to immigration, meaning they are cruel and extreme and legal and fairly similar to things that other Republicans are trying to enact. Our country has not undergone a transformation on the issue of immigration, after Trump, and other Republican governors have learned from his example, pushing the legal envelope dubiously legal Trump-like ways, tricking innocent refugees (all of whom were in the country legally), on to buses in ways many felt resembled kidnapping, for the purpose of cruel anti-immigration stunts
So, I think that’s the future we have to look forward to, where concern for trans rights on the left has a dramatic “kids in cages” quality which somehow, oddly, never results in anything getting better for immigrant children. Anyone who points this out will be accused of liking Trump, and it will all be incredibly stupid and frustrating for anyone who actually cares about trans people or their rights.