By the LGBTQ and Women’s Movement Work Team of Freedom Road Socialist Organization
It seems like Trump signs each bigoted executive order before the ink dries on the last. He hasn’t spared any time or pulled any punches in attacking trans people.
The latest executive orders include holding federal funds hostage to bar trans athletes from sports and trans kids from receiving healthcare. Based on pseudoscience, one executive order declares that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes.” This erases the thousands of cisgender intersex people living in the United States. The same order mandates that trans women be barred from women’s restrooms in federal buildings, and it calls on coworkers to turn against each other to report them. It also prohibits changing gender markers on passports.
Trump is pushing for legislation allowing parents to sue medical providers for offering gender-affirming care to children while simultaneously punishing parents and healthcare workers for respecting the autonomy of transgender youth. He is stopping trans women from using abuse shelters and being housed with women in prisons, effectively compounding sexual violence against them.
These orders come on the heels of hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced by reactionary state governments in a four-year-long backlash against Trump’s defeat in 2020. They expose the openly reactionary face of a declining empire lashing out, trying to salvage the oppressive system it depends on.
They are the tip of the spear in an all-out assault against women and LGBTQ people. The “two sexes” order defines gender as beginning “at conception,” opening the door to the dangerous notion of fetal personhood. The gender-affirming care ban states that trans people conduct “a losing war with their own bodies,” calling into question both bodily autonomy and people’s right to define their own identities.
The idea that these orders somehow “protect women” is a lie. Not only will they expose transgender and cisgender women alike to unnecessary and traumatic scrutiny of their bodies, they also do nothing to protect women from actual perpetrators of violence. When the majority of assaults on women happen in their intimate relationships with men or while living their lives in public, regulating trans people’s participation in public life is an absurd distraction from real problems in our society.
These orders will also curtail the rights of oppressed nationality and working-class women. The sports ban prohibits trans women and gender non-conforming people from entering the country, opening the door to racism against any woman deemed too masculine. The sports and gender-affirming care bans both threaten to withhold free lunches from schools, as well as Medicare and Medicaid funds from hospitals that don’t comply with transgender discrimination.
FRSO resolutely opposes these reactionary policies that target our trans community members. These attacks are intended to intimidate, confuse, and overwhelm. We won’t stand for this. We will unite all who can be united against Trump’s agenda and the backward political movement he represents. We look forward to fighting back in the streets.
