Trump’s Anti-Trans Executive Orders

Speaker 1 [00:00:08] Adrian such fam this is the Mess Memories guide to our political hellscape. And that’s me. I’m Imara. And also, we’re definitely in a political hellscape. Like the hellscape of hellscape. I’m so glad that you’re here, because this is a show where we break down everything that’s going on in politics, which is now suddenly take an a very serious and a very deadly turn. But there’s still a lot of absurdity in everything that’s happening. And so what we’re going to do, as we always do, is to balance the serious part with the court jester ness of it all and try to use those things to inform us and to get us through without being depressed and collapsing in despair. But to be able to look at things squarely so that everyone can figure out what to do and how to respond. And there’s no better way to go into the absurdity in politics right now than to talk about the second inauguration of Donald Trump and all of the things that he did in the first couple of days afterwards to get it all started. Specifically, I’ll be talking through his executive order proclaiming that the government will only recognize two sexes. His attempt to end birthright citizenship and the trans military ban 2.0. Now, as always, we record this show a couple of days before it comes to your ears. So if something’s changed by the time you’ve heard it, now, you know why. And especially now, when things are rocking and rolling, changing minute by minute, it’s second by second. Something’s got to have changed. All right. With that, let’s get messy. As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female. I don’t know about you, but do you think that Trump knew the word henceforth before it was on his teleprompter? I don’t know. That clip was from Reuters, by the way. So with that, Trump began to make good on his promise to end the transgender insanity from day one. Now, the exact title of this executive order is utterly and totally ridiculous. The official title is Defending Women from Gender, Ideology, Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. Now, what’s interesting about this is that in many ways it is not grounded in the law because the Supreme Court already ruled in the Bostock discrimination case that trans people are covered by sex definitions in the Constitution. But this isn’t about what’s in the law or not what’s in the law. It’s fundamentally about trying to redefine biological sex, which is a backdoor to redefining gender protections overall by moving gender protections to be based upon biology. And if you do that, then so many of the case law that justifies sex discrimination is null and void. Practically speaking, from their point of view. And so this isn’t only about trying to define who is a man and who is a woman. For trans people, it’s actually about shifting our entire definition and legal understanding of what sex discrimination is, because we know that at their core, the Trump administration are patriarchal authoritarians and need to reinforce patriarchy through everything that they do in order to shift things in the direction that they want them to go. And so this is a move to do that, using trans people as the entry point for that project. The second thing that I think is really important about our understanding of this, you know, executive order is that it is allowing the federal government to end the recognition of X markers on any passports. And so that puts non-binary people in a particular spot. We don’t know whether or not this is going to change the way that they issue a series of documents. I think it likely will that says that the federal Government has 30 days to determine if that’s the case. It probably will be. So that’s another practical implication of this and also a practical implication for millions of federal employees. The federal government is the single largest employer in the world. And this says that these rigid biological sex definitions have to be reinforced for millions of federal workers. And we don’t know if that means going person by person and demanding birth certificates and changing documentations or even employment status based upon that. So there’s so many different ways that this can go sideways. And I wish I was shocked by the fact that the mainstream media are not talking about this. But honestly, they seem to have abandoned the idea that talking about trans people is relevant. But that’s how we got here in the first place because they did that in the election and we see how that went. And it’s also the case that when you read this, it’s really obsessed fundamentally with reproduction, like what body parts reproduce, what in what kind of way, which opens the door to a whole host of things. It opens the door to eugenics and the government beginning to control reproduction because it’s so obsessed with that as the basis for people’s identity. The last thing, of course, is that their definition is wrong and cannot be implemented. You know why? Because they’re not just two sexes, as they say. We know that they’re intersex people that have a range of different characteristics that you may be able to see visually or not. We know that there are people who appear to be, what we would say, men or women, male or female. They have all types of chromosomal arrangements. We know that there are cis women who cannot, quote, reproduce. So does that mean that because if you are born without a uterus or something along those lines, that somehow that you technically aren’t a woman because you can’t reproduce like it is wrong in every direction, including by their own biological standards, and opens the door for there to be much bigger implications for the people who think that they’re being protected by all of this. And so the bottom line is that while this is great on a bumper sticker and it seems that for the masses of people who voted for Donald Trump, that this is just common sense and a common sense move. It actually is the contrary. And it is ushering us into a new era of authoritarianism, patriarchal authoritarianism, using trans people as the excuse. And for me, this. Is just a biological mess. I. Next up is an executive order about birthright citizenship. Here’s a clip from ABC seven in Chicago explaining it all.

Speaker 2 [00:07:17] President Trump signing an executive order tonight that attempts to end birthright citizenship in the United States. That right is guaranteed by the Constitution. The 14th Amendment states anyone born in the United States is an American citizen.

Speaker 1 [00:07:33] Okay, So I wanted to talk about birthright citizenship because it’s a really important conversation for intersectional identities and trans communities. We know that trans people come in all shapes and sizes of all backgrounds. And we know that there are trans black and brown people for whom this is really relevant. But like so many things that he’s doing, it really is about one group of people, but is in reality meant to push broader changes that will allow them to remake society along the authoritarian lines that they’re obsessed with. Okay, so what is birthright citizenship? Well, after the Civil War, the Congress of the United States and the States ratified a change in the Constitution which said that citizenship in the United States is based upon not race, that these other things that it had been based on before, but literally who’s born in the country. And it is the way that black people got citizenship in the United States, because the 4 million people who had been enslaved, who were of African descent in the United States were born here and got that citizenship. It is also the way that immigrants got citizenship. And the Congress of the United States at the time understood that birthright citizenship meant that immigrants, many of whom had fought in the civil war from Ireland and Germany and all these other places would have citizenship in the United States. Like they understood that birthright citizenship meant African-Americans, and it meant people who came to the United States who had families and or who had been born here from people who had immigrated here, would all have citizenship. So Donald Trump is, first of all, trying to do what he can’t do, which is to strike from the Constitution, an amendment that had been passed legally with an executive order that doesn’t do it. Executive orders are basically his interpretation of the law, his interpretation of the law. Who cares? But what is really relevant is it sends a signal to all of the people in the federal government, especially the people being weaponized along the border into the military, that they have carte blanche to do whatever they want and that Donald Trump is going to make people stop him from doing something rather than restraining himself. So while technically he doesn’t have any say so over this part of the Constitution, he doesn’t care. He is going to go ahead and implement it and literally make people stop him. Now he says he’s doing it in order to go after the gangs or whatever. But the reality is that when you are patriarchal authoritarians with a racist bent, you have to ensure that the country stays majority white. And they see this as a way to do that by ending birthright citizenship and by removing the right of people of color to be citizens of the United States. And this isn’t only about immigrants, which people think it’s actually a backdoor way to begin to threaten the citizenship status of anyone born in the country, including African-Americans who he says are included in all of this. But I don’t know about you, but do you really trust, again, Donald Trump to restrain himself or to stop in a direction once he has started to go? And so this particular conversation around birthright citizenship adds to the stress of so many people in our community, especially if you have an interest sexual identity, which we have to be concerned about and lift up. And beyond that, for anyone who is here at this particular moment, if the government can begin to threaten your status as a person, that means that they can threaten you, which makes you less likely to speak up, to protest, to push back against what they’re doing. And they fully understand that. So we need to be really broad. And our thinking about the impact of these executive orders, especially one which is meant to attack the citizenship status of tens of millions of Americans potentially, and need to be on guard for the way that this is going to unfold. And for me, this executive order is just a constitutional mess. Last up is the trans military band, which was actually included amongst the very, very, very first executive orders signed by Donald Trump. It repealed an executive order from Joe Biden, which allowed trans people to serve in the military, which in itself repealed Trump’s first trans military ban during the first Trump administration. Now, what this means is that 15,000 trans people could be thrown out of the military as a result of this particular ban. Now, the rules around the ban have been totally crafted, and the executive order says that the Department of Defense has 45 days to come up with how to implement this particular ban. So we’ll see exactly what it means. But the U.S. government is the single largest employer in the United States, and the United States military is the single largest employer within the federal government. So we’re talking about an entity with massive implications for trans people. And as we spoke about on this program late last year, the military already took away health care for the trans kids of military service members through a budget bill that passed at the end of last year. So the Department of Defense is being weaponized against trans people, both in terms of families and now service members. Now, regardless of whatever you think of the military, the military has been used as a way to promote integration in society. It’s true for African-Americans. It’s true for immigrants. It’s true for people of all backgrounds. Literally since the beginning of the country, if you served in George Washington’s army and you were enslaved African-American, you got free at the end of that. So this is aiming directly at an institution regardless, again, of how you feel about it and what you think about it, which domestically, for the people serving in the military has been used to open doors and break down barriers. And this is sending a very clear message that that door is closing. And it’s also the case that there’s so many people serving in the military who have jobs that are not related to using lethal force, that, you know, they’re truck drivers and psychotherapists and food people, people of all different backgrounds. And suddenly those people who are being told that a career that they have been in for perhaps decades, that they’re about to be tossed out of. And so on a personal level, that’s terrible. And as the single largest employer, it is sending the signal that any employer in the United States can take that action and not face consequences, at least from the federal government. The last thing that I think is really concerning about all of this is that it underscores this broader shift within the U.S. military with the nomination of Pete Hegseth as its new secretary of defense, a person who is known to be a Christian nationalist, person who is known to be a misogynist, a person whose own mother said that women should be afraid of him because of a history of sexual assault, of pushing anyone outside of the military who’s not a white man, who’s not signed up for the Christian nationalist project. And that means that the military is transformed then into a very specific weapon of the state without anyone inside who could put the brakes on it or to resist. So again, here we have an executive order which seems to be and practically is aimed at a specific group of people with much broader implications for us all. And it’s why we cannot fall into the trap that the mainstream media wants us to, which is to think that trans issues are relevant and that we should dismiss ourselves from the conversation about what’s happening in this country. Because we’re not important, because we understand from everything that’s happening that we’re at the very heart of everything that they’re trying to do. Which is why we have to talk about it and let people know exactly what’s happening. And so in so many ways, the trans military ban is just bad for trans employment for the people serving in the military and potentially for all of us. Because the military, from the perspective of the people who are now running it, should essentially be Trump’s own private army. And that’s why I think this executive order is a marching mess. Thank you for being a transsexual ambulance driver and sorting through all the mess with me today. If you like the show, it would mean so much to me if you could go and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. I love hearing those and I loved reading them on the show. And it also communicates to me and everybody that works on the show that like, y’all are actually the snake, so please go do that. Kind of important. I’ll be back in your feed in two weeks to sort through all of the shenanigans that come up between now and then. And they’re going to be more than we could fit into a little short intrepid show. I’m your host, Imara Jones. This show is produced by Aubrey Calloway. Xander Adams is our senior sound engineer and contributing producer. And this episode was engineered by Lucy Little Oliver. Ash Klein oversees production as the director of podcasts at Transition Media. This show gets through your ears with the help of our social media team, including Morgan Asprey. And of course, this show is made possible by transmission subscribers like you. So thanks for listening and I’ll see you soon.