In the first weeks of Donald Trump's second presidency, the administration hurriedly issued executive orders that attempt to strip transgender people of what scant rights we already have, all while seeking to erase us at all levels. The only thing that has stopped the wholesale trampling of trans lives has been a handful of judges ruling that laws still matter.
By the time you read this, we may see if judges still hold any sway at all.
These actions by Trump – as well as transgender people asking for our rights to be protected, if I may be so frank – have been labeled as "distractions." As the orders themselves are of dubious enforcement, it is argued, we should instead focus on some of the other illegal actions of this nascent dictatorial presidency.
My personal feelings are simple: nothing Trump or his administration does is a distraction. Every one of these is perfectly legitimate. Yes, even the threats about the U.S. buying Greenland.
More than this, myself, and all other transgender and nonbinary people, are not distractions, but human beings. When people in the administration act on these executive orders, they are causing direct harm to actual, factual, living people – not abstract distractions. If you cannot see that, then that's on you and your own biases.
People often cite Pastor Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" poem in these times, about how the Nazis came for socialists, and trade unionists, and Jews, before they came for him. Yet, while Niemöller was writing about his own experiences, learning that his own antisemitism did not provide him cover for the atrocities of the Nazi regime, it is also a poem that forgets that one of the first groups the Nazis came for were LGBTQ people –and more specifically, transgender people.
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Research) was one of the largest repositories of information on LGBTQs in prewar Germany, and was a source of employment for many transgender people at the time. It was destroyed in May 1933, two years before the Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship, and some six years before World War II. Trans people ended up in concentration camps, along with other members of our LGBTQ community.
Niemöller was also sent to a camp in 1937.
Yet, when liberation came to the camps in 1945, the freedom that Niemöller and many others felt did not mean freedom for the gay and trans people held there. As others were freed, they were sent to other prisons, and had to serve out their sentences regardless of the time they spent in the camps. It wasn't until 1994 that Paragraph 175, the law used to hold them, was abolished, and it wasn't until 2002 that those convicted were pardoned, according to the National Holocaust Museum in the United Kingdom.
Even now, the involvement of those we'd call transgender today is largely glossed over, or forgotten outright. Former children's author and full-time anti-trans bigot, JK Rowling, has publicly denied that transgender people suffered through the Holocaust.
As far as I could find, Niemöller did not speak on LGBTQ people, let alone anything specific to trans people. I would not be surprised if he was firmly opposed to our existence. Certainly, he saw no reason to mention us in his poem.
As much as Niemöller gets quoted, it's worth remembering that he was wrong. He only acted in hindsight, once he was under threat. To him, I presume, all the others were just distractions, just like trans people are seen today.
Let's jump forward, to a June day in 1969, and a New York City bar called the Stonewall Inn. I suspect we all know what happened when police raided that bar, helping to form the flashpoint that led to the modern LGBTQ movement.
We know there were a lot of people and a lot of different identities in the mix, but chief among them were some very brave people who we, once again, would consider trans in our modern parlance.
You won't find this on the official website for the Stonewall National Monument, which last week clumsily removed "transgender" from the language on the site, truncating LGBTQ+ to LGBQ+, then later simply LGB. A page about Sylvia Rivera, a trans woman who has become a pivotal part of the Stonewall story, has seen her own page awkwardly edited to say, "Sylvia Rivera began fighting for gay and rights." You can easily guess what's missing.
I presume that our existence is simply too distracting, and we need to be scrubbed from even the history that directly includes us, even as our distracting real lives are under threat.
Finally, let me speak once more about the months since the election. The body of Sam Nordquist, a 24-year-old transgender man, was found in a field in upstate New York on February 13. For more than a month, Nordquist had been beaten and sexually assaulted by five people. While not a lot of specifics have come out about the case, Ontario County District Attorney Jim Ritts has said to local reporters that this murder is, "by far the worst homicide investigation that our office has ever been a part of."
This week, it was reported that authorities don't have evidence of a hate crime in Nordquist's death and said that some, or all, of the suspects are themselves members of the LGBTQ community.
You will not hear about this killing from our federal government, any more than you will hear about much else regarding transgender people.
I feel that once Trump's crimes are listed in the history books, trans people will be omitted, our names scrubbed away as easily as they are from the Stonewall website, and as mercilessly as those who were kept imprisoned in Germany.
As for me, I feel that we need to be as distracting as possible. It's our lives that are literally on the line.
Gwen Smith may not sting like a bee, but she does annoy like a gnat. You'll find her at the newly-revised gwensmith.com
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