Once more down the memory hole
Censorship and Trump’s war on trans existence
Within less than 24 hours, the Trump regime began doing exactly what it promised, and enacted an immediate and comprehensive campaign of erasure of transgender people unlike anything in United States history.
Within days, any mention of transgender and nonbinary people was eliminated from government systems, with multiple executive orders demanding the removal and opposition of transgender people in all spheres of life. So complete was this erasure, that on government websites many of the edits appeared to have been done in batch in order to account for the thousands of pages hosted on government servers, leaving errant commas or lists with only one item. In many cases, pages were removed and entries deleted from databases if they referenced transgender people in any way.
Amidst a deluge of executive orders already numbering twice as many as any previous president, his administration has made it clear that opposing trans people isn’t merely a priority — it is one that it is willing to commit near infinite resources to pursuing.
This was followed by enormous layoffs and cuts across the government with particular attention to social programs that serve LGBTQ+ people and immigrants. While justifying the destruction of USAID, the administration posted line-items of projects, more than half of which referenced LGBTQ+ people. Meanwhile, Elon Musk livetweeted the destruction.
Amidst loyalty tests, workers live in perpetual precarity, ensuring that no information will make it out of the federal bureaucracy that isn’t explicitly vetted by the administration and its loyalists. Meanwhile, newly appointed cabinet members have been threatening trans people and those who support us across defense, education, and health agencies. Even the Federal Trade Commission is proposing to get in on the act by opposing off-label hormone use.
As Trump’s invective grows more reactionary by the day, and any mention of transgender people is either deleted or replaced with a screed about why we’re subhuman, it’s impossible to avoid thinking about the burning of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in 1933.
Document revocation and restricting freedom of movement
One of Trump’s first actions was to bar transgender people from changing their passports. In an executive order on January 20th, the day Trump was re-inaugurated, he banned the issuance of passports with a nonbinary designation, or a sex marker different from that recorded on the original birth certificate.
Immediately, passport applications were paused, renewals were denied and in many cases, documents have been seized. Overnight, transgender people lost the ability to freely leave the country. Currently a lawsuit in federal court is challenging this order in Orr v. Trump. However, transgender people around the country continue to report being challenged in passport offices and having their documents taken by overzealous employees. Reports have already started to emerge on social media that gender markers are being reverted before being returned.
The administration has also announced that trans people navigating the immigration system who record a gender other than sex assigned at birth will be investigated for “fraud.” Many attorneys have warned on social media that it is not out of the realm of possibility that this tactic could be expanded beyond immigration, to declare that any document with an incongruous gender marker is inherently fraudulent.
K-12 education, schools and financial aid
Although he has also pledged to do away with the Department of Education altogether, Trump’s executive order on schools orders an immediate cessation of social transition for trans students, bans trans students from bathrooms and accommodations and declares any reference to transgender people unlawful “gender ideology”. The order is sweeping in that it attempts to define any reference to transgender people at all of being “indoctrination”, and declares any teaching related to LGBTQ+ topics and/or racism and DEI as the same. It additionally goes on to mandate “patriotic” instruction that must reflect a positive attitude towards US history (which is difficult if you’re familiar with the topic.) A following executive order banned transgender student athletes from athletic competitions. Both executive orders have promised to weaponize the USDOJ’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) to investigate schools caught in violation of these orders.
More broadly, Trump has also asserted that any DEI or affirmative action taken by institutions of higher learning are now subject to the very anti-discrimination laws that helped enact them. Citing SFFA V. Harvard, Trump’s functionaries have begun ordering investigations into universities. At the K-12 level, they have begun investigating public schools with gender-affirming policies. OCR has additionally ended 10,000 civil rights investigations related to gender, and have initiated new ones seeking to enforce sex segregation across the country. Trump has been clear that OCR will take point in pursuing violations of bans on trans student athletes, targeting specific schools where trans students have already faced significant public harassment and threats.
Unsurprisingly, his first day executive orders have translated into actions that effect students applying to college as well. His acting undersecretary of education, James Bergeron, has announced that the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form will no longer contain nonbinary options, and will require students to use their sex assigned at birth. The FAFSA system feeds into any number of financial aid offices around the country; preventing students from accurately listing their gender ensures that many students will be incorrectly listed in school enrollment forms, and may cause further problems with mismatched data where students come from states that allow people to amend their birth certificates and social security cards.
War on gender-affirming care
The order entitled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”, attempts to ban all lifesaving gender-affirming care under the age of 19, regardless of circumstance or individual consideration. It does so through by threatening to defund hospitals by withdrawing federal assistance if they continue to provide care, and rescinds guidance from the Biden administration affirming protections for patient confidentiality under HIPAA. — this would be a prelude to the new Trump DOJ dropping charges against people accused of unauthorized disclosure of transgender people’s medical documents. It goes on to promise that the weight of the federal governement would be used to investigate and prosecute providers of affirming care, and lays out several enforcement mechanisms it proposes for this purpose. It declares lifesaving care fraud, and trans bodies “mutilated”.
But Section 2, subsections II and b (the order inexplicably vacillates between formatting styles mid-list, which has led many to suspect they were written by ChatGPT) announce two additional actions that are coming within 90 days of the order that signal Trump has taken a page from the DeSantis administration. The order directs Health and Human Services to conduct a “review” of existing literature.
” The Secretary of HHS, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, shall use all available methods to increase the quality of data to guide practices for improving the health of minors with gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion, or who otherwise seek chemical or surgical mutilation.”
We’ve seen this before. As Zinnia Jones describes, the Florida Board of Medicine and the DeSantis Administration used a similar strategy, working in tandem with anti-LGBTQ groups, and in close consultation with the Finnish psychiatrist who would play a pivotal role in the Cass Review. Aware that medical associations like the AMA were able to call forth hundreds of studies documenting both the efficacy and safety of gender-affirming care, the DeSantis administration sought to manufacture a justification for why these studies don’t count.
But what Trump has to offer that previous governments have not is both the willingness and ability to remove enormous portions of evidence from the internet itself. The National Library of Medicine hosts PubMed, one of the most trusted search engines and databases for peer-reviewed literature on topics related to medicine, health, and psychology. For more information about this, read on.
Science and the academy
For knowledge-generating agencies these changes demanded the destruction of scientific documents. In a move shockingly reminiscent of the burning of the Institut, entire government systems were taken offline with critical scientific datasets like the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) deleted completely, although a federal judge has ordered them restored for now. The dataset has been restored temporarily, but pages or entries ordered restored by courts now have a draconian warning to users that the content violates the administration’s strict construction of reproductive biology, visible below.
In what would become an all-out war with medical science and the academy writ large, articles were stripped from the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database containing words connected to transgender people, HIV, diversity equity and inclusion, and race. In an unprecedented move, the Centers for Disease Control has ordered a mass-retraction of scientific research conducted by CDC scientists or teams using CDC grants. Not only has Trump removed literature about trans people from the annals of medicine, he has managed to circumvent peer-review for studies before they can even be published.
Additionally, a communication blackout across health-related agencies has meant that many of these changes have gone unreported, and critical reports unrelated to gender but related to core CDC functions like infectious disease surveillance have gone unpublished. Teams who do work related to reproductive health, health equity or gender-affirming care have been cut off from communicating with one another, and communication with the public deemed grounds for termination.
The military
“Effective Immediately, the Department of Defense will remove all traces of gender ideology.”
Following Executive Order 14168, government agencies issued a series of memoranda eliminating affirming name and pronoun use, mandating the deadnaming and misgendering of personnel and reverting gender markers in official systems for government employees. While it has taken time for these changes to be implemented across all systems, this was perhaps most sweeping in the military — now run by avowed Christian nationalist and former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, Trump’s new Secretary of Defense.
In a memo to senior leadership at the Pentagon, Hegseth writes “President Trump has given us our marching orders” and goes on to enumerate an exhaustive list of actions taken to ban any trainings or materials that mention transgender people, as well as deleting pronoun options in any systems, including removing the actual fields and in some cases manually deleting pronouns from email signatures. So comprehensive was the erasure of transgender people from military systems, that later directives intimated that any mention of transgender people itself was incompatible with the military ethos. Last week, transgender service members were summarily barred from military service. Consistent with Trump’s attempt to cast trans existence as fraud, military officials decreed that service members who espoused a trans identity were inherently “dishonest.”
Trump’s attempt to rewrite LGBTQ History
While also noteworthy for how authoritarian it is, the actions Trump has taken to redefine LGBTQ back to LGB has been some of the most instructive as they illustrate a clear strategy with respect to the administration’s hope to fracture the queer community. Trump has long contended that his opposition of LBGTQ rights was “simply” opposition to trans people, a strategy right out of the Values Voter Summit, where Meg Kilgannon instructed audience members that the best way to take down queer rights for all was to start by “separating the T from the LGB.” (Later, in 2020 when openly gay senior advisor for national security, Ric Grenell spoke at the RNC, Grenell espoused Trump as a “friend to the LGB community” and made no mention of trans people at all.)
While this can be seen across the federal government on websites like the State Department’s Travel Advisory page, which provided information about safety for LGBTQ+ people traveling abroad, it is most visible in places where mentioning queer people is impossible to avoid, such as historical references to moments in LGBTQ+ history.
As part of this, the Stonewall National Monument’s website continues to undergo a series of changes beginning with the deletion of the “T” in “LGBTQ+”, where for a brief moment on February 13th, it listed “LGBQ”. Predictably, the final edits appear to only list “LGB”, with the words “transgender” and “queer” deleted from the site completely.
Additionally. a comprehensive directory of representative flags showing what the color combinations meant to prospective visitors was also deleted. All that remains is a short paragraph about the original rainbow flag. At times this had unexpected results, such as when the caption to Zazu Nova’s picture was altered to remove the word “trans”. The entry now simply recognizes that she was Black woman, accidentally affirming the reality of her gender while erasing her iconic status as a trans community leader and trailblazing activist.
Once more down the memory hole
As s difficult as it is to list out every possible step the administration has taken to eliminate transgender people and “DEI” from face of the United States, it’s even more difficult to put into words how it feels to watch it happen. Erasure isn’t a thing that happens once, it is an active process of seeking things out and removing them, and then seeking out references to that which was changed to hide the traces. Trump doesn’t merely oppose trans rights — he has declared that our existence, and any acknowledgement of this fact, to be one with which he and the entire federal machine is now at war.
Will he ultimately succeed? It’s unclear. While transgender people will always exist just as we always have, our history is forever chasing the daylight as time and again people seek to bury it. The weaponization of “evidence-based medicine” as a buzzword has convinced a generation of internet commenters that they know better than the foremost experts in the field of gender medicine, and now everyone with a Substack thinks they’re one anti-trans post away from a Pulitzer. Only four years ago, the banning of gender-affirming care for youth was seen by liberals as an impossible pipe dream of the far-right (despite ample warnings to the contrary from trans people). Today, those bans cover more than half the country. If Trump’s executive order succeeds in defunding any institution which supports gender care or transgender patients, it will be effectively banned even before the Supreme Court has the chance to decide Skrmetti, which may very well be the nail in the coffin already.
It’s out of fashion to reference Orwell now that the right-wing has all convinced themselves he was secretly writing about Biden, but there’s a single scene from 1984 I find myself thinking of every day of this administration where Winston’s colleague burns the last remaining evidence of a historical occurrence that had otherwise been erased from public memory. As the paper burns, protagonist Winston and his coworker get in a tragic exchange where he states that such evidence “never existed”. When Winston protests that he remembers it, O’Brien, who had incinerated the document a moment ago, states that he has no recollection of this exchange symbolizing the willingness of party members to cede not only their documents but their minds and memories.
Like so many trans people before me, I’m not most afraid of death. I’m afraid that in death the life I managed to live will also face a death of its own.
What you can do
While this was originally started as a blog post, I would feel remiss if I didn’t at least make some attempt to list steps that you can take to try and push back, or for trans people, how you can protect yourself. This page will be updated as more steps are identified that you can take to prevent trans erasure. If you know of a resource that isn’t listed here, please don’t hesitate to let me know!
Passports & Documentation
If you have been directly impacted by this and had your passport denied or documents taken, please fill out this intake form for the ACLU.
States like Washington have announced expedited gender marker changes in light of the new administration, you can access the form here.
For more information on how to change your documents, check out A4TE’s document center
Public comment period is open for passport changes! [reddit]
30-Day Notice of Proposed Information Collection: Application for a U.S. Passport [form]
0-Day Notice of Proposed Information Collection: U.S. Passport Renewal Application for Eligible Individuals [form]
30-Day Notice of Proposed Information Collection: Application for a U.S. Passport for Eligible Individuals: Correction, Name Change to Passport Issued 1 Year Ago or Less, and Limited Passport Replacement [form]
Gender Affirming Care
Actions are available to everyone to protect gender-affirming care, and they depend on your state and whether you’re a patient, an ally or a provider.
The first step is to find out if your state Attorney General is involved in one of the ongoing lawsuits against the Trump administration’s EO 14187.
Currently, AG’s in Washington, Minnesota and Oregon have won a temporary restraining order against enforcement of the EO. If your state isn’t included in that list, check usa.gov to find yours and call them today.
Education
The most important thing you can do depends on whether you’re in a state with affirming policies, and whether you yourself are an educator.
One of the things that made the Trump administration’s return possible is the meteoric rise of far-right parent groups, which have taken over school boards around the country. Find out how you can run for school board, and if you have kids, make sure to plug into local parents groups to see when hearings are coming up.
Find out how groups like Safe Redland Schools (SRS) are fighting back by organizing antifascist parents to track anti-LGBTQ activity in their local school systems. You can listen to an interview with them on Its Going Down here.
In 2017, after Trump floated a fraction of these policies, education associations and school boards issued resolutions and guidance vowing non-compliance with forced outing mandates and other directives targeting LGBTQ+ students, such as this one the National Education Association. Find out if your school district has done the same, and if not, write them to let them know you support transgender students, and encourage groups like the NEA to do the same.
To speak out about the upcoming FAFSA changes, you can submit a public comment here. The public comment period is 60 days, and will expire at the end of the first week in April.
Please note that your responses are visible to the public on the federal register website.
Science and information
While a more sustainable solution is forthcoming, one immediate step you can take is to support the work of private archivists who began working overtime to make sure digital records deleted by the administration were preserved. One of the most active communities has been r/DataHoarder on reddit, which has this megathread of projects for the task.
A group called ArchiveTeam has even set up a downloadable virtual machine that is preloaded with tools to help their efforts to archive as much of the US government as possible before it’s taken down. [reddit]
The data rescue project contains an in-depth listing of ongoing efforts, with links to original data sources.
For people with a lot of hard drive space and a reasonably fast internet connection, you can seed the torrent
Datasets wiped from data.gov can be accessed at Harvard Harvard University’s Library Innovation Lab
Websites like GovDiff have been set up to track changes between pre-Jan 20th government websites and present. You can help efforts such as these by documenting changes, comparing versions of websites available on the Wayback Machine.
