This Is What I Have Been Saying!

I have been calling at the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation a pogrom and now there are others who see all these laws as a genocide of the LGBTQ community just like the 1930s in Germany.

Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice

November 29, 2022

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention voices its concern over the growing number of laws introduced in the United States that target transgender individuals and the transgender community. Anti-trans hostility in the US has become a staple of the Republican Party’s election strategy and is clearly being used to stoke voters’ fears of a changing world by raising the specter of a malevolent polluting force tied to liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and democracy. The Lemkin Institute believes that the so-called “gender critical movement” that is behind these laws is a fascist movement furthering a specifically genocidal ideology that seeks the complete eradication of trans identity from the world.

The gender critical movement is a loose international affiliation of people and groups who promote far-right ideas that have gained a degree of centrist respectability through their purported defense of women. The movement alleges that people cannot determine their own sex or gender, and that the genitalia observed by doctors at birth are the final determinants of biological sex as well as the permanent markers of gender belonging. Focusing primarily on the imagined threat posed by transgender women, gender critical ideologues believe that transgender women are in fact men who are seeking to dominate cisgender women (women whose sense of self corresponds with their birth sex) by impersonating them and thereby gaining access to women’s bathrooms, women’s locker rooms, women’s sports teams, and other women’s spaces. They routinely accuse transgender people of being mentally ill and believe that the parents, family members, and medical professionals who support transgender people are commiting morally reprehensible acts against the transgender individuals (by nurturing their ‘illness’) and against society at large (by permitting dangerous people and ideas to take root).

The ideological constructions of transgender women promoted by gender critical ideologues are particularly genocidal. They share many features in common with other, better known, genocidal ideologies. Transgender women are represented as stealth border crossers who seek to defile the purity of cisgender women, much as Tutsi women were viewed in Hutu Power ideology and Jewish men in Nazi antisemitism. Trans people in general are framed as figures that threaten the wholeness of the patriarchal nuclear family as well as the strength and vitality of national communities, much in the way that ethnic and national targets of genocide are viewed as cosmic enemies of the perpetrator group. Like the religious targets of genocidal violence, trans people are often described as somehow polluted, sinful, or against God. They are blamed for a host of social problems that have nothing to do with them or with the free expression of their identities. The Lemkin Institute reminds readers that one of the first libraries to be burned under the National Socialists in Germany was the library and archive of Magnus Hirshfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a groundbreaking research organization studying human sexuality and gender. The Nazis, like other genocidal groups, believed that national strength and existential power could only be achieved through an imposition of a strict gender binary within the racially-pure “national community.” A fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide.

[…]

In the United States, the Republican Party has introduced a barrage of anti-transgender laws and policies in multiple states since 2016. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, there have been 286 anti-transgender bills introduced between January 1, 2021 and October 13, 2022. Most of the anti-trans bills that have been passed and signed into law across the country have to do with the eligibility of trans athletes to participate in school sports. Thankfully, many of the most dangerous bills have not been enacted into law (yet), including bill KS SB214 (Kansas Senate Bill 214), which criminalized gender reassignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy for minors, and MO HB2086 (Missouri House Bill 2086), a bill that would prohibit a person from changing their gender marker on their birth certificate. All these laws seek to create a society that is hostile to the very idea of trans identity and in which it is impossible to live openly and legally as a trans person.

They also see it as based on lies, design to stir up animosity against us, stirring up bias crimes, and riling up their right-wing conservative base.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention points out that the gender critical movement is not about protecting women. It is about exacting control over the bodies of marginalized people and thrusting them outside of the community of moral obligation if they fail to conform to the norms of the gender that has been assigned to them by others. In other words, the gender critical movement seeks to control the deepest aspects of human experience and self-knowledge through genocidal aggressions against an historically marginalized and silenced community that has just begun to flourish and gain acceptance. The gender critical movement is a totalitarian and genocidal social force that targets not just transgender people, but also all the institutions of democracy that protect individual and collective human rights.

They equate it with what the US, Canada, and Australian did to the indigenous peoples, “kill the Indian, [and] save the man.” justifying the eradication of a culture.

The pogrom is not just an American phenomenal but a global genocide.