Transphobia in the U.S.: ‘What used to be whispered is now said out loud.’
Trans woman’s view: Trump’s hatred and cruelty unleash America’s ugliness
Since Jan. 20, U.S President Donald Trump’s administration has rolled out a series of anti-trans policies, including the removal of the word “gender” from the Republican administration’s new semantics and the insistence that there exist only two biological sexes, female and male (Executive Order 14168). In addition, transgender people have been banned from enlisting in the army (Executive Order 14183) and from school sports (Executive Order 14187).
Ursula (pseudonym), a discreet black transgender American woman who until now thought herself integrated and relatively safe from transphobia, shares with Erasing 76 Crimes her feelings about the recent anti-trans decrees issued by Donald Trump.
Overall, she believes that Trump has given permission for people to express cruel, hateful attitudes they had previously repressed. In fact, she says, “outbursts of brutality, racism, transphobia and nationalism” by Trump and his allies have allowed “the whole of America” to rip away “a cosmetic varnish” of support for progressive ideals and reveal its true ugliness.
If she had her way, she would move to France until Trump leaves office. She been in touch with French authorities to see whether members of her complex, multi-national family in the United States and the Caribbean could move there with her.
America ‘showing its true face’
Erasing 76 Crimes: How do you feel about this avalanche of coercive measures against transgender people?
Ursula: Since Donald Trump came to power with his inauguration on Monday, January 20, people have been expressing out loud what they used to say down low.
In fact, from the moment that politicians, the business world and tech and Silicon Valley companies turn their backs on support for transgender people, the whole of America is showing its true face.
Being a binary transgender woman who’s had surgery for many years, people don’t notice me at first, unless they type my name into search engines, which alas for me, ends up happening quite frequently.
As a result, I hear comments at work and on the street in New York, where I live, and there’s something of a permissive undertone in the air when it comes to transphobia, gayphobia and xenophobia.
Here and there in the Big Apple I can hear remarks about foreigners, especially when they have the misfortune to be too different: too gay, too effeminate, too Jamaican, etc…
But having grown up in this country, I’m not surprised either, and the hatred has always been there, present and rooted.
Even on the side of the big flourishing firms, we realize with the rapid dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion departments that it was all just a cosmetic varnish as we slowly sink towards dictatorship on this side of the Atlantic.
After trans people, who’s next?
It’s like Hitler in the ’20s and ’30s, when he talked about attacking the Jews or annexing the Sudetenland and Austria, and everything he promised to do he did to the great delight of the captains of industry and a certain bourgeoisie, while in the years that followed the repression affected not only the Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists, foreigners and all those opposed to the new order.
In America, the same drama is being played out. Heterosexual Christian or Muslim black, Arab or Latino men would be wrong to rejoice at what’s happening to trans people. And that’s why, as a French speaker, I wish my family could leave this country as soon as possible, at least until Donald Trump leaves office and completes his mandate.
In a deeper sense, my country is in the grip of its own demons, and it will take years to plug the gaping breaches opened by Trumpism with its outbursts of brutality, racism, transphobia and nationalism.
The ‘right to indifference’ has been forgotten
Erasing 76 Crimes: What are the causes of this hatred?
Ursula: Conservatives of all stripes have turned the trans issue into an abscess of fixation and incessant debate, even though we only represent 1% of the population.
However, I believe that activist trans activism has lost sight of the right to indifference and is also partly to blame. For example, as a trans woman, I underwent surgery over 20 years ago so that I could be in agreement with myself, far from seeking to crystallize the attention of public opinion or to be an object of political and social debate.
In fact, in the street, I’m a black woman like any other and treated as such, which is what I aspire to be.
However, in recent years, new terms have aroused more incomprehension and disbelief than anything else, such as “sex assigned at birth”.
In reality, we’re born with a sex and we can’t change it. [Her experience is that she was born female in a male body with an intrinsic femininity that cannot be changed, only accepted and expressed, which she long ago decided to do. When she says you can’t change your sex, she’s referring to the fact that, as a trans person, she has to take hormones regularly to maintain a feminine gender expression and keep passing. More than anyone else, she says, many trans people are acutely aware that you can’t change your sex, and that sexual characteristics are profoundly biological.] That’s just the way it is.
In the same way, the debates surrounding the place of non-binary people in women’s prisons, despite their gender expression, have caused a great deal of uproar that could have been avoided, and have needlessly given grist to the mill of the most reactionary people in the United States.
