Transgender Veteran: I Fought for Your Right to Hate Me.
A popular picture showing these words on a transgender man’s T-shirt captures the cultural moment we are experiencing with Donald Trump and his MAGA movement’s representation of members of the transgender community.
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In the first week of his second regime, he signed an executive order banning transgender people from the military, referring to them as having a mental disorder.
He signed another order ending healthcare for transgender youth and one ending transgender-inclusive and anti-racist education policies in K-12 schools. He also ordered that all prison inmates must be incarcerated in facilities based on their assigned sex at birth, regardless of their gender identities.
During his second inaugural address, Trump said, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.”
The man who vilifies and dehumanizes trans people is the same man who cut off all U.S. foreign aid to the world’s poorest people.
The man who placed trans people at greater risk of violence and of developing a negative self-concept is the same man who has suggested constructing massive internment camps for predominantly hard-working and tax-paying undocumented immigrants, the same man who could possibly begin separating children from their parents again.
Why does Trump act with such malice and contempt for certain groups of people?
Robert Reich, professor and political commentator, argues that “[H]e’s a malignant narcissist and sadist with an insatiable lust for power who gets pleasure out of making others squirm.”
“The bigger his demonstrable power and the more unpredictably he wields it,” Reich continued, “the greater his ability to trade some of that power with people with huge amounts of wealth, both in the United States and elsewhere.”
The interrogation of Madeleine Tress
On April 26, 2023, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation acknowledging the 70th anniversary of the Lavender Scare – which took place in the 1950s after Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order banning LGBTQ+ people from working for the U.S. government, accusing gay and lesbian employees of working with the Soviet Union’s Communist Party to compromise the country’s national security.
“We must reflect honestly on the darkest chapters of our story and on how far we have come,” Biden wrote, denouncing the “decades-long period when 5,000 to 10,000 LGBTQI+ Federal employees were investigated, were interrogated, and lost their jobs simply because of who they were and whom they loved.”
Progress revolves like a coil stretched out, advancing up and forward, then circling down and back, though not as far as when it began, until it starts its upward forward motion once again.
Like all civil service employees working during the Eisenhower administration, Madeleine Tress – a 24-year-old business economist at the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. – was required to pass a security investigation as a condition for employment.
On an April day in 1958, when Madeline had only held her position for a few months, she was led into a room by two male examiners who began the “interview’” by asking her a few mundane questions like her name, where she lived, and her date of birth.
“Miss Tress,” one of the men then retorted, “the Commission has information that you are an admitted homosexual. What comment do you wish to make regarding this matter?”
Shocked, Madeleine froze and refused to answer the question. The men disclosed that they had reliable information that she had been seen frequenting a gay bar, the Redskins Lounge, and they named several of her lesbian and gay male friends. One of the male examiners then sneered, “How do you like having sex with women? You’ve never had it good until you’ve had it from a man.”
Tormented into silence, she refused to sign a document admitting her alleged “crime.” The next day, Tress handed in her official resignation.
By the late 1950s, thousands of employees working in Washington, DC, experienced similar inquisitorial grillings conducted under the guise of “national security.”
There are moments in history when conditions come together to signal a seismic shift in the social and political landscape. Three critical moments sparked an era of fear, suspicion, and repression leading to the interrogation of Madeleine Tress.
The first occurred during the Truman administration in June 1947 when the US Senate Appropriations Committee warned Secretary of State George C. Marshall that a concerted effort was being carried out for the alleged purpose of protecting Communist personnel in high government positions. This subversive project was said to have involved the employment of supposed admitted homosexuals in extremely classified positions who were presumed to have been security risks.
In their attempts to counter these alleged security lapses, the Committee attached the McCarran rider to an appropriations bill giving the Secretary of State authority to dismiss any employee at his “absolute discretion” to promote public security.
A second critical moment occurred three years later, in February 1950, when a relatively young and brash Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, provocatively claimed in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that 205 “card-carrying Communists” worked for the U.S. State Department.
In part as a response to McCarthy’s allegations, the third moment emerged when Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy testified at a Senate appropriations committee meeting on February 28, 1950, denying, on the one hand that his department hired Communists, but on the other hand disclosing that several persons had been fired for being “security risks,” including 91 homosexuals.
These disclosures set off a firestorm. Within one month, Congressional Republicans ordered investigations looking into the extent of the “homosexual problem” and the infiltration of “sexual perverts” in government.
It is important to note that the Soviet government itself criminalized homosexuality under Joseph Stalin and blamed homosexuality on the West as a product of “bourgeois decadence.” The U.S. countered by blaming homosexuality on a Soviet Communist international “godless conspiracy.”
The so-called “Red Scare” was said to have been saturated with lavender, the color associated with homosexuality at the time. Some U.S. government officials connected the Comintern (an international Communist organization) with what they termed the “Homintern,” which they saw as an international homosexual conspiracy linked to Communists.
Although LGBTQ+ U.S. citizens were never blackmailed into divulging classified information, and connections between homosexuality and “security risk” were groundless, mere allegations of homosexuality or gender transgressions triggered congressional hearings, executive orders, and executive agency security briefings.
The exact number of people harmed by the anti-homosexual inquisition cannot be known since detailed records were not kept, and many individuals simply resigned before they were interrogated. But it has been estimated that approximately 5,000 federal agency employees lost their jobs on suspicions of homosexuality during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Trump’s ignites a new age of fearmongering
During his first regime, Donald Trump redacted the terms “Communists” and “Communism” and replaced these with “Muslims” and “Islamist Extremists” while morphing “sexual perverts” and “homosexuals” into “predatory men in dresses” and “transgender advocates.”
Trump had incessantly blasted Islam as the number one threat to our nation, thus exposing U.S. Muslims to increased calls for travel bans from majority-Muslim countries and for the creation of a “national registry” and surveillance to track their movements. In his obsessive calls for “law and order,” he invited a return to terrifying (and possibly unconstitutional) measures of torture and surveillance.
In a memo sent from his Department of “Justice” to U.S. attorneys, department heads, and federal agencies, Trump’s first Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, reversed an Obama-era policy that protected trans employees from discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sessions made clear that his department would no longer interpret gender protections in Title VII to include gender identity and expression.
After Trump’s first “American carnage” inauguration, he abolished an Obama-era executive order permitting transgender students to use school facilities most closely aligning with their gender identities, and the White House website removed all references to LGBTQ+ issues and policies.
Despite conclusive evidence by Department of Defense regulations released June 30, 2016, under Defense Secretary Ash Carter permitting trans people to join and openly serve their country – as well as a Rand Study fully debunking Trump’s assertion of “tremendous medical costs” expended on trans service members – the president nonetheless directed the military to exclude trans people from its ranks.
Trump also rolled back other protections initiated by his immediate predecessor. The Obama administration issued a policy directive manual enumerating the rights of transgender people in prison as related to housing, strip searches, and medical care. The directive advised respect and protection of transgender inmates and, on a case-by-case basis, the possibility of residence in prisons matching their gender identities.
After Trump left the Oval Office, Education Week found that 42 states either introduced bills in their legislatures or have taken other actions that would ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory or restrict how educators discuss racism, sexism, and LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom. Several states have already imposed these restrictions.
Florida, for example, has positioned itself at the tip of the spear to cut and bleed to death school curricular materials on topics of race, gender, and sexual identity. The state’s so-called “Stop WOKE act” imposed new restrictions on how race is discussed in schools, colleges and workplaces (pieces of the law have been permanently blocked).
Currently, states are proposing legislation to restrict transgender rights in athletics or health services; others are working to limit overall LGBTQ+ protections, especially in schools.
Other state legislatures have also appropriated Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and have passed or considered similar bills.
Before signing that bill, DeSantis stated at a press conference that teaching kindergarten-aged kids that “they can be whatever they want to be” was “inappropriate.”
“It’s not something that’s appropriate for any place,” he said, “but especially not in Florida.”
He continued: “We will make sure that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.”
Since Republicans have no genuine policy positions to offer, they are dredging up all the hateful and terrifying stereotypes they can muster to promote fear in the hearts and minds of potential voters. By banning discussions of race, gender, and sexuality from classroom discussions, they are igniting a culture war for their own political ends.
What Republicans are doing amounts to a form of bullying. We must hold state legislators who are banning class discussions of LGBTQ+ and racial themes responsible for this further marginalization and also for the harassment and violent bullying it may cause.
It should be crystal clear to everyone that both during the “Lavender Scare” and today’s attacks on democracy, the motives in declaring war on entire categories of people have nothing to do with concerns over improving military readiness or security considerations or ending discrimination or improving prison conditions.
The attacks have nothing to do with the well-being of the nation or with keeping health care costs low. It has nothing to do with some alleged and unspecific “disruption,” and it certainly has nothing to do with “religious freedom.”
It amounts to demagogues engaging in the psychology of scapegoating by representing the “others” as manipulative and violent predators out to circumvent and destroy the nation. In doing so, they play on people’s fears and prejudices for their own political, social, and economic gains, resulting in the loss of civil and human rights, harassment, violence, and at times, death of the “others.”
Biden’s proclamation declared, “Today and in each generation, we must rededicate ourselves to ending the hatred and discrimination that LGBTQ+ Americans continue to face.”
“That includes addressing a wave of discriminatory laws that target them — especially transgender children — and that echo the hateful stereotypes and stigma of the Lavender Scare. My Administration is standing firmly with brave LGBTQI+ Americans to push back against these injustices.”
It remains clear, however, that Truman, Eisenhower, Trump, and MAGA Republican lawmakers have sent us down and backward on the coil of progress.
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