“President Trump has never considered L.G.B.T. Americans second-class citizens,” White House spokesperson Judd Deere claimed to The New York Times in response to an article on the Trump administration’s record on transgender Americans, “and has opposed discrimination of any kind against them.”
What a fucking joke. Throughout numerous federal agencies, the Trump administration has stomped on numerous protections for trans Americans, some based on gross, right-wing tropes. Some months after moving to reverse protections for trans people in homeless shelters, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson reportedly “repeated concerns from advocates who expressed worry in September that ‘big, hairy men’ pretending to be women would try to get into women’s shelters, The Washington Post reported.”
These are tired tropes that give permission for violence. Just as anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy has led to anti-immigrant attacks, violence committed against trans people has also ticked up compared to last year. The New York Times reports that “At least 22 transgender people have been fatally shot or killed in 2019, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Nearly all of them were black women,” like Dana Martin, Jazzaline Ware, and Ashanti Carmon.
The administration’s moves and proposals aren’t just reversal of policy, they’ve also been an express effort to erase trans people out of existence. The trans people they can’t erase they quite literally force out: Under the inhumane Migrant Protection Protocols policy, the administration has been wrongfully forcing vulnerable trans asylum-seekers to areas of Mexico where they may be at increased risk of violence. Within the U.S., federal immigration officials have jailed a record number of trans people.
When it comes to actually supporting LGBTQ Americans, the Trump administration could certainly support the historic Equality Act, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and passed the House in May. Instead, the administration expressed its opposition to it—and it certainly helps Trump not have to sign it into law when his buddy in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, won’t let any progressive legislation pass in the chamber.
ProPublica names nearly three dozen further instances where Trump “has systematically undone recent gains” in the rights and protections of trans Americans. That list is something to keep handy the next time a defender of the president claims he’s pro-LGBTQ just because he hugged a Pride flag.