By Calvin GA, League of Young Communists USA.
As social progress for the LGBT+ community continues to strengthen across the globe, the U.S. has taken several reactionary steps backward. In 2023, Vietnam signed a new law that both legalized gender identity changes and established protections against discrimination for transgender individuals. In 2024, both Liechtenstein and Thailand legalized gay marriage. Meanwhile, what has the U.S. done in the three months that President Donald Trump has been renewed to office? One example includes the reposting of the infamous “pink triangle” symbol – a Nazi-era marker used to identify gay men within concentration camps – to Trump’s “X” account.
This move by the President represents a concerning rise in anti-LGBT+ persecution that has been steadily escalating for years. Trump’s first term saw more anti-LGBT+ bills signed into law than under any former President, alongside a startling rise in hate crimes against gay and transgender individuals. Now, the renewed administration has set out to outdo its former reign, already having introduced dozens of hostile bills meant to deprive LGBT+ Americans of life-saving healthcare, anti-discrimination protections, safe schooling environments, historical recognition, safe air travel, and other civil liberties. These laws are especially aimed at the transgender community.
The baseless justification for such laws against the aforementioned community – a community so tiny that it represents less than 1-2% of the human population – is that the current administration is attempting to “protect women and children” by “ending gender lunacy.” However, those that study the history of reactionary scapegoating will recognize this tactic of failing monopolies to shift blame for its failures onto populations that have little hope of defending themselves. This was done in Nazi Germany after the fall of the Weimar Republic. Prominent Nazi politician Heinrich Himmler believed homosexuality would be the downfall of Germany, blaming gay men for unmarried women and believing homosexuality to be contagious. This was used as a justification for sending thousands of gay men to their deaths in concentration camps after slapping them with the now-reclaimed “pink triangle” symbol.
Unquestionably, this lie about LGBT+ identities being “contagious” did not die in the 20th century. President Trump himself has provided this rationalization as justification for targeting transgender youth in particular. Just one executive order signed by the President in February includes banning transgender girls from participating in interscholastic athletics (sports teams). This is again done in the name of “protecting girls” even though transgender girls represent an extremely tiny section of the student body. According to the ACLU of Iowa, “approximately 1% of any given school would be compromised of transgender girls, who may or may not choose to participate in sports.” Evidently, this law is done not in the name of protecting cisgender girls; rather, it is one step of several aimed at excluding trans students from the activities of their peers.
Further attacks on transgender youth include the removing of transgender people from the website for the “National Center for Missing and Exploited Children” (NCMEC). Clearly, the Trump administration does not want missing transgender children to be found!
These assaults on the intersection of two vulnerable populations, transgender people and children, plainly demonstrates that there is no place the right-wing culture war will not go in order to promote its scapegoating tactics, and consequently, the reactionary agenda to classify transgender people as second-class citizens. The hostility toward transgender youth is just a stepping stone to garner mass consent for the enactment of greater repressive legislation against the entire transgender community, and, by and by, the LGBT+ community altogether.
For example, on March 7th, 2025, the Department of Defense flagged any content containing the word “gay” and “transgender” from its websites, including references to the Enola Gay, an airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Similarly, in February, references to transgender people were removed from the National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument, which commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots. These riots set the stage for the broader gay rights movement– and transgender people, namely transgender women of color such as Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera– played a significant role in both the protests and the movement that followed. Yet, the word “transgender” was removed entirely from the site, alongside any mention of transgender activists.
This development came just nine days after the freezing of all passports containing an “X” gender marker, which culminated in the banning of that marker and the issuing of passports with the wrong gender marker to all transgender people owning a passport (meaning, transgender women received updated passports containing an “M” gender marker, and vice-versa for transgender men). Meanwhile, India, Pakistan, the Netherlands, and Nepal all have a nonbinary option for passports. This change represents a significant travel risk to transgender Americans who will now be “outed” while traveling internationally.
Other laws targeting transgender individuals as whole include the removal of “T” from the State Department Website, the moving of some transgender women to men’s prisons (endangering these women greatly), and the officiating of the U.S. government’s recognition of “only two genders: male and female,” among a flurry of hostile legislation.
What evidence, beyond the bigotry-fueled ravings of Donald Trump, exists to justify such undue oppression, and outright hostility toward some of this country’s most vulnerable individuals? How many more children’s lives must be lost? How many more law abiding citizens must have their health and security threatened for the crime of existence?
In short, this blame-shifting, funded largely by right-wing lobbyist groups such as the Heritage Foundation – i.e., this need for a scapegoat in times of capitalism-induced economic crisis – is not only an underhanded attempt by monopoly to confirm a whipping boy for capitalism’s failures. It has been gleefully, actively cultivated by the opportunistic alt-right that seeks to preserve capitalism partly via a gendered division of labor.
Plainly, transgender people pose a threat to the bio-essentialist “nuclear family” complex that defines men and women as “fundamentally different” than one another in heart, mind and body, and therefore justifies keeping women in a lower status than men. Simply put, if people can change their gender, this establishes that men and women are not so different from one another after all. This goes against the chauvinistic notion that a woman’s role in the division of labor is to stay barefoot and pregnant, barred from basic freedoms.
Misogyny has always been essential to fascist movements, which seek to preserve capitalism. Therefore, the struggle of transgender people is part of class struggle. The attack against transgender Americans’ civil liberties not only poses a threat to transgender people themselves, but to the entire LGBT+ community, women, and the labor movement as a whole. Despite the efforts of our federal government, trans people exist and will continue to exist long beyond this administration. This is why communists must stand up against the attacks on both transgender youth and adults.