Maëlys McArdle

On a precipice

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Maëlys McArdle

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In the 2024 American election, Republicans spent nearly $215 million dollars on ads fear mongering about the presence of trans people in society. It was their wedge issue of choice, along with manufacturing a panic around Black people and immigrants (Trump: “they’re eating the dogs… they’re eating the cats… they are eating the pets of [Springfield, Ohio].”)

Republicans won.

In Trump’s first two weeks, the White House pardoned the Trump-backed attackers of the capitol in a violent failed coup, abolished the Department of Education, imposed sanctions on the staff of the International Criminal Court, pushed to annex Canada and Greenland, among a flurry of other authoritarian moves. In the midst of it all were six executive orders to purge trans people from American society.

With the party having purged dissenting members, including through death threats, Republicans in the legislative and judicial branches made Trump a sovereign; no longer a check and balance, they are reduced to conduits for his whims.

Trump, the serial rapist and convicted felon supported by “pro-family” and “tough on crime” Republicans, finally became a strongman like those he has openly admired: Hitler, Kim Jong-Un, and Putin.

The Executive Orders

The six anti-trans edicts of the past two weeks were:

Trans people are mentioned in 12% of the executive orders signed by Trump thus far. A tiny population (1.6%) that’s just trying to get by like everyone else, but that Republicans have relentlessly attacked and scapegoated to literal death.

The Precipice

We are close to a moment where Republicans drop the cover of dog whistles entirely; the pretense that these attacks on trans people are about fairness in sports or military readiness.

When that happens, it will mean that there is no bar where anti-trans actions would result in consequences.

Dog whistles only exist because being open about eliminating a group of people can result in a backlash, as Republican strategist Lee Atwater explains:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n*****r.” By 1968, you can’t say “n****r” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced bussing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes. And all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”

Republican strategist Lee Atwater, in an interview in 1981.

Well, we are now at the stage where Republican lawmakers can openly say “tranny, tranny, tranny” without consequence:

Rep. Nancy Mace saying “tranny, tranny, tranny” during a hearing.

If the public gets so apathetic to attacks on trans people that coded language is no longer necessary, Republicans will no longer need to stick to niche issues like sports to get to trans people. They’ll be able to start a far more comprehensive and violent regime of eradication.

Conservative commentator Michael Knowles at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2023 stating that “for the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”.

The country is led by an autocrat who is shredding institutions at record pace to the tacit approval of Republicans who are seeing their real agenda – the one behind dog whistles – realized. All bets are off.

Laying the Groundwork

The language in those executive orders lay the groundwork for increasing state violence towards trans people. Trans people are framed as a threat to the entire American system and maiming children:

Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers.  This is wrong.  Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.  The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.

Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government

Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.

Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation

But it’s not just these edicts that have set the stage for state violence, or the 500+ anti-trans bills in state legislatures, or the Christian right, or Democrats who responded to a campaign of transphobic fear mongering with silence.

It’s the likes of Disney, who dropped a trans story line to appease Republicans. It’s Target, who dropped merchandise for trans people following conservative attacks. It’s Shopify, that helped fund a virulent anti-trans account linked to bomb threats on children’s hospitals. It’s Facebook, that lifted restrictions on hate speech when targeted at trans people. It’s the New York Times, which repeatedly spread disinformation that was then quoted by anti-trans legislators.

They too are helping shape attitudes towards trans people. So then this moment of peril for trans people is not merely the result of Trump, or his party spending $215 million dollars inciting hatred, but of all the people in every organization that knew better and said nothing. Each time someone chose silence, it made it a little bit harder for the next person to speak up. And eventually, it seems, everyone chose the comfort of silence.

O Canada

I often see Americans online view Canada through this rosy lens. Let’s be clear that transphobia is in Canada too.

Legislatures in multiple provinces passed anti-trans laws and policies. Pierre Poilievre, the likely next Prime Minister, overthrew his predecessor Erin O’Toole because O’Toole helped ban involuntary conversion therapy for trans people. He is sympathetic to Trump’s anti-trans executive orders and adopts the same dehumanizing language towards trans people.

I live in Ottawa; I’ve watched hundreds of people march downtown spouting the same transphobic rhetoric Republicans are disseminating. An anti-trans mob descended on my city’s schools. I’ve been subject to harm and documented more.

However, whatever is in store for Canada, it’ll be better than what happens south of the border. The United States is not safe for trans people under the Trump regime.

Canada must withdraw from the Safe Third Party Agreement and accept trans refugees from the United States. We cannot wait until the unthinkable.

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