April 1, 1933, was the first boycott of Jewish businesses in Nazi Germany, and it was wildly unsuccessful. Non-Jewish Germans were annoyed by the inconvenience of being turned away by soldiers when they tried to go shopping or visit the doctor, and they did not care if the business was Jewish in the first place, nor could they even tell what businesses were classified as “Jewish.”
It was only after the process of “social death” that the foundations for genocide were laid. Social death is the dehumanization of a group in order to turn the rest of society against them, which leaves them vulnerable to violence and oppression. This is conducted through propaganda and solidified through the gradual degradation of rights and visibility in public life, which we see in the numerous executive orders he signed in his first weeks of the presidency and beyond. I would argue every year since 2016, it has become more dangerous for transgender Americans as propaganda has increased (I have certainly had an increase in dangerous situations).
This is not to compare situations or to imply a sameness, as no instance of genocide is the same, However, the process of social death is not unique to either of these cases. Dehumanization is the first step in genocides across the board, and we are seeing rampant dehumanization right now.
Whether or not the term “genocide” is applicable here has been widely debated in the past years as the dehumanization of transgender people has increased across the United States, the United Kingdom, and other regions; some argue that it is non-applicable because transgender people are not a race, however, the original definition of genocide from Raphael Lemkin included political and social groups before nations like the United States pushed to have the definitions altered to evade conviction for the genocide of Native Americans. This is not to say transgender people are a political group, but rather to say that the definition of genocide was intended to cover beyond race, religion, and ethnicity. As of now, the Lemkin Institute has issued a Red Flag Alert in the United States, specifically in response to Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes, shattering the fragile illusion that genocide cannot happen here; (an already non-existent illusion if you are familiar with the settler-colonial history of the United States and it’s modern day treatment of Native Americans).
Personally, I am still moderately undecided on the applicability of the term legally, but I am also undecided on whether or not the legal definition of genocide is helpful when The Genocide Convention has failed in situations like Bosnia, Rwanda and Palestine due to inaction and sluggish response times. The definition itself requiring “intent” makes the legal definition weak, as intent can be easily denied and the willingness to push back on such denial seems absent.
The reasoning for the term being applicable is simply that it fits most of the definition, including intent. The conduct of genocide is as follows:
- Killing members of the group.
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the
group.
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
or in part.
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the
group.
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another
group.
Transgender people are killed in hate crimes across the United States, and black transgender women are the most vulnerable. The state has yet to start explicitly killing transgender people, but Florida Governor Ron Desantis is attempting to detransition every prisoner in Florida (Which can be deadly in some cases) on top of attempts to criminalize being transgender in public (the goal target of drag bans is trans women, as they would be classified as “cross-dressers”), and Florida hitting record execution numbers is not a good combination. As of now, this one is semi-applicable, as these are “vigilante” murders.
There is a clear intent to cause bodily or mental harm, forced detransition qualifies as both, but getting a cisgender audience to fully believe this can be tricky and getting transphobes to believe this is impossible. The mental harm is clear with the messaging alone, as we get erased from public life and legal definitions. The third one is clearly happening, if you read everything until now; Donald Trump’s bans on “gender ideology” are explicitly bans on transgender people.
The fourth and fifth are interesting ones, as the fourth is impossible unless you could tell if a baby was transgender; however if you classify “births” as newly-transitioned individuals, this one becomes applicable with the attempts to block people from transitioning and to have transgender children reported to potentially abusive parents. The fifth is applicable if you view families with a transgender child as a group, or trans people and their closest allies as a group. States like Texas have attempted to have transgender children separated from their parents, likely to be sent to conversion therapy, and therefore would be transferring the child from a supportive “group” into a non-supportive “group” to be stripped of their identity.
Currently, the future of trans people in the United States is unsure. Right now, we need our allies to be vocal. People don’t listen to the groups they oppress, they listen to those they view as equals. When your uncle says something nasty about trans people, say something to his face about it. When you see state legislation attacking trans people, find out how you can oppose it. Right now, to be frank, everything looks like shit, but we will hold strong. We aren’t going anywhere.
