In 2023, a prominent fascist speaking at the annual CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) meeting said: "...there can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. ... Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely." 

Step by step, fascist law by fascist law, this is exactly what the Trump/MAGA regime is doing.

The Trump regime is waging an all-sided war on trans people: criminalizing their existence, preventing them from existing in public spaces, blocking their ability to get medical care and viciously dehumanizing them. The patriarchal assault on women and LGBT people is a driving force in the overall fascist program of open white supremacy, ugly America-first xenophobia (hatred of so-called "foreigners"), scapegoating of immigrants and rule through open violence and terror.

The specific way that an irrational hysteria against trans people is being whipped up calls to mind the kind of lies that throughout history have fueled lynch mobs and genocidal violence. The fascists paint a picture of “medical professionals... maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex...."¹ They treat trans women as “predators” who want to target and assault women and girls. Through laws and executive orders, the fascist regime is trying to forcibly codify strict gender roles—in other words, have the state enforce what it means for women to be women, and men to be men. They act as if there is no such thing as transgender people who experience what is known as gender dysphoria. Instead they claim there are "gender ideology extremists" that for some crazed reason are trying to corrupt and confuse children. 

As we wrote on revcom.us in January:

A report issued from UCLA in 2022 said there are 1.3 million adults and 300,000 youth ages 13 to 17 who identify as transgender. The percentage may be higher among younger adults. In a country with over 340 million people, the percentage of people who identify as transgender is tiny. But there has been an outsized vicious and demeaning fascist attack aimed at trans people, and a lot of patriarchal confusion and enforced ignorance among masses more broadly.

Gender dysphoria is a real medical condition that cannot be erased through presidential decree. Gender dysphoria is a profound unhappiness with one's biological sex, and a desire to live as or become a different gender. While there are real medical questions over the right course of treatment for people experiencing gender dysphoria—these fascist attacks have nothing to do with those real questions. They are about viciously scapegoating and dehumanizing trans people and violently enforcing strict patriarchal gender roles.

Going After Transgender People with Vicious Vengeance

In Trump’s first three-plus months, he signed about a dozen executive statements that in whole or in part attacked and sought to marginalize, demonize and erase trans people.² Some even bar using the word “transgender” in federal documents.³

These orders have been accompanied by a tsunami of anti-trans bills in state legislatures and in Congress (850 state bills as of April 19, of which 51 have already been signed into law). 

Seventy-three of these bills would “eliminate legal recognition of transgender people entirely, often by revoking updated driver’s licenses, stripping correct gender markers, and invalidating identification documents.”⁴  A Texas bill would make it a felony for a trans person applying for a driver’s license to identify themselves as the gender that they have transitioned to (rather than the gender they were assigned at birth). 

This is criminalizing the existence of trans people. And it's calculated cruelty. 

To get a legal ID, a transgender man would have to declare himself a woman, regardless of how he identifies or presents. Then, every time he used the ID, he would have to explain the discrepancy between his actual appearance and the sex listed on the ID. Imagine driving cross country and having to explain to every motel clerk, every state trooper who pulls you over for a violation or just for kicks, that you are transgender. Each such encounter would not just be stressful, but potentially extremely dangerous. 

Seventy-seven bills aim to limit use of bathrooms in public places, which means that trans people would face potentially humiliating or outright dangerous situations every time they went into public places.

Other orders and bills banned transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports—which raises the prospect of “aggressively subjecting anyone who doesn’t conform to sex-based stereotypes to invasive scrutiny to verify their gender.”⁵ While there are real questions that would need to be teased apart about trans athletes playing at the highest level of professional sports, these laws use "concern for women and girls" as a cover to viciously demonize trans people. 

Thousands of People Expelled from U.S. Military for the “Crime” of Being Transgender.

On May 6, the U.S. Supreme Court approved the Department of Defense policy of purging thousands of transgender soldiers from the military.⁶

Pete Hegseth, the Christian fascist Secretary of Defense, responded gleefully and contemptuously, telling a conference in Tampa, “No more dudes in dresses. We’re done with that shit.” Other Trump officials have claimed that the very presence of transgender people in the military undercuts “unit cohesion"⁷ and interferes with the military’s “lethality.”

Hegseth ordered active-duty trans soldiers to leave the military by June 7—the first week of LGBT Pride Month!—and said that the medical records of all soldiers will be searched for evidence of being trans, in order to root out any that didn’t voluntarily leave. 

To be clear, the U.S. military is the murderous armed force of a vicious and predatory empire that no one should be “proud to serve.” But it is also a major institution in U.S. society, with over 2 million soldiers and enormous influence on the broader culture.

When the U.S. military expels thousands of transgender people in this mocking and disrespectful way, and then pores through medical records like it was looking for hidden contaminants, it is sending an extremely ugly and powerful message that trans people are not fully human and not entitled to basic rights or equal treatment. 

Attacking Gender-Affirming Care

On top of this campaign to drive trans people out of every sphere of public life, both the bills and the executive orders are going after the medical care necessary for people to be transgender, and to remain so in a healthy way. This is known as “gender-affirming care” (which Trump’s executive orders outrageously refer to as “chemical and surgical mutilation”).

Gender-affirming care is a set of treatments—ranging from psychological counseling to medications that delay the onset of puberty to gender transition surgery. 

In these executive orders, the fascists have pretended that their concern is with children receiving this care, playing on legitimate questions about adolescents making major and permanent life-altering medical decisions. But like their lies about “defending women,” the fascists’ “concern for children” is a cynical ploy. 

For one thing, despite Trump's constant lying about this, surgery is almost never performed on minors. And the fascists are making clear they are attacking medical care for all trans people. Just this week the fascist-controlled House of Representatives changed the language in their annual budget bill—originally it had ordered a ban on Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care for minors. Then this past Wednesday, they changed it to a cut off for all gender-affirming care. Concern for minors was just a way to get the ball rolling towards their real objectives.

Assuming this language remains in the final budget bill, this is a major attack on the very existence of trans people. According to the UCLA Williams Institute, more than 152,000 transgender Americans currently rely on Medicaid for their care. 

Trans journalist and activist Erin Reed wrote:

Stripping that coverage would make surgeries cost-prohibitive for many, with procedures often running into the tens of thousands of dollars. Even routine hormone therapy and necessary bloodwork could become financially out of reach. For countless trans adults, this would mean either turning to unsafe alternative care or being forcibly taken off treatment—a process known as medical detransition. The effects can be severe, particularly for those who’ve already undergone surgery and require ongoing hormone supplementation, putting both mental and physical health at serious risk.

Refuse to Accept Their Handmaid's Tale Future

This MAGA fascist movement, with millions of Christian fascists at its base, have a vision of a Handmaid's Tale future—and they feel deeply and irrationally that the whole future of America as a "god-ordained nation" rests on whether they are able to enforce this future. 

The Handmaid's Tale is a novel, turned into a TV series, of an American theocracy (or religious dictatorship) where women are turned violently into breeders and wives, and they are not allowed to read or play a role in civic life. Gay people are surgically mutilated and tortured. Dissidents and those who don't conform are hung on a wall for all to see. This is the future the Christian fascists want to violently enforce.

They see the "nuclear family" as the basic cell of society, with men at the head of the household. Women are enslaved as breeders of children (or seen only as objects of sexual plunder). Men and boys are trained as tough and strong while women and girls are supposed to be soft caretakers. The cruelty and abuse heaped on boys when they "run like a girl," or don't "man up" or girls when they act like "tomboys" or "sluts" has warped generations of young people. 

The existence of trans and non-binary people, the upending of traditional gender roles, poses a challenge to this Dark Ages biblical conception of what it means to be human.

This whole attack needs to be taken on and defeated. It is urgent that we DEFEND the rights and lives of trans people, that we uphold the basic rights of all LGBT people. 

But, as important as this is, we cannot fight each fascist attack one by one. We will drown in their "flood the zone" strategy with our fight on each specific front overwhelmed. We have go on the OFFENSIVE against the regime, and their fascist program, as a whole. And we have to do so NOW—before it is too late.

As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian said in his recent social media message, Revolution #117: Trump/MAGA fascists—cruel, demented, dark ages oppressors—who twist reality inside-out to “justify” their lawless tyranny:

Everyone who wants to see an end to oppression based on race, sex and gender—and an end to cruel, murderous oppression and lawless tyranny overall—needs to be actively involved, now and in an ongoing way, in the massive movement that is urgently needed to defeat this Trump/MAGA fascism—to create the conditions in the country where this fascist regime cannot govern, cannot remain in power, and cannot carry out the even worse horrors it is moving to violently enforce.