“Shock and Awe”: President Trump Officially Orders the Broadest Attack on LGBTQ+ Existence in American History. Here’s How You Fight Back
Donald Trump is prioritizing a massive assault of LGBTQ+ rights during his first days. How do we triage our response? Plus, photos of protestors who took to the streets today in DC.
Updated 5:59 PST with the released executive order.
Newly inaugurated President Trump has announced an executive order targeting LGBTQ+ people. The order, among others that are not yet released, includes directives that could involve the following, according to previous reporting.
Forcibly detransitioning many of the 1,500 trans women in federal prisons. Unfortunately, this might involve cruel policies similar to the ones I reported on recently in Florida. The policy also forces all trans women into men's prisons, where nearly 60% may face sexual assault from men.
Ending correct gender identification on passports, social security, and other documents for all trans and non-binary Americans, as well as federal employees. The order also includes language that appears to require agencies to correct some already-issued documents of federal employees, but the impact of this is unclear.
Repealing all forms of anti-discrimination protections for trans people, while mandating discrimination against trans people for some government backed services.
Endorsing the harassment of trans people as a “first amendment right” justified by religious beliefs.
Another order bans transgender people from military service, which may result in thousands of trained servicemembers being discharged.
Although many of these orders may not take effect for months or years due to various reasons, President Trump’s prioritization of this issue in his first days reflects the GOP’s maniacal obsession with restricting LGBTQ+ rights.
The administration’s description of this unjustifiably cruel and unconstitutional onslaught as “shock and awe” conveys the true intention of these orders. Here is a simpler interpretation of the message Trump intends to send to the LGBTQ+ community.
Dear LGBTQ+ Individual/Ally,
I hereby order you to give up all hope immediately. Do not try to resist or protest what comes next.
President Donald J. Trump
Millions of LGBTQ+ (especially trans) Americans might suffer great harm due to the consequences of these orders if they are fully enacted. But this suffering does not happen on day one. Many of these orders are purely symbolic, others will be tied up in courts for years. The real order he is announcing today is for you to feel afraid and hopeless and intimidated by the sheer number of actions he is rolling out at once with the backing of the Presidency.
But as Timothy Snyder teaches in On Tyranny, you must not obey in advance.
Instead, imagine you are a doctor at an emergency room after a mass casualty event, such as an earthquake. Your hospital is flooded with all kinds of injured people. How do you even begin to address this situation? Do you give up and go home? No, of course not. You triage your patients based on how urgent their individual situation is, and work with your team to save as many lives as you can.
The way we approach the next four years is no different. The GOP’s war on trans people has declared that every LGBTQ+ person is now an activist. Even if all you do is survive the next four years, your continued existence is resistance against an order to disappear.
Hatred burns hot and bright like a wildfire, but all fires inevitably run out of fuel and burn out to a whimper. Radical LGBTQ+ solidarity and activism has historically shown to have far more resilience and strength than any fascist movement, and its our duty to ensure our communities hold together and persevere until we create the future we deserve to live in.
Prioritize your energy wisely.
Here is your triage priority list for the first weeks of the new administration.
How to approach this list (you may want to bookmark this link for later): For each item in order, ensure that you've done all you can to act to protect LGBTQ+ lives. Proceed to the next item once you feel like you’ve done what you reasonably can. Whenever you run out of energy, take a break and revisit your progress later. You don't have to fight this all in a single day, and you are certainly not alone.
Protect Yourself. If at any point you feel overwhelmed, burnt out, or otherwise in dire straits, you must stop what you’re doing and care for yourself. Stay informed, but stop scrolling once you notice you are just rereading the same news repeatedly. Take breaks frequently, and don’t feel bad if you lack the energy to do everything you want to do. Make a plan for yourself that prioritizes sustaining your energy for a multi-year gauntlet in defense of your community.
Protect Your Marginalized Friends and Family. Make sure your loved ones are safe. Many immigrants, cis women, and other groups of people similarly face tremendous harm from the incoming administration from executive orders released today. Our BIPOC and undocumented LGBTQ+ siblings will face the brunt of the repression that is to come, so pay special attention to their physical and mental well-beings.
Organize Your Community. With your loved ones as a basis for any community organizing, you should build resilient communication networks and organizations that ensure your broader local community can prepare for incoming threats. Some basic safety guidelines are below, and you can find other useful guides here.
Only communicate via Signal chats with disappearing messages enabled.
Name your group and set basic ground rules and strategies.
Do not trust any social media for sensitive communications.
Work across different community groups to build mutual aid networks that ensure everyone has access to access to medication, self-defense, or legal rights if they need it.
Prepare a response for unwanted confrontations with government actors.
Fight Imminent Existential Threats in Congress. Unlike executive orders, which are frail to court challenges and easily repealed by future presidents, laws are much more permanent and resilient to the courts. Activists must work to defeat bills like H.R. 28, a bill I reported on earlier which defines trans and intersex people out of existence in Title IX in order to ban trans people from sports, at all costs.
This bill represents a generational threat to LGBTQ+ rights in America at a level not seen since the Defense of Marriage Act, which was not overturned by the Supreme Court for 17 years—and the Court is far more conservative today. The bill could also lead to invasive “sex testing” of all girls in sports which could involve invasive birth certificate checks, expensive chromosomal testing, or even genital inspections by adults. The urgency of acting to stop this bill is underscored by its high place on the Senate legislative schedule, which means it’s likely to be voted on within weeks.
We also have significant influence ensuring this bill does not pass the Senate. Constituent activism from people like you successfully persuaded all but two Democrats to vote against the bill in the House, and LGBTQ+ advocates must urge for similar unity when voting against cloture in the Senate. The bill cannot pass without seven Democratic votes in the Senate, and Democrats must not make the same mistake they made last week when they helped the GOP pass the highly dystopian Laken Riley Act. Trans activist group Anti-Capitulation League (ACL) has provided template emails or call scripts you can use, and you can find the Senators you must contact with the button below.Fight Executive Orders. Executive orders pose a more ephemeral threat than laws, but are also much harder to influence by regular people. The only way these orders can be challenged is either through court rulings or an act of Congress that overturns them. Since the GOP controls Congress, the only reasonable hope will be for legal challenges against these orders to prevail at preventing the worst harms. The best way to directly aid in these efforts would be to donate to nonprofit organizations that lead these lawsuits like the ACLU, or to petition pro-LGBTQ Attorneys General to join challenges against the orders.
However, organizing your community on the ground to lead broader protests may be an even more effective tactic to fight back against this and many other actions from the government, hence the low priority for this bullet point. You should only reach this point once you have already done all you can to organize your local community.
Battling a hostile media.
After years of peddling misinformation and hatred, the mainstream media will continue to be enemies in the fight against Trumps’ anti-LGBTQ policies. Conservative outlets will fully support his tactics, reminiscent of the “Newspaper Axes” that helped bring Hitler to power in Germany. “Liberal” news media, including several outlets owned by the billionaire oligarchs in Trump’s inner circle, will ignore, downplay, or even support his actions, the same way they ignored the negligent treatment of the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s.
The only reliable sources of information on LGBTQ+ issues will be independent sources of media staffed by LGBTQ+ people who understand the true nature of these threats first-hand.
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More photography taken by Linus Berggren today in Washington DC:
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