It is very hard to describe what it feels like to be a trans person in Donald Trump’s America today.
What pops immediately to mind is persecuted, hunted, vilified, hated, defamed, maligned and abandoned. As proud as the English teachers I had growing up might be to know I came up with all those SAT words off the top of my head, none of them come close to capturing the soul-chilling feeling of knowing your own government is actively using every lever at its disposal to make your world smaller and smaller until you cease to exist.
Of course, all of what is happening to the trans community was prophesied by Trump’s first term, justified by the conservative’s $210 million anti-trans advertising campaign this past election cycle and strategized within the 900 pages of Project 2025. And yet, so many of my cisgender gay friends were caught flat-footed after assuring me we would be “OK” because they would “stand with us” no matter what happened. Apparently, that was a check they never thought would be cashed, because it IS happening, trans people are NOT ok, and when I look to my left and right, I don’t see much of the “standing” we were promised.
When I do cry out for cis gay people to do something, they tell me they don’t know what to do. It reminds me of Ned Flanders’ beatnik parents on “The Simpsons” who, exasperated with Ned’s bad behavior as a little boy, went to a doctor and told him, “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!” My greatest fear is that because Trump hasn’t come hard for them yet, their sympathy is actually performative. It assures them they are good people but they will not actually fight until it is too late for the trans community.
Since we don’t have eight months to wait for cis gay people to receive the University of Minnesota Spankological Protocol that Ned did, I am going to try this hail mary act of desperation. I recently asked myself, what would it look like if what the Fed had done to trans people in the last two weeks had actually been done to cisgender gay people instead? Here is what I came up with and I hope it resonates deeply enough to generate some outrage. I apologize to my bi and pan siblings, but much like how the Fed’s real policies don’t account very well for nonbinary and intersex people, you don’t fit neatly in my made up ones. That said, cis gay people, imagine if the federal government:
- Denied your passport applications and held on to your supporting documents submitted, indefinitely. This would effectively ban you from international travel as well as put you at risk of deportation by ICE because you wouldn’t be able to prove citizenship.
- Threatened to detain you upon returning to the country after travelling abroad with your “fraudulent” passports issued under the previous administration.
- Issued an Executive Order with language claiming that you don’t exist because you are actually delusional and thus pose a threat to straight people in accordance with your so-called sexual attraction. To address the danger, the EO would deny gay men access to male-only spaces and lesbians to female-only spaces such as bathrooms, changing and detention facilities in federal buildings, programs and prisons. It would also end the issuance of “gay” marriage licenses in states to avoid supporting the gay delusion.
- Denied funding to any organizations that support the rights of gay people. This would end lifesaving PrEP, PEP and HIV treatments under the 340b program, as well as gay support and affiliation groups, at federally funded clinics, prisons and centers.
- Forced Fed funded schools to end all acknowledgement of gay kids in classrooms, disallowed their use of school single sex facilities in correspondence with their so-called sexual attraction, denied their participation on sports teams and outed them to their parents. This would be enforced in K-12 and Fed funded colleges as well.
- Denied gay kids and youth under 19, including legal adults who are 18, access to all puberty blockers to arrest precocious puberty or hormone treatments to correct low levels of testosterone or estrogen at Fed funded medical facilities. Non-gay kids though would have full access to that care.
- Forced gay people out of the military and promised to deny them access to medical care through the VA.
- Removed all remaining references to gay people on government websites.
- Forced government employees to remove any visible support of gay people in the workplace. So no rainbow flags, lesbian pride flags, employee Pride groups, etc.
- Directed the CDC to remove references of “forbidden” words like gay, lesbian, homosexual, AIDS and HIV from all websites, literature and submitted studies.
- Directed the EEOC to stop processing claims of employment discrimination based on sexual orientation.
These might seem ridiculous, but #10 is already partially happening and #11 has already happened. Obviously, they are not stopping at trans people. We are the first targets but we will be far from the last, and once they get that momentum going it will be hard to stop. So volunteer, go to “trans” events and rallies even if you aren’t trans, give money to trans nonprofits and any politician brave enough to be vocal and annoying to our enemies. Let trans people know that you are doing more than offering sympathy from the sidelines because if the entire LGBTQIA community doesn’t get outraged and push back hard and soon, we will all find ourselves back when America was “great” but only if you were cis, straight and white.
Melody Maia Monet has her own trans lesbian themed YouTube channel at YouTube.com/MelodyMaia.
