Writing From Exile

This week, Supreme Ruler Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a memo stating that any organization or institution that receives federal funding will be in violation of the law if they allow trans people to use bathrooms or other gender-segregated spaces that correspond with their gender identity, or if they otherwise do not actively discriminate against trans people. In other words, the DOJ is now mandating that anyone receiving federal funding actively engage in discrimination against trans people under threat of criminal prosecution or loss of funding if they do not. This effectively extorts/threatens Blue States (states currently governed by Democrats) into complying with the Trump regime’s anti-trans efforts, as it places them in a position where protecting a persecuted minority group could potentially cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost funding or could open them up to prosecution by the DOJ. This is a further escalation of the Trump regime’s extortionary tactics to impose its anti-trans agenda onto states that have elected Democrats to run their governments.

Unsurprisingly, when faced with such potential losses of funding, hospitals and universities in Blue States have repeatedly capitulated to Trump’s fascism and eliminated their gender affirming care programs for trans youth or otherwise abandoned policies that protect trans people. In fact, even LinkedIn recently capitulated to the Trump regime’s anti-trans agenda, changing its policy to allow anti-trans hate speech and harassment on its platform.

As I noted before, the Trump regime has escalated the criminalization of both the unhoused and those with mental health issues. His regime is now planning to round up and “institutionalize” people who are unhoused, have mental health issues, or who have substance abuse problems. It is worth pointing out here that Trump and his regime do not legally recognize the existence of trans people and consider trans people to be inherently mentally ill, an ideology, and/or an inherent national security threat, depending on whichever argument they feel like works best for the situation. His regime also put out a bogus report (of which no one wanted to claim authorship) that advocates for conversion therapy for trans people, instead of the widely accepted forms of gender affirming care that are supported and recommended by every major medical association in the United States and much of the democratic world.

Trans people in the United States now have a credible fear that their own government will likely soon seek to imprison them on false charges of mental illness and then detain them either in a psychiatric facility, a jail or prison, or a concentration camp. If trans people are rounded up and thrown into psychiatric facilities (or other types of detention centers), at this point, it is reasonable to expect that these facilities will deny trans people gender affirming care while incarcerated and will instead subject them to conversion therapy, with the goal being forced detransition. These are now valid and credible concerns. Trans people can no longer count on the courts to protect them from these types of human rights abuses, either, as the Trump regime has already defied almost 35% of the judges who have ruled against them.

There is also no reason to believe that this process of rounding up and institutionalizing trans people will not be rife with civil and human rights abuses, given that the DOJ recently dropped lawsuits that were targeting the civil rights abuses of prisoners and those with mental health issues. That article is worth a read, by the way, as it highlights the kind of depravity and injustice that this regime is all too comfortable with. These were cases that involved wrongful detainment, a practice that the Trump regime is increasingly engaging in. And this is to say nothing of the open human rights abuses that are occurring in places like “Alligator Alcatraz” and the plan to build more of such facilities; the increasing trend of housing trans people in jails and prisons based on sex assigned a birth, including throwing trans women in men’s jails and prisons—regardless of where they are in their transition—where they are then routinely raped or sexually assaulted (see the process of V-coding); or that this DOJ has already repeatedly shown itself to be completely corrupt.

Given all of this, given that Trump and the Republicans are using the DOJ to interfere with the midterm elections and are openly scheming to rig a Texas election so that they can never lose power, and given the Trump regime’s open attacks against the judiciary and that there is currently no more rule of law in the United States, trans people in the U.S. have a credible fear of persecution by their own government, including a credible fear of imprisonment or death, with Democratic-controlled cities and states no longer being viable safe options.

It’s time for the world’s democratic countries to open up their asylum and refugee programs to transgender Americans.