The Trump administration’s use of an anti-trans slur is a warning of what comes next: When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood before hundreds of military leaders last week and declared, “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals,” he was sending a message about who belongs in America — and who doesn’t. Days later, President Donald Trump used the same anti-trans slur to attack South Carolina Senate candidate Annie Andrews, who isn’t even transgender.
As a Black transgender woman who has spent years investigating America’s anti-trans movement, I am deeply alarmed. I fear these remarks are a warning of something much worse to come. Because escalating rhetoric is almost always followed by real world action.
As a Black transgender woman who has spent years investigating America’s anti-trans movement, I am deeply alarmed.
Black Americans know something about the relationship between slurs and violence. The N-word has a long history in this country. The dehumanization that it encapsulated was essential to enslavement and the persecution which followed. In just six letters it provided an entire worldview that Black people were inferior, undeserving of equal rights and fundamentally less than other people. That word helped animate generations of citizen-led terror.
Oppression relies on the participation of everyday people. The Ku Klux Klan and other groups didn’t need a president to personally order every lynching nor do the paramilitary groups in our midst right now. White mobs operated in a society where politicians defended white supremacy and authorities routinely allowed murderers to go unpunished. The Equal Justice Initiative documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950.
Dehumanizing language is how permission for violence takes hold. When people in power treat a group as not equal, it can send the signal that abusing or even killing members of that group is acceptable. For transgender Americans, this historic precedent is already a reality. The Human Rights Campaign has documented at least 399 transgender and gender-nonconforming people… https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-hegseth-anti-trans-slur