One expert called the situation “terrifying.”
Daniel Villarreal (he/him) at LGBTQ Nation:
Genocide experts are sounding the alarm to warn that the U.S. is in the early stages of a larger campaign to “literally, physically” destroy transgender people as a specific gender group, according to a report from the Accountability Journalism Institute’s Important Context newsletter republished by the Lemkin Institute, a U.S.-based multinational non-governmental organization dedicated to ending genocide. Lemkin Institute President Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey said the U.S. is now in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.” She added that Republicans are using trans people to generate fear — particularly surrounding children, family, and their ideal concept of masculinity — to prime their base for genocide, the institute reported in a recent article.
Dr. Gregory Stanton, president of the group Genocide Watch, agreed, saying that Donald Trump’s executive order denying any recognition of any gender outside of the male-female binary is a “totalitarian” idea that is driven by “Nazi ideology.” Dr. Stanton also noted that such strict male-female binaries neither exist in nature nor in many other cultures.
“The Trump administration and its bases… have identified a set of ‘enemies’ or ‘objectionable people’” and have stirred up public prejudice against them “in a way that is escalating toward violence,” said Dr. Henry Theriault, who served as the International Association of Genocide Scholars from 2017 to 2021.
Former genocide researcher Haley Brown said that the 20 U.S. states with anti-trans bathroom bills “effectively give non-state actors tacit approval to commit violence” against trans people by essentially deputizing people to police gender expression “down to the very physiological characteristics” of every person.
Brown also noted that Trump and his cronies’ anti-trans rhetoric has often invoked the conspiracy theory of so-called “cultural Marxism” (which is the modern incarnation of the Nazi antisemitic conspiracy theory of “Cultural Bolshevism,” or the idea that there is a concerted international campaign – led by Jewish people – to undermine traditional Western culture). The rhetoric includes the ideas that “leftists, feminists, Marxists, and LGBTQIA+ people are trying to destroy Western civilization” and that these “immoral,” “inferior” groups should be destroyed.
Experts on genocide notice that the USA is in the early stages of an anti-trans genocide.
