Amid growing fears and increasing violence against the transgender community, many transgender Americans are turning to firearms for protection.
A Washington Post article highlights the experiences of several transgender individuals who have chosen to arm themselves in response to the rising transphobia and anti-trans legislation, particularly during and after the Trump administration.
May Alejandro Rodriguez, a 21-year-old trans woman, illustrates this shift in mindset. Initially a supporter of gun control, Rodriguez bought her first gun after witnessing the rollback of transgender rights and the surge in hate crimes. She and others in the community are learning firearm safety and self-defense as a means to feel secure.
The article underscores the alarming rise in hate crimes against transgender people, with trans individuals being four times more likely to be victims of violence than their cisgender counterparts.
Organizations like Arm Trans Women (ATW) are offering gun-safety courses, reflecting a broader trend of marginalized groups arming themselves for self-defense.
A Montana court has struck down Senate Bill 458, a law that sought to define sex and gender in a strictly binary and immutable manner based on perceived chromosomal makeup at birth, Erin in the Morning reports.
The bill was challenged by a group of trans, intersex, and Two Spirit Montanans who argued that it violated their civil rights in various aspects of public life, including housing, employment, and healthcare.
Transgender lawmakers Rep. SJ Howell (photo) and Rep. Zooey Zephyr have argued that the bill would legally misdefine them and effectively write them out of state law.
The court ruled that substituting licensed medical professionals’ opinions with legislators’ beliefs was unconstitutional and that even minority groups deserve protection under the law.
The court’s decision emphasized that a child’s sex, typically determined by birth certificate filers based on external sex organs, does not predict internal traits or gender identity. The ruling deemed the bill “intellectually and morally indefensible,” aligning it with previous cases protecting rights such as abortion.
Frances Thompson, a Black transgender woman, testified before Congress in 1866 about the Memphis Race Massacre, where she was assaulted by a White mob. Her testimony played a significant role in the ratification of the 14th Amendment.
The Memphis massacre resulted in the deaths of 46 Black people and injuries to 75 others, with many homes, churches, and schools burned.
Frances was a formerly enslaved woman. She was an anti-rape activist.
The 14th amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law, and was proposed in response to issues related to formerly enslaved Americans following the American Civil War.
A decade later, Thompson was outed as transgender, arrested for cross-dressing, and forced to work in an all-male chain gang.
Her story is a painful reminder of the ongoing struggle for trans rights and the parallels between her experiences and the current political climate in the United States.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has issued a Red Flag Alert warning against the anti-trans policies of the second Trump administration, arguing that they align with a larger genocidal process.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (LIGP), or Lemkin Institute, is a multinational non-governmental organization based in the United States.
The Lemkin Institute believes that current anti-trans hysteria within the government is meant to serve three purposes within a wider genocidal process.
First, the Executive Orders constitute the paper marginalization and ‘paper persecution’ of an identity group that has recently gained rights and greater acceptance in order to lock in evangelical support for the Trump administration.
Second, the executive orders create a fictitious 'cosmic enemy’ that will justify radicalization of government in general, leading to ever-more power for the executive branch;
and third, the executive orders, over time, aim to normalize the destruction of identity groups by desensitizing the public to state-sponsored persecution of people based solely on their identities.
The document draws parallels between Trump’s rhetoric and other historical instances of identity denial, comparing it to Russian policies against Ukrainians and Israeli policies against Palestinians. It warns that such identity erasure tactics often lead to mass atrocities.
Pseudo-science
The institute also refutes common anti-trans arguments, emphasizing that trans individuals are a small, natural part of human diversity. While the executive orders targeting trans and non-binary people appear legally sophisticated, they lack scientific validity and rely on “junk science,” the institute argues.
These policies stem from long-standing conservative attacks on trans individuals, including from certain self-identified “feminists” [TERFs] who embrace a strict gender binary. The report warns that such initiatives endanger not only trans people but also all women by undermining privacy, bodily autonomy, and gender-based protections.
Furthermore, the institute argues that the administration’s focus on transgender women as threats distracts from addressing real structural issues of gender-based violence.
The debate over the display of Pride flags in Utah schools has escalated, as lawmakers push forward a bill that would prohibit the flags not only in schools but across all government buildings and property.
The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the legislation, originally targeting only public schools, was broadened in scope Thursday by Rep. Trevor Lee, R-Layton, before being favorably recommended by the House Education Committee.
House Bill 77 (HB0077) now stipulates that only select flags—including the U.S. and Utah state flags, military flags, flags of other nations, Native American tribal flags, and official college or university flags—may be displayed on government property.
Additionally, the bill allows for the temporary display of “historic versions of flags” for educational purposes, a category that Lee explicitly stated would include the Confederate and Nazi flags when relevant to curriculum.
So the Confederacy and Nazi Germany are part of the curriculum, which they should be. Using their flags is another matter entirely, though. But why would not LGBTQ history be part of what students learn about?
During the committee hearing, Lee framed the legislation as a measure to reduce political division in schools. “Our schools should be a place for children to learn, to not feel like they are being pushed or seen as agendas in one way or another as it pertains to political beliefs,” he said. Lee originally introduced the bill on the social media platform X, stating his goal was to ban pride flags.
It is typical that right wing extremists believe that compassion and inclusion are dividing, while racism and transphobia are uniting. Make no mistake about it: They want to unite American on their terms, no dissent allowed.
LGBTQ+ advocates and students voiced strong opposition, warning that such legislation could further marginalize queer youth. Millie Dworkin, a high school senior, denounced the bill as unconstitutional and harmful. “Queer people commit suicide at a higher rate than everybody else… If you pass this, you will have queer blood on your hands,” she said.
Indeed.
The Tribune reports that the bill will now advance to the full House for consideration.
Jack Molay
Photo: Bethany Baker and The Salt Lake Tribune. Protesters gather in front of the Utah Capitol on Jan. 25, 2024.
James S tells the story about his journey from Alaska to California and then to the Netherlands in search of a safe place to live. He reflects on the way transphobia and anti-trans policies affect transgender Americans.
By James S.
In Summer of 2024, I decided to move back to the Bay Area. Before that, I’d been living in my hometown of Kodiak for the previous two years, living pretty comfortably in my first one bedroom apartment.
I worked as a special ed aide at the same school I had attended for kindergarten and first grade, and I had a pretty decent support network considering the remoteness of a little town on an island in Alaska.
There had of course been some struggles, because I’m a trans man and for quite a few years now trans people and our lives have been a hot button issue to say the least.
Kodiak religious transphobia
I had been on a committee of educators and medical professionals to review and help update the school district’s health curriculum since 2022, because the whole process had been started, stopped, and slowed as community members and some committee members complained about anything that so much as resembled an acknowledgement of trans people’s existence in the presence of children (an incredibly surreal and painful thing to witness over and over again as a trans person who made my living helping my community raise and care for their children).
Early on, a petition from a local new apostolic reformation church to stop the ‘indoctrination’ of children was passed around in many local venues over the health curriculum committee meetings, which along with direct complaints to the superintendent, caused the review process to be shelved for almost a year.
An ‘incident report’ was even posted on the Parents Defending Education’s IndoctriNation Map (in the tradition of maps targeting abortion providers, often for terroristic threats) over the committee’s first meeting, where I brought up the importance of gender neutral, medically accurate language when discussing anatomy.
After the process of making decisions and then attending every school board meeting to hear and provide my own public comment, I began to feel anxious.
I watched the church’s services out of morbid curiosity and observed the pastor’s sermons grow increasingly hateful and arguably quite violent. He repeated at every opportunity that trans people were not real and alarmingly, aggressively (but very much in line with the new apostolic reformation) pushing the idea of ‘taking Kodiak for Jesus’.
Moving to San Francisco, but is California safe?
All of this, along with what I saw when I read the Project 2025 Mandate For Leadership led me to decide that maybe I should move somewhere more welcoming for a trans person.
I found an elementary special education aide position in San Francisco and a room to rent in Emeryville and was on my way.
In the back of my mind I held on to the understanding that this might not last. I remember having arguments with friends who insisted that California would be just fine despite the very clear intention laid out by Project 2025 to overhaul everything on a federal level.
Part of me had believed that California would somehow be safe as well though, which was the whole reason I’d moved. I knew that given everything that was probably untrue. But I felt desperate.
Trump & Co wants to ban “transgender ideology”
In the Mandate For Leadership document (which is now being put into action largely by way of executive orders), says “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” (read: media or information about trans people, likely including trans influencers and people publicly talking about their experiences) “has no claim to First Amendment protection” and claims that “it’s purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women”.
This idea of misogyny and harm to women especially is heavily reflected in the title and text of the first executive order to be signed by Donald Trump during this term.
The conflation of transgender people with pornography and child exploitation is alarming, because it would mean that anyone who talks about trans people around children could be classified as a sex offender.
I personally worry that this could extend to simply existing as an openly trans person around children, which is the biggest reason I decided to leave. I fear that this will be part of another executive order eventually, and that having just done my job would make me a criminal.
The 2024 election
When Kamala Harris ran for president, I let myself feel a little bit hopeful that maybe I would be okay and able to settle down safely and permanently in California. I got comfortable for that small window of time, and then it was election day.
I went to a friend’s apartment and we watched some shows together to keep our attention off of the results, but of course we gave in and occasionally checked our phones, nervously watching the numbers move in a very foreboding direction. I told myself that the full count would probably be done in a matter of days rather than overnight, and did my best to relax and enjoy myself.
Things didn’t pan out the way I’d hoped. Now it was time to decide what to do.
Going to Europe
My initial plan was to try to go to Norway and go to college and maybe get a foothold there, because I’d heard long ago that Norwegian colleges didn’t charge tuition for foreign students. They do now, and there was no way that I was going to be able to raise tens of thousands of dollars by January.
I discussed with coworkers what to do and where to go, because I was not the only trans person working at the school who wanted to get out of the country.
Eventually, a friend sent me a tumblr post about the Dutch American Friendship Treaty visa. It ended up being pretty inaccurate and I really wonder whether the person who wrote it actually got that visa, but it led me to look further into it and find factual information.
I already had been taking art commissions for both commercial and private clients since I’d graduated high school, so all I had to do now was save money and get ready to really commit to what had once been a side hustle.
I started crowdfunding to raise money for my required business deposit of 4,500€, and before I knew it it was January 18th and I was on my first ever flight off of the continent.
In the days leading up to my departure I had started to seriously doubt my decision, had stayed up for days at a time panicking and shaking, said very tearful goodbyes to friends, and even considered canceling everything, refunding all of the money and staying put.
That sense of having made the wrong decision turned abruptly on its heel the day after my arrival when Trump signed an executive order titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT”.
This order aimed to enshrine in federal law the idea that there are only two genders (assigned, according to the order, ‘at conception’ which if you know anything about fetal development is nonsense on its face), make it impossible to get an X as a gender marker on passports and other documents, and that such documents could only use an M or F marker reflecting what a person was assigned at birth.
Passport worries
I became very anxious about the status of my own passport, which says Male. I legally changed my name and gender markers all the way back in 2013. If I was sent home would I be detained? How much harder would it be now for other trans people to leave the US? Would my passport be taken away? Everything was now terrifying and uncertain.
ALT
Since then I have learned that, supposedly, I would only have an issue if I tried to renew my passport. Unfortunately I will have to renew mine during this administration, and I really don’t know what will happen. In all likelihood, I will have to have an F on it until I can get Dutch citizenship and a new passport.
I have heard of at least one trans person being denied a new passport at all, although negative attention and a lawyer were enough to move her passport office to give her one. It seems like the processes of renewing and getting new identification documents as a trans person is now very up in the air and ambiguous.
Living in the Netherlands
Now that I am in the Netherlands, I’ve made many friends who are also here on the DAFT visa as well as folks who were born and raised here.
It is a very small, accessible country with wonderful public transportation and it would be very easy to create a support network of trans and queer people looking for safety.
Right now the main obstacles are money and the requirement that you have your own business, as well as an inability to receive any government assistance on the DAFT visa, which have kept my closest friends from being able to escape with me.
I hope that soon they will have a clear road to safety and the ability to imagine a happy, secure future that they deserve, and that the current president is violently ripping away from them.
President Donald Trump’s return to office has sparked significant global ramifications, particularly for the transgender community in Uganda, the Washington Blade reports.
Jack Molay
In the initial weeks of his presidency, Trump enacted executive orders that ban trans women and girls from participating in women’s sports at federally funded schools and redefine sex strictly as male or female at birth.
This stark shift in U.S. policy marks a rollback of previous protections under federal law, including the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County ruling that recognized gender identity as a protected category.
The United States has historically supported LGBTQ+ rights worldwide, and Trump’s new policies undermine these efforts.
Ugandan anti-LGBTQ policies
Ugandan civil society organizations, especially those advocating for LGBTQ+ communities, have depended on U.S. backing for legal support and funding. This support has been crucial in a country where transgender individuals face widespread societal backlash and a lack of legal recognition.
The recent passage of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act has intensified repression, and Trump’s policies may further strain resources. The U.S. executive orders could disrupt funding for essential services, such as HIV prevention and treatment, leaving marginalized groups without critical support.
Needless to say, Trump’s anti-LGBTQ policies will also embolden bigoted politicians in East African countries. This, again, will strengthen the hate activism found in parts of the population. In other words: More LGBTQ Ugandans will have to flee the country.
One reason is the chilling effect that new U.S. executive orders may have on international donor funding. If federal agencies are mandated to halt the “promotion” or “support” of what the Trump administration terms “gender ideology,” projects focusing on transgender health, counseling, or HIV prevention may find themselves unable to secure necessary funds.
Making life worse for refugees in Kenya and South Sudan
Trump’s policies will also affect the refugees, many of them living in camps in Kenya and South Sudan, including, for instance, the lesbian LGBTQ activist Nakafeero and her friends.
On Friday a federal judge on blocked the Trump administration from placing about 2,700 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) employees on paid leave and recalling nearly all of those posted abroad, the Washington Post reports.
On January 28 the Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed an “Emergency Humanitarian Waiver to Foreign Assistance Pause”, which basically says that existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs should continue or resume work, for the time being.
However, as we do not know if USAID will exist next month, the chaos is causing a lot of uncertainty and fear, inside and outside of USAID.
My contacts in the camps in Kenya and South Sudan have not registered any reduction in food and medicine supplies yet. I fear that this may change quickly and that more private aid will be needed in the future.
The Medieval Laxdæla Saga contains the fascinating story about how Gerda and Thord, who wanted to get married, accused their Viking spouses of crossdressing in order to get a divorce. The author of the saga, who might have been a woman, seems to admire “Aud with the trousers”, the presumably transmasculine wife of Thord.
One of the main transphobic arguments these days is that people become trans because of “gender ideology”. And “gender ideology” is apparently something new invented by post-modernists, Marxists and progressive leftists. So what if I told you there were transgender people in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages?
However, with the exception of the poem on gender dysphoria from Kalonymos ben Kalonymus (1322), none of the original sources I have found have been written by trans people. All of the texts, including the one I present here, will therefore have to be read with an open, but critical, mind.
Getting behind the stereotypes
Many of the historical texts are written by transphobes or people who do not understand gender variance. Still, even a queer-phobic or transphobic text can be a witness to gender variance, because why would the author imagine cross-gender expressions if the culture had no concepts of gender variance?
Whether the author of the text I am going to present today, namely the 13th century Laxdæla Saga (also written as Laksdøla, Laksdæla or Laxardale), is transphobic remains to be seen.
It clearly refers to negative tropes about both transfeminine and transmasculine gender variance. The story in the saga takes place around 1000 CE, which mean that this may also apply to the Viking age.
Note that I am using the word “transgender” as an umbrella term covering a wide variety of gender variance here. The references found in the saga do not tell us if the people referred to were gender dysphoric or gender incongruent as we use these medical terms today.
The similarities with contemporary gender variance leads me to believe, however, that many of them probably were.
President Donald Trump signed a toxic executive order Wednesday, barring federally funded schools from recognizing transgender students’ names and pronouns that align with their gender identity, Advocate reports.
By Jack Molay
The measure specifically targets social transitioning, which includes using chosen names, dressing in accordance with gender identity, and adopting preferred pronouns.
The order also mandates that schools notify parents if a student requests to use a different name or pronoun, a policy critics warn could forcibly out transgender youth, possibly leading to invalidation and violence at home.
The sweeping directive also prohibits transgender students from using bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender and prevents them from participating on sports teams consistent with their identity.
This is a fascist text
What is missing from much on the reporting on this case (including Advocate’s) is the fascist nature of the text. The Trump administration is no longer hiding that the goal is to create an education system that instills “a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.”
“Patriotic education” means “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.”
We doubt that the extermination of Native Americans, the practice of slavery and the persecution of LGBTQ people can be seen as “ennobling”.
The goal is clearly meant to stop any teaching that make students question the racist past of the US and the current terror against transgender kids. The administration is turning the American education system into a propaganda machine for a cishet white supremacy. Real education is to be replaced with nationalistic propaganda.
The language used in the order is extremely toxic, using slurs and defamation to stigmatize those that support an open, just and democratic society. Any disagreement is seen as “indoctrination”, “anti-American, "subversive”, “harmful” and “false”.
All of these words could rightfully be used to describe the Trump-administration’s policy, but that is what fascists do: They project their own crimes upon those who go up against them.
Do not discuss real racism
The message given is that any substantial discussion of racism is bad.
The order will stop federal funding of any K-12 school that teaches what they call “discriminatory equity ideology”, which means “an ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.”
Concepts like “White Privilege” or “unconscious bias” (which are real, observable, social phenomena) are to be banned in schools receiving federal funding.
Any policy aimed at helping people of color in a white society is seen as some kind of reverse racism targeting white Americans.
A war against transgender people
There is broad agreement among researchers and medical experts (and their organizations) that gender incongruence and gender dysphoria are real phenomena, that they do not represent mental illnesses and that trans kids benefit greatly from the help the health system can provide them.
In spite of this the document is filled with insulting lies about trans people.
Gender affirming health care is presented as “surgical and chemical mutilation” . Trans women are presented as men.
This fits the rhetoric found in the previous Executive Order on “Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation,” which states that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) lacks “scientific integrity”. (Who cares about real science, right?) Kids are apparently undergoing “female genital mutilation”. They are not. The use of puberty blockers does not include surgery.
So this is all about creating a false narrative that makes the social exclusion of all transgender people possible. They will definitely come for adult trans people next.
Protests
Advocacy groups swiftly denounced the order, arguing it effectively erases the existence of transgender people in schools and puts LGBTQ+ youth at greater risk of harm.
Nicholas Hite, an attorney with LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda Legal, condemned the move as “patently unconstitutional nonsense” designed to marginalize transgender students. He warned the order endangers youth by exposing them to increased bullying and discrimination.
The Human Rights Campaign also criticized the order, with its president, Kelley Robinson, saying that “All students deserve to feel safe and welcome in school. But this new administration is making it clear they want to dictate to children, their parents, and educators what they can read, what they can learn, what they can say, and who they can be.”
Trump may lack the authority to do what he’s promising, Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor tells the Washington Post. He argues that the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015, forbids the federal government from mandating or incentivizing states to adopt or use any particular set of academic standards.
The order directs the education secretary to provide a plan to end “indoctrination” in schools within 90 days. Lambda Legal and others are considering legal action to challenge the directive.
But the legal approach must not be the only one. Pro-democracy activists and politicians have to stop beating around the bush and start telling the public that what we see here is fascism, plain and simple.
The photo is of an American school with kids saluting the American flag using the so-called Bellamy salute. For some bizarre reason many Americans did not find the similarity to the Nazi salute disturbing, not even during the Second World War.
In a sweeping executive order issued Monday night, former President Donald Trump directed the U.S. military to overhaul its medical and personnel policies, The Washington Post reports, and it is specifically targeting transgender service members and broader diversity efforts.
The order, which builds on earlier directives during his presidency, cites “radical gender ideology” as a threat to military readiness and calls for new medical standards that could affect tens of thousands of service members.
The directive identifies conditions such as bipolar disorder, eating disorders, suicidality, and prior psychiatric hospitalizations as potentially disqualifying for military service.
Verbal violence
It also singles out transgender individuals, accusing them of living in a manner incompatible with military discipline and honor. Trump’s order states:
“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”
In other words: The Trump administration does not even try to hide its transphobia under a veneer of science or military reports.
Against science and the will of the US military
There is a broad scientific consensus that transgender identities are real and that gender incongruence and gender dysphoria are not mental illnesses. The U.S. military, as an institution, has not issued formal complaints about transgender service members.
SPARTA, a leading transgender military advocacy organization, estimates that removing 15,000 transgender service members would result in the loss of an $18 billion capital investment, with the Palm Center projecting an additional $1 billion cost to recruit and train replacements.
The goal is clearly to use orders, laws and regulations to invalidate trans people and using stigmatizing language to force them back into the closet. This administration’s goal is the erasure of trans people in public spaces. It represents a kind of evil we have not seen since Germany in the late 1930s.
While the new order does not immediately ban transgender individuals from serving, it instructs the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to revise medical standards and report on steps to implement the changes.
A policy made for white cishet people
The new order also eliminates diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices within the Defense Department, part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to roll back diversity initiatives across the federal government.
