Transphobes like those in the Trump administration have long smugly declared themselves the arbiters of the “truth” about gender – that it is fixed, that there are two, that gender is merely a brute fact of the body that cannot be changed, and that nothing that happens to a person after their sex is assigned at birth has any bearing on the truth of what their gender is.
It is an exercise in cruelty that the Trump administration has declared that official documents, like passports, will no longer reflect these basic realities of trans people’s lives.
The Trump administration and the broader revanchist movement are targeting trans people because they are a tiny minority that they think can be bullied and dehumanized without great political pushback.
They are targeting trans people because trans life represents the principles of dignity, self-determination and gender equality that they abhor.
Hunter Schafer, a 26-year-old actor best known for her roles on the HBO series Euphoria and in the Hunger Games film The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, appeared in an eight-minute video last Friday in which she revealed that due to a Trump administration order, she had been assigned a passport with the gender marker “male”.
