Erasure has always been a tool of autocratic regimes. If a group of people are deemed not only lesser, but also illegitimate in the eyes of the regime, then they can be scapegoated and brutalized.
Those in the Trump regime have yet to find a history textbook they don’t want to censor. They seized the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the nation’s capital and canceled LGBTQ+ Pride events that had been scheduled to take place there in June. According to civil rights leaders, they have started removing precious artifacts from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. (The Smithsonian Institution disputes this allegation). They think that by scrubbing our history of injustice, laws to remedy those injustices become illegitimate.
This strategy has been used to devastating effect against transgender people. The erasure began immediately upon Trump’s return to office in January. One of the administration’s first actions was having the National Park Service remove transgender and queer people from the website of the Stonewall National Monument, a federal memorial honoring the Stonewall uprising in 1969, a multiday battle outside a New York City gay bar that launched the modern-day gay rights movement.
As CBS News reported in February, “The park service website on Friday was still filled with information about the uprising, including photographs of noted transgender activists. But the words ‘transgender’ and ‘queer’ had been deleted from text that had been on the site. Also, the letters T and Q were cut from various references to the acronym LGBTQ and replaced with phrases like the ‘LGB rights movement’ or ‘LGB civil rights.’ ” This occurred despite the fact that transgender heroes like Sylvia Rivera led that bloody struggle in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Some within the Trump Administration are simply rank opportunists. Others, like Elon Musk, harbor a deep, disturbing anti-trans animus. Musk, for example, speaks of his twenty-one-year-old trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, as if she is dead, a victim of the “woke mind virus.” As a result, she had to leave the country to protect herself from his savage, incel fanboys while remaining, to her great credit, her father’s most trenchant critic.
Another devastating development is the way that sports has been used to further these violent efforts at erasure. In the previous issue of The Progressive, I wrote about how Martina Navratilova, one of the leading cisgender female sports trailblazers of the past generation, has helped blaze a new and quite treacherous trail for the radical right to use sports to attack trans children and the existence of trans people in general. The effects of this work were first seen at the state level with statewide bans on trans children playing sports. This was a new poisonous arrow in the rightwing’s quiver: preemptive erasure.
The very idea of banning the few trans athletes we have, of holding up scant individuals like swimmer Lia Thomas as if they were the first in a wave of people seeking to destroy Western civilization, as South Africa’s Musk is so fond of saying, is the beginning of an agenda that has moved from erasure to a form of extermination. What else do we call a federal agenda that weaponizes Title IX legislation to attack the rights of trans people in public spaces and harasses teachers over signs in their classrooms that declare “Everyone is welcome here”?
In sports, formerly trans-friendly leagues have now banned trans athletes. This is even happening in sports like chess! Canadian women’s teams have understandably not crossed the border in order to avoid being harassed or detained. Again, all of this effort, fearmongering, terror, and costly legislation aims to attack a subset of an already incredibly small community. Call it a final solution in search of a problem.
However, one thing the anti-trans Furies did not count upon is that if sports can be used as an entry point to enact such terror, it can also be used to fight back. What the Trumpists never calculated was something that exists at the heart of sports: the team. While the regime highlights every young woman thrilled at the bans, there are dozens standing up for their teammates’ right to play. That’s our best defense: a reminder that in sports—and in society—we must stand for inclusion, acceptance, and the joys of friendship and play.