Divide and rule!

It has been clear for a while that in the US, there is one major political party that is all about expanding the tent and including people.  And then there is another major political party that is always on a mission to win by excluding people.

But then this country as we understand it was founded on excluding people.  The politics of exclusion is, thus, not anything new by any means.  However, it does not mean that I, like tens of millions of my fellow Americans, am no longer shocked by the rhetoric and politics of exclusion.  It is simply revolting!

The Democratic Party welcomes into its big tent transgender people.  Something like this video now in a trump era feels like it never happened, or that it happened in our dreams, right?

trump and the Republicans, on the other hand, want to erase their existence by redefining the sex of people in America.

for transgender and intersex people, having rights taken away is just not a return to a time before those rights were gained. It is worse. It is traumatic. It can have the effect of leaving people exposed because they don’t have a closet to return to. It can create absurd legal situations—if, for example, state-issued identity documents are not recognized by the federal government. The revocation of rights feels violent because it is violent, in part because the effort is aimed at preventing the rights from being reclaimed. It is probably for this purpose that draft changes to the law include a proposal for genetic testing to determine sex, according to the Times. James Hamblin, a writer for The Atlantic, interpreted this provision as “proposing widespread genetic testing and keeping records of citizens’ genitals.”

Awful. Atrocious. Inhumane!

But, again, not really new to the party loyalists.

But the Republican Party has been telling us all along that it would rather trans people did not exist. It should come as no surprise that the Trump administration is trying to erase us altogether.

In every thing that trump says or does, you can pretty much trace the line back to the same or similar things that the GOP has always been trying to say or do. The real difference is that trump does that crudely,while back in the pre-trump days, the GOP did that less crudely.

Even after Trump announced a total ban on transgender people serving in the military, they did not recognize the conservative push to erase our identities altogether, to outlaw a legal transition from one gender to another. The news of Trump’s legal redefinition of sex proves just how wrongheaded that assumption always was. Conservatives are now saying, loud and clear, that they will not be content as long as transgender people exist.

You recall that old line?  First they came for the gays ...

It’s a difficult time to be a progressive. The fundamental American values we’ve long used to measure progress are suddenly under attack. Trump and the GOP have shown that they do not believe in human rights at home or abroad. The rights of asylum seekers and children of migrants have been illegally done away with. Our rhetorical commitment to supporting human rights abroad no longer obtains. In light of this dramatic shift away from upholding human rights, the rights of transgender people may feel secondary, dispensable.
But whenever the left agrees to a compromise on basic principles, whenever we accept that some groups’ rights are more equal than others, the message we’re sending is that human rights are ultimately negotiable. The GOP didn’t stop with demonizing Muslims or Hispanics. It won’t stop with trans people, either.

63 million people wanted such exclusion, and they proudly support it!