Whatever Happened to the "Transgender Tipping Point"?

A brief history of the last eleven years and their devastating impact on trans Americans

My fellow bugbears, it’s been a week. I live with my chosen sister M. and her partner, and everyone around here is sniffling from allergies, a cold, or both. M. is getting over such a severe cold that she had to take some time off work. Our adorkable Pomeranian, Darcy, is on edge and very itchy, and we’re still almost two weeks out from the first available appointment for her next occasional Cytopoint injection for allergies.

On top of that, I’m now worried that with DOGE descending on the FDIC, what meager savings I have may not be secure. Then there was the tariff rollercoaster (and the obvious and grotesque profiteering that must have occurred for the rich and connected when stocks soared after Donald Trump announced his “pause”). And the Trump regime’s direct defiance of a federal court order, affirmed by the Supreme Court, to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the Salvadoran prison to which he was deported.

The New York Times, naturally, claims Garcia was “inadvertently” deported, which is dictator-appeasing bullshit. CNN, too, reports, “The Trump administration has conceded that it mistakenly deported him ‘because of an administrative error,’ but maintains it cannot bring him back because he is in Salvadoran custody.”

Major news organizations should not be taking our authoritarian government’s excuses at face value. “Administrative errors” are a feature, not a bug, of this authoritarian government that is deliberately wreaking havoc on American life and international relations. If the Trump regime cared about redressing such “errors,” or outright avoiding them in the first place, it would be acting very differently, and we can only hope some federal judge will eventually find the courage to hold Trump officials in contempt and apply the maximum penalties possible.

The cruelty is the point, as the truism goes—the Trump regime is deliberately striking terror into marginalized populations. And speaking of marginalized populations, I’ve been thinking a lot about the transgender community (of which I am part) this week after giving a relevant virtual talk to an audience of mainly religious studies scholars and their students. Below you’ll find some thoughts along those lines, including both political analysis and personal reflections. Be warned that the following section contains discussion of suicide, and specifically of trans people driven to suicide by the intense hostility to our existence that is prevalent in many parts of the United States.

Sad to say, it was also brave of this department to invite me to speak in a period when the federal government could declare that invitation “DEI” and move to block the university’s federal funding.