Genocide experts are sounding the alarm to warn that the U.S. is in the early stages of a larger campaign to “literally, physically” destroy transgender people as a specific gender group, according to a report from the Accountability Journalism Institute’s Important Context newsletter republished by the Lemkin Institute, a U.S.-based multinational non-governmental organization dedicated to ending genocide.
Lemkin Institute President Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey said the U.S. is now in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.” She added that Republicans are using trans people to generate fear — particularly surrounding children, family, and their ideal concept of masculinity — to prime their base for genocide, the institute reported in a recent article.
Dr. Gregory Stanton, president of the group Genocide Watch, agreed, saying that Donald Trump’s executive order denying any recognition of any gender outside of the male-female binary is a “totalitarian” idea that is driven by “Nazi ideology.” Dr. Stanton also noted that such strict male-female binaries neither exist in nature nor in many other cultures.
“The Trump administration and its bases… have identified a set of ‘enemies’ or ‘objectionable people’” and have stirred up public prejudice against them “in a way that is escalating toward violence,” said Dr. Henry Theriault, who served as the International Association of Genocide Scholars from 2017 to 2021.
Former genocide researcher Haley Brown said that the 20 U.S. states with anti-trans bathroom bills “effectively give non-state actors tacit approval to commit violence” against trans people by essentially deputizing people to police gender expression “down to the very physiological characteristics” of every person.
Brown also noted that Trump and his cronies’ anti-trans rhetoric has often invoked the conspiracy theory of so-called “cultural Marxism” (which is the modern incarnation of the Nazi antisemitic conspiracy theory of “Cultural Bolshevism,” or the idea that there is a concerted international campaign – led by Jewish people – to undermine traditional Western culture). The rhetoric includes the ideas that “leftists, feminists, Marxists, and LGBTQIA+ people are trying to destroy Western civilization” and that these “immoral,” “inferior” groups should be destroyed.
Dr. Theriault said that trans Americans may be more vulnerable due to their small population. They make up only about 1% of the adult population — a size equivalent to Jews in 1933 Germany — and violence against trans people has been rising. Dr. von Joegen-Forgey called the situation “terrifying,” adding, “No one goes to war… on behalf of the victims of genocide.”
Theriault said the U.S. would increase policies to make life “intolerable” for trans Americans, something that will cause the trans suicide rate to rise dramatically. Indeed, Republicans have already instated policies nationwide to defund any trans-inclusive research or policies, force trans kids and adults to medically detransition, and force trans people into sex-segregated spaces where they’re likely to face more discrimination and violence.
“We’re already at the point for trans folks, for immigrants, where the damage is being done,” Dr. Theriault said. “So it’s not so much ‘will genocide happen?’ as ‘we got to stop it from happening.’”
Dr. von Joegen-Forgey warned, “You don’t have a democracy that’s committing genocide against one group. That is not a democracy anymore, once genocide is in the mix. The state in question will commit other mass atrocities.”
