Trans folks need you to use your voice

I am a scholar of neither fascism nor gender, so when I say this, I speak as a cisgender layperson to other cisgender laypeople: Stop snoozing the alarm. Anytime a "debate" over a minority group emerges, every alarm up and down the block should be blaring, because every last person who is not part of that minority group needs to wake up.

Trans kids, and more broadly, trans adults, are being demonized, torn apart and rebuilt in the lab of conservative propaganda as if they were Frankenstein's monster, with an obsessive focus on the parts of their bodies and none whatsoever on their wholeness, their sacred autonomy as individuals, their dignity as people, and their right to determine their own destinies.

In the process, the judgment and the rights of intelligent, loving parents are also being dismissed and degraded. This is by no means a first in American history, where Black and native people have been and in far too many ways remain the targets of eugenics and reproductive violence, including sterilization and the seizure of children (often as property, as well as for Christian paternalism). In the case of trans kids, people on the right are fully prepared to sacrifice some number of white parents in order to codify moral and lawful parenting as enforcing gender conformity, even and especially when the kid has an innate and overwhelming sense of belonging to another gender. And let's be clear where they're going here: Ultimately, they want to make it unlawful to assist a child with gender transition, no matter what the cost to the child or the family.

Again, this encroachment by the State on the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit would not be tolerated by white conservatives in almost any other context unless they believed it would be applied predominantly to Black, native, and immigrant parents. They know full well that white parents have trans kids, so they are trying to peddle state intrusion into white family life to other white Americans by demonizing and dehumanizing trans folks and their families.

Demonizing and dehumanizing are also the strategies being used to sell mass deportation, and it is important to recognize them as strategies, not realities, in both instances.

• Historically speaking, the loud, pervasive, determined demonization and dehumanization of a group of human beings presages great harms to come.

• The worst historical example that most Americans know is World War II, from which the majority of us have learned in a fairly sophomoric way that anti-Semitism is bad and leads to violence.

• It is not clear we understand much more than that, and it is not clear we can draw the morally necessary inferences - namely, that we must be vigilant, must name, and must combat the demonization and dehumanization of any group of people, because they can all lead to mass actions, mass harms, and in the end, mass violence.

So what can you do?

You can start by using your voice in person and online.

You can refuse to let demonizing, dehumanizing voices dominate any space, virtual or real (and especially real, whether that's a local school board meeting or a conversation in your house of worship).

You don't have to be an expert to speak. You can in fact speak powerfully from moral conviction, rather than academic expertise.

You can also donate money to organizations combatting efforts to dehumanize trans people and immigrants in your state legislature and speaking the words you wish you could say.

If cis people keep snoozing this alarm because we aren't sure how we "feel" about someone else's fundamental humanity, we are already the biggest part of the problem.