Early this week, New York Times opinion columnist Masha Gessen penned a piece purportedly exposing “The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attacks on Trans People.” Unsurprisingly, the Trump policies Gessen sees as proof of an insidious Trumpian plot are reality-based measures that protect women and children and preserve American culture.
Gessen begins her supposed exposé by bemoaning the “current, protracted bad-news moment” and its repercussions for her “personally” as someone who is “trans and an immigrant.” She then moves quickly to comparing the United States to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. As the essay continues, Gessen’s contention becomes clear: Trump’s “barrage of attacks on trans people” is central to his “denationalization campaign,” which he pursues ostensibly so he can then deport them or implement a more fiendishly Hitlerian purpose.
Gessen likens trans people in America to Jews in Europe during the Holocaust and tells the story of a “nonbinary” friend who felt the need to hide her Star of David necklace when an alleged “attacker” questioned whether she was “a girl or a boy,” implying a link between antisemitism and traditional, biology-based views of sex. In other words, the United States has become like 1930s Germany, and those who refuse to accept the left’s gender ideology are the 21st century’s Nazis.
As evidence, Gessen cites Trump’s “assert[ion] that only two sexes exist;” “executive orders aimed at banning any mention of transgender people in schools, banning trans athletes from women’s sports, ordering a stop to gender-affirming medical care for people under 19 and barring trans people from serving in the military;” the elimination of the “X” designation on U.S. passports; and “visa guidelines” that require the sex designation on a person’s passport to match that on his birth certificate, among others.
In other words, from Gessen’s perspective — and apparently that of The New York Times — the most compelling evidence that the Trump administration is an authoritarian regime akin to the Third Reich or the Soviet Union is its acknowledgment of biological and cultural realities and moral laws. Gessen characterizes Trump’s acceptance of the fact that “only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable” as an assertion that “trans people … do not exist.” Trump referencing Payton McNabb and her being injured by a trans-identifying male during his joint address to Congress is an attack on trans people. (Gessen downplays the injury by asserting that “serious volleyball injuries are surprisingly common,” though evidence suggests that volleyball is one of the safer sports.)
While Gessen may believe her own fearmongering, her conspiracy theory is ridiculous and unfounded. (Perhaps Gessen’s conspiratorial thinking should be unsurprising, given that she actually suggested that Kamala Harris’ refusal to double down on pro-trans policies cost her the election.) U.S. citizens who identify as transgender, nonbinary, and so forth (and so forth, as the identities multiply) are in no danger of being deported or alienated from society. Trump isn’t denying the existence of people who claim to be transgender; he’s just stating the fact that such people do not transcend the biological and cultural realities of male and female.
The whole trans-activist accusation of existence-denial is nonsensical in any case: It’s fairly obvious that if a man claims to be a “smart scientist” and another man disagrees with him, he’s denying the man’s claim, not his existence (otherwise, whose claim is he disagreeing with?). A female who switches from identifying as male to identifying as nonbinary didn’t commit suicide.
Despite Gessen’s protests and all the headlines implying that Trump is kicking trans people out of sports, no Trump policy does any such thing. Those who claim to be transgender are allowed to play sports with other people of the same sex — just like everyone else. A boy can try to look, act, and sound like a girl and still play sports — on the boys’ sports teams.
When it comes to passports, Gessen seems to ignore the fact that passports (and other forms of ID) have photographs for identification purposes, not just an M for male or an F for female. Passport photos are supposed to be recent when submitted, but they can be updated to reflect a drastic change in appearance, rendering the objection to the removal of the X designation a red herring. If all else fails, the individual can simply explain why his passport says he is male but he is attempting to look like a woman (an uncomfortable conversation for some, perhaps, but one that was chosen by the individual identifying as transgender). Trump isn’t prohibiting the travel of people like Gessen.
The Trump administration’s common sense policies are simply a reflection of the truth that government has a role in preserving culture (or, in the case of the Biden administration, destroying it). That role exists even if it is as limited as ensuring that the passports it issues tell the truth about the carrier’s sex instead of legitimizing his confusion. Viewed through this lens, the policies Gessen decries have nothing to do with targeting those who claim to be transgender — and certainly nothing to do with “denationalizing” them — and everything to do with acknowledging the truths about reality that form the bedrock of this nation and its cultural norms.
Trans activists, on the other hand, are perfectly willing to destroy America’s cultural fabric in order to replace it with their own distorted framework — a framework in which the concepts of male and female exist, not as biological and cultural realities established by a Creator, but as malleable categories whose primary purpose is transgender cosplay. Gessen herself argued that the institution of marriage should be done away with in 2012, in part because marriage wasn’t “compatible” with her relationship arrangement. (Her “new partner” at the time had just given birth to her brother’s child, among other “incompatibilities.”)
A more recent example of trans anarchism was brought to light by an Illinois mother who claimed that her 13-year-old daughter’s school made female students undress in front of a male student. Trans activists booed the mother for speaking out at a school board meeting, and the school disputes the mother’s claim. But even if the mother’s story were completely false, that wouldn’t change the fact that schools requiring girls to undress in front of boys (or men) is exactly what trans anarchists want — the total obliteration of boundaries and norms rooted in immutable distinctions between male and female.
Trump opposes this imposition of cultural anarchy. His resistance is not based on a desire to render those who claim to be transgender nationless, but, apparently, on a recognition that this cultural anarchy if left unchecked will ultimately lead to the demise of the nation all Americans call their home. Thus Trump’s emphasis in his joint address to Congress on the realities that a person is either male or female and “every child” is “perfect exactly the way God made” him or her. Gessen and those who share her belief system are in no danger of losing their country, but all Americans are in danger of having it undermined by a radical trans agenda that brooks no dissent.
Interestingly, in a 2023 interview with the New Yorker, Gessen discussed her parents’ response to her using a boy’s name and telling them she planned “to have an operation when I grow up.”
“My parents, fortunately, were incredibly game. They were totally fine with it,” Gessen said.
Trump isn’t “denationalizing” trans people. He’s simply telling radical trans activists what Gessen’s parents should have told her a long time ago: No.
