With the stroke of a pen late Monday, freshly inaugurated President Donald Trump took trans rights back more than a decade by signing an executive order that, in essence, commands federal government agencies to stop recognizing the existence of trans people.
The executive order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” orders government officials to treat sex as “biological” and “determined at conception.” It specifically says imprisoned trans women are to be held in men’s prisons and that federal single-gender spaces are to be used according to so-called “biological sex.” And perhaps most importantly to working class trans people in the U.S., Trump ordered the State Department to ban the practice of assigning X as a gender marker on U.S. passports and barred gender marker changes going forward on passports and all federal identification.
The message feels unimaginably cruel: Trump and his supporters want me and my fellow trans community to detransition, to retreat back in the closet out of fear.
On Tuesday, the White House clarified that the passport rules do not apply to previously issued passports, but, if a trans person seeks to renew their passport, they would have to return to the gender marker of their birth. NBC News reported a warning from experts for trans people and those with an X (usually used by nonbinary people who don’t want to be identified as either male or female) on their passport, saying that such international travelers could potentially be detained until a new passport with their assigned sex at birth can be re-issued. If true, that process could take weeks and presumably trans women in this situation would be detained with men and trans men with women, given other references in the order.
It is the most widespread government intrusion into the private lives of trans people since gay sex was legalized in 2003 in the Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision.
While most trans people rightfully panicked over the new passport rules, it’s important to tell the whole story of the executive order, which extends further than travel documentation. Housing trans prisoners with men results in horrific rates of prison rape. There’s plenty of study and evidence of this. The reason that trans women started being housed with other women is because courts determined that it was cruel and unusual punishment to subject a specific minority to rampant prison rape.
That risk now extends to trans travelers who might be detained trying to re-enter the country. The order also opens federal employees who are trans to widespread discrimination. Trump is sending an early signal that trans people have no place in the America he is trying to build over the next four years. It is not the government of reasonable people with a handful of concerns that the trans rights movement maybe went a little too far. It’s arguably genocidal, according to the official definition of genocide. This is not about trans athletes, this is not about transition care for minors, we’re looking at a future where trans Americans are detained by their own government just trying to come home from overseas. Are you not outraged by this? I woke up this week as officially a second-class citizen, simply because I exist in a way that the party in power does not believe should be allowed. The message feels unimaginably cruel: Trump and his supporters want me and my fellow trans community to detransition, to retreat back in the closet out of fear. This executive order has made my practical life even more difficult in ways that I anticipate I’ll keep discovering in the coming years. But, Mr. President, I am not going back and I am not afraid.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. 
