American Atrocities Past and Present: What Can 20th Century Bigotry Tell Us About 21st Century Transgender Rights

Throughout humanity’s time on our planet it has often been advantageous for those in power to stigmatize either a separate population or a portion of it’s own population. Hidden in the preceding sentence, so dry and academic, is a well of human suffering deeper than any ocean. In this essay we will examine the causal chains that led to this marginalization in two separate times in history, along with the responses of the marginalized and the outcomes of their situations. These two events have both been selected due to their similarities and relevance for one of the current stigmatized groups in the United States of America, transgender people. The Lavender Scare of the 1950’s and 1960’s is the most similar event available for study. The targets of the Lavender Scare were gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, the events took place in the United States, even the rhetoric and justifications have a disturbing resemblance. The Japanese Internment took place during the Second World War from 1941 to 1945, also in the United States of America, and comprised a percentage of the population of roughly the same size as the current transgender population.

We currently live in a time when the group in power has decided to use the unifying power of turning one part of the population against the other with reckless abandon. In the run up to the 2024 election, the campaign of Donald Trump’s campaign spent just under $215 million on a massive anti-transgender ad campaign. Many of the ads ended with the line, “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you”. There are two false assumptions hidden in this statement. First, that it is impossible to support transgender people and cisgender people at the same time. Secondly, and far more insidiously, that there are two groups of people: transgender people and ‘regular’ people. This rhetorical tactic is known as ‘othering’ and it is a common tactic used in the first several steps that lead up to genocide according to Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, founder and president of Genocide Watch. Dr. Stanton first unveiled his ‘The Ten Stages of Genocide’ in 1987 as part of a larger lecture at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. While not all stigmatization leads to a genocide, any movement in that direction is troubling to say the least. At the time of writing the situation regarding transgender people in the United States of America is fluid, but we do have two troubling signs for how things will go. The first and most obvious signal that we have been given is what President Trump has actually said. He has already announced that transgender people will be removed from the military, transgender protections will be rolled back, and what little federal funding there is for transgender care. He has also announced he is going to ask Congress to redefine gender in a way that erases all transgender legal identity overnight. The second of our dark omens concerns how and if the Trump administration will be rolling back any progress made in transgender rights and care. We know from his first term that he has no issue with signing executive orders that will trigger litigation or backlash if he is not able to push agenda items through Congress. Since his first term, he has only solidified his position as sole head of the Republican party, so he may not have to use executive orders as much in his second term. The Supreme Court has a solid conservative majority and both the House and the Senate are in Republican control, he may find his agenda moving along without much force at all. Due to all of this, it is imperative that anyone who might be targeted in Donald Trump’s second term learn from those who came before and prepare like no one ever has before.

Before we begin comparing events, it is necessary that we define our terms. Words like ‘discrimination’, ‘persecution’, and ‘genocide’ are used hyperbolically enough that it can warp their meaning enough to cause confusion. According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of discrimination is “prejudiced or prejudicial outlook, action, or treatment”. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, discrimination rises to the level of prejudice when it is severe enough to deny or infringe on a person’s fundamental rights. If prejudice is systematized to target an entire group then it becomes a crime against humanity, also according to the Center for Constitutional Rights. Lastly, if this crime against humanity reaches the point of trying to erase or destroy a group, it becomes a genocide. By these definitions, Trump is currently publicly planning a crime against humanity, and if some members of his own party are correct, a genocide.

Through a combination of the Second World War and The New Deal, millions of people moved from rural America to metropolitan areas in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In these cities, people in the LGBTQ population began to slowly find each other through secret symbols and codes, finding a real community of like people for the first time. Once the war ended, Communism jumped to the front of the American enemy list and a young Senator named Joseph McCarthy capitalized on the American fear of Communist subversion by claiming he had a list of over 200 Communists currently employed by the State Department. Eleven days later he gave an extended speech on the floor of the Senate where, still without evidence, he listed out numerous individuals identified only by case number. Of particular note, Cases 14 and 62 were identified as known gay men who were also Communists. McCarthy claimed that gay, lesbian, or bisexual people were more likely to be Communists because of their “mental twists”. This began the Lavender Scare, which resulted in thousands of suspected queer government employees being interviewed. After a suspect was interviewed they had a stark choice: resign or be publicly outed in front of a Congressional committee and probably fired. Many chose an unspoken third option: suicide. It is estimated that between five and ten thousand government employees quit or were fired during the Lavender Scare. When McCarthy’s flimsy link between Communists and queer people began to wear thin he switched to another one: queer people were easier to blackmail and therefore could not be trusted. Rather than see this as a damning indictment on the societal perception of queer people, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 in 1953. Executive Order 10450 effectively banned queer people or anyone else suspected of “sexual perversion” from serving in federal government positions and charged the FBI with investigating anyone suspected of trying to sneak into a federal job. The same restrictions flowed down to many state and local governments. The vast majority of those who lost their jobs under these policies went quietly, but Frank Kameny was not one of them. After being fired from a position in the Army Map Service for being gay in 1957, Kameny fought the decision both legally and publicly, which was incredibly rare for the time. Aside from his court case, Kameny also organized a picket in front of the White House and founded a chapter of the leading gay rights organization of the time in Washington D.C. Upon finding out that the newly published Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders listed being gay as a sociopathic disorder, Kameny fought that, too. One by one, Kameny began to win his battles. In 1973, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders released a new edition that removed homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 1975, Eisenhower’s executive order was essentially overturned when the Civil Service Commission updated it’s rules so that gay people were not barred from employment or fired for being gay. In 1980, when an NSA employee lost his job because being gay counted against his ability to get a security clearance, it was Kameny who was in his cornerand organized enough resistance that the NSA employee was reinstated. After that progress slowed, and even occasionally moved backwards. Ironically for Kameny, the armed forces were almost entirely exempt from all of this progress. In 1993, this was partially relaxed under a policy known as ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’, but armed services members were still fired if it was discovered that they were queer. It was not until 1995 that the government stopped discriminating against queer employees in matters regarding a security clearance, and 1998 when it officially became illegal for the federal government to discriminate against queer employees. In 2011, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was abolished and for the first time queer people could openly serve in the military. That was until 2017, Trump banned transgender people from joining the military. Three years later this restriction was repealed, though it has already been announced that all transgender people in the military will be discharged in 2025. It is entirely arguable that the Lavender Scare goes on to this day.

On February 19th, 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The actual text of this executive order seems entirely benign. It begins by stating that during a war, a country must protect itself from espionage and sabotage. It follows this by giving the Secretary of War and his commanders the authority to move people away from military areas. It finishes by saying that the Secretary of War and his commanders are to give people that have to move supplies and a space to live. Without knowing the history of this document, one could be mistaken for thinking it’s going to move a potential enemy spy away from a military base. Instead massive portions of the states of California, Oregon, and Washington were declared military areas and around 120,000 people of Japanese descent were moved into concentration camps. Roughly two-thirds of those moved were American citizens. In March of the same year, refusing to comply with the officials moving people was criminalized. Anyone who refused to be moved could be fined $5000 and spend a year in prison. Over the course of the war, ten separate camps would be opened and filled with Japanese-Americans. The people who were rounded up were given very little warning. There was no time to prepare or make arrangements for their properties or businesses. Many of those who were sent to the camps were forced to sell their property at predatory prices by their neighbors. Once they arrived at their new ‘home’, they found camps that were poorly prepared, overcrowded, and under supplied. On top of this, these new prisoners discovered that they were also not exempt from the draft, and many of their best and brightest went to war for the very country that had imprisoned them. The Japanese reacted to this process with several means of resistance. The Japanese American Citizen’s League put out several statements asking the prisoners in the camp to not resist and show their captors the purity of their loyalty regardless of their treatment. For many young Japanese-American men this meant volunteering to join the war effort and they would eventually be recognized as some of the best shock troops in the Pacific front of the war. Several people became voluntary test court cases, intentionally allowing themselves to be arrested resisting internment. Three separate cases made it to the United States Supreme Court, and in all three the Court ruled that the internment was constitutional. In some camps there were strikes against work, or refusal to join the draft. Many of these resisters served their entire jail term and then were sent back to the concentration camps. Finally, in 1942, the Japanese American Citizen’s League hired a lawyer to contest the internment on constitutional grounds, who went and found what he thought of as the ‘ideal’ plaintiff. Mitsuye Endo had never been to Japan, had a brother who served in the Army, and was a Protestant Christian. This time when the case made it to the Supreme Court they found that if a citizen had been screened and found to be loyal they could not be forcibly interned. This was in October of 1944, the war was less than a year from being totally won, and in many ways was already decided. Despite all of that, Roosevelt did not allow prisoners to leave the camps until January of 1945.

Having looked into the circumstances of both the Lavender Scare and The Japanese Internment, the next question is how does our current situation compare. We can quantify this by comparing all three events to Dr. Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide. The first stage is Classification, and all three situations began with the targeted group being classified as something ‘other’. The second stage is Symbolization, the entire group is grouped together into a uniting symbol or marked with a symbol. In all three situations, the targeted group is seen to be reduced to a propaganda image. For Japanese people this was done by sending photographers to the camp to create an image of the happy internee, for queer people under McCarthyism this was done by dragging gay employees in front of public Senate hearings, for transgender people now it is done by equating them with drag queens. The third stage is Discrimination, is where the minority group is attacked with laws, political power, or customs. In both of our past examples, this can be shown with a presidential executive order. In our current example transgender people have already been targeted with state level laws, and it is only a matter of time before the new administration or Congress propagates a new executive order or law targeting transgender people. The fourth stage is Dehumanization. In the case of the Lavender Scare this was done by calling queer people sexual perverts and degenerates, in the case of Japanese people it was in calling them all potential spies along with racial slurs. Today transgender people are openly called slurs by members of Congress, along with sexual groomers and predators. The fifth step, Organization, is where the path deviates, if only because the new administration has yet to take power. In the case of the Lavender Scare there was committee after committee, report after report, and legions of investigations. In the Japanese Internment, an entire department was organized called the War Relocation Authority that coordinated the deportation and ran their camps. In the current case of transgender people, there has been some state level organization such as websites where people can report transgender people going to the bathroom, in one city in Texas there has even been a bounty program put in place. It is a stated part of the Trump administration’s plan to begin organization at a federal level as part of their day one agenda. The sixth step, Polarization, involves the silencing of moderates and the dominant power gaining total power over the targeted group. The Lavender Scare accomplished this by making moderates afraid of speaking out lest they be accused. The Japanese Internment accomplished this by dehumanizing Japanese people both at home and abroad to the point it was unpatriotic to dissent. The sixth step has begun here in the United States for transgender people. Law makers that were formerly fighting for transgender people now blame them for losing an election, the first transgender woman to be voted into Congress is already banned from using the lady’s bathroom, and the extremists are only getting started. The rest of the steps, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial, are not apparent in these events, though that is not necessarily the bright spot that it appears to be. Japanese Internment did not begin to end until it was clear that the United States would win the war. We will never know what would have happened to the prisoners in those camps had the war continued or even gone against the United States, but it is unlikely that things would have remained as civil as they did. The Lavender Scare only got less scary because Communism got less scary. It is of note that none of the official rollbacks on the discriminatory policies happened until after the Berlin Wall fell. Even then, the Lavender Scare still exists in a dormant state and will likely come roaring back in the coming year. As for those most dire steps on the chain for our current situation, the only real answer is that we do not know. Twenty years ago most people would have laughed at anyone who proposed that anything like that could happen in the United States, but twenty years ago no one thought we would be where we are now, staring down over the edge.