Trump isn't just attacking trans people. He's denationalizing them

A friend recently told me that he has devised a way to ask people how they are doing that is appropriate for the current, protracted bad-news moment. He asks, "How are you, personally?"

"My wife is the best and I have a new puppy," I responded, taking his cue.


Also, I am trans and an immigrant. Personally. My father, my children, my wife and my closest friends are immigrants, too. My friend and I have much in common, but at least for now, I am much less able to separate my personal situation from the campaign of destruction than he is.

Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be "denationalized" -- excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the "right to have rights" could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights.

Arendt once said that "the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated." As a stateless person, she experienced that loss of rights -- unable to get papers, hiding from the police, interned as an "enemy alien" in France -- before making it to the United States. She was lucky. Her friend Walter Benjamin committed suicide in his eighth year of exile, when French authorities blocked him from crossing the border ahead of advancing German troops.

I became stateless when I was 14 and my family left the Soviet Union. In exchange for granting my parents, my brother and me exit visas, the USSR stripped us of citizenship. For nearly a decade after we arrived in the United States, instead of a passport I carried a long rectangular booklet called a refugee travel document. Not being able to fill in the blank when asked for my nationality added a layer of complexity to some otherwise simple transactions, like opening a bank account, but I was young, white, female and, in the parlance of this country, "legal," so the difficulties I experienced were not excessive. They were just enough to make me feel precarious.

In the decades since, life for noncitizens in the United States has grown much more difficult. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have pushed immigrants to the margins of American society, cutting off access to public assistance programs, limiting pathways to legal status and ramping up deportations. The giant bureaucracy of "immigration courts" took shape, though it hardly resembles any court system that U.S. citizens would encounter. Its presiding authorities have no political independence, and those they judge are not guaranteed counsel. An estimated 43,000 people are currently held in immigration detention facilities, where some will spend years. In theory, the Constitution guarantees the rights of persons, not just U.S. citizens. But in 1999, the Supreme Court, siding with President Bill Clinton's Justice Department, ruled that some noncitizens facing deportation cannot argue that the Constitution protects them from selective enforcement.

We have grown accustomed to the understanding that this "nation of immigrants" no longer accepts many immigrants as part of the nation. Recently Maura Healey, the progressive governor of Massachusetts -- the state where my family came as refugees -- boasted, in an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, that she sought to exclude most immigrants from her state's right-to-shelter law. New York City, which also has a right-to-shelter law, has set a 30-day limit for the use of shelters by migrants. These laws are called "right to shelter" to frame housing as a right, not a privilege. But evidently, not everyone has a right to this right.

A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration's barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place. In his inaugural address and one of his first executive orders, President Donald Trump asserted that only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable. Trans people, in other words, do not exist. Executive orders aimed at banning any mention of transgender people from schools, banning trans athletes from women's sports, ordering a stop to gender-affirming medical care for people younger than 19, and barring trans people from serving in the military followed.

The State Department stopped issuing passports with the "X" gender marker and began issuing passports consistent with the sex the applicant was assigned at birth, even if the person had legally changed gender. In his executive order on the military, Trump asserted that being transgender "conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle." During an address to Congress in February, Trump recognized a young woman who apparently suffered a brain injury during a volleyball game. Serious volleyball injuries are surprisingly common, but what stood out about this one was that the player who spiked the ball that hit her, the young woman said, was trans.

The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.

Last month, despite the Supreme Court's 2020 ruling that trans and nonbinary people are protected from workplace discrimination, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission started dropping lawsuits it had brought on their behalf.

The rights the Trump administration is taking away from trans people are relatively new. Only in the past few decades, for example, have clear legal procedures existed for changing the gender marker on identity documents, and only in the past few years have federal and some state authorities made the process fairly easy. But before transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people were recognized as a group -- or groups -- of people who had rights, many could blend in, fly below the radar. Now, in their new rightlessness, they are exposed.

"I was shocked," Hunter Schafer, a transgender actress and model, said in a TikTok video she posted last month, "because I didn't think it was actually going to happen." Schafer had just received a new passport, to replace one that had been stolen. Schafer, 26, had held identity documents with an "F" gender marker since she got her first driver's license as a teenager. When she applied for her new passport, she indicated her sex as female. It came back with the marker "M."

Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a loan, obtaining a driver's license, and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders. I was once detained in Russia following a routine road check because an officer thought I was a teenage boy using his mother's driver's license.

It's not just American identity documents that are being scrambled. Like all things American, Trump's denationalization campaign affects people far beyond the United States. In late February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued visa guidelines, ostensibly designed to keep foreign trans athletes from competing in the United States, that seem to direct consular officers to deny entry to anyone whose gender markers appear different from their sex assigned at birth.

The new regulations require visitors, when filling out the paperwork to cross the border into the United States, to indicate the sex they were assigned at birth. Lucien Lambertz, a German curator who is trans and was planning a professional trip to the United States, told me they worried that they would be denied entry if they complied, indicating a birth sex different from the gender marker in their passport, but also if they didn't comply.

Lambertz emailed the foreign ministry in their country to ask for guidance. "The issue is the subject of tense discussions here at the ministry and your concerns are absolutely understandable," the response read, in part. Ordinarily, the foreign ministry would suggest asking the U.S. Embassy, but by doing so, as the letter notes, Lambertz "would then 'out' yourself to them."

Trans and nonbinary Germans fear that their country's incoming conservative government may take its cues from the Trump administration. Far-right parties, ascendant in Germany and other European countries, have made the specter of "gender ideology" a centerpiece of their politics.

"Something has changed," Heinrich Horwitz, a German choreographer, told me. Horwitz, who is nonbinary, was recently assaulted at the main train station in Vienna. The attacker was demanding to know whether Horwitz was "a girl or a boy." Before they could make out what the attacker was saying, Horwitz instinctively tucked the Star of David they wear around their neck inside their shirt. "I thought that would be safer." Horwitz, who was born in Munich in 1984, is the child of a Holocaust survivor. "I grew up with this idea that I could always go to the U.S. if the Nazis came back," they told me. That no longer seems like an option.

You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population; the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights; the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. (Trump spent about five minutes of his recent address to Congress specifically attacking trans people and 10 minutes attacking immigrants; the Democratic rebuttal mentioned immigrants once and trans people not at all.) Then I finish with the standard exhortation: The attacks won't stop here. If you don't stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won't be anyone left when they come for you.

But I find that line of argument both distasteful and disingenuous. It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won't stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.