In commemoration of the upcoming Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), President Joe Biden issued a statement praising trans people’s contributions to society and describing actions his administration has taken to counter transphobic bullying and extremism. Additionally, many members of Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also issued their own statements affirming that community health depends on supporting trans people too.
“Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our Nation,” Biden wrote in his statement. “Whether serving their communities or in the military, raising families or running businesses, they help America thrive. They deserve, and are entitled to, the same rights and freedoms as every other American, including the most fundamental freedom to be their true selves.”
I am a lover of both words and deeds. This issue needs a lot of bad laws rolled back, but it also needs to have this kind of thing being said at every level of society.
Just tiresome to read "Joe Biden becomes first president to wave a trans flag from the stairs of Air Force One" and then turn the page and read "Florida legislature passes the 'Install Land Mines In Women's Restrooms Act' and funds it to the tune of $40M"
That word is being abused lately. Trans people aren't being packed into trains and sent to gas chambers.
What's happening to them isn't ok and laws need to protect their rights like everyone elses, make no mistake about it but conflating it with the Holocaust, doesn't help the victims make progress. We need to use accurate language to combat the inflammatory language being used by the bigots trying to limit Trans rights IMO.
You're not wrong but we should still use the correct language so that when we actually get somewhere nasty, the language isn't diminished beyond the point of usefulness.
What it means is "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group". The GOP is definitely trying to create a world without trans people by any means necessary, so unless your quibble is that trans isn't an ethnic group, I don't see how I'm misusing that word.
And yet, if something so evidently man-made and contrived as nationality can constitute a grounds for the definition of genocide, then so too could we use any number of qualities more integral to the human condition to speak intelligently about genocide. It beggars the imagination to suppose we can gain anything by fretfully splitting hairs when we have a word to hand which quite precisely encapsulates the most ardent desires and aims of the perpetrators. People are being murdered, terrorized, made illegal, and hounded out of public life through political means by elected officials and the apparatus of state, whom themselves do not mince words. Historians are the ones who must take care with their words, and even they know when to say the word "quisling".
Some legal scholars and transgender rights activists have argued this definition should be expanded to include transgender persons. Others have critiqued the term "transgender genocide" as inappropriate for modern Western contexts, arguing that current levels of discrimination and violence fail to reach the legal definition of genocide.
I'm glad it's a subject among academics, that's more or less as it should be. I am not bound by their findings in either case; the real world value of a "legal definition" in the international courts has been demonstrated to be of limited use to prevent or discourage genocide in any case; ask a Palestinian.
Absolutely, but that's not something the president has powers over. We need Congress to pass a law that allows the federal government to crack down hard on states doing this. And we need a Congress to bitch slap the Supreme Court back into actually following the Constitution and not being a right wing mouthpiece.
Messaging and signaling are both important. We just have to be wary of when people are disingenuous. There's value in introducing progressive legislation like how Sanders and AOC do even if it isn't going to pass, just like there's value here in affirming that trans people are people who matter.