On Trans Citizenship

A fascist playbook for the eradication of a people

As a transgender educator, I sometimes feel like a sitting duck. There are those across the United States who have made clear online, and in direct messages to me, that I am a “groomer”; that I am a “mentally ill pervert” who doesn’t belong in the classroom; that I am an “indoctrinator” of a now-federally-outlawed yet still-ill-defined bundle of ideas known as “gender ideology.” The thought of a transgender teacher makes some people sick, and it makes some people angry. When I receive hate mail, I often worry for my safety.

As a transgender citizen, on the other hand, I do not feel so much like a sitting duck but rather the proverbial frog in a pot of water being brought to a slow boil. As we know, the frog does not recognize when to jump out of the pot for its own survival; instead, it just sits there, boiling to death.

The delimiting of trans citizenship in the United States is like that. A slow, deadly boil.

At the Jewish Museum in Berlin, there is a long, white room filled with flowing exhibit panels that are draped from the ceiling. Each panel lists anti-Jewish laws passed in Germany in any given month of the Nazi regime: April 1933; May 1933; June 1933; July 1933. To read each panel, you must position your body within this claustrophobic maze of flowing white. To exit to a side room, you must walk through a flurry of anti-Semitic laws. There is no way around but through this history.

The impression conveyed by the panels is that the Holocaust was not some brazen rupture between past and present—a shocking transformation of society that should have awakened the frog to its imminent danger—but rather a slow boil of anti-Jewish denaturalization that, from 1933 to 1939, reduced Jews to a stateless people trapped within the state’s heavily-policed borders. By 1939, it was too late. The frog was cooked.

Are we, transgender Americans in 2025, sitting in our own pot of water?

It is worth looking at some of the first anti-Jewish laws passed by the Nazi regime in the spring and summer of 1933 after Hitler came to power. We can compare these to the anti-transgender executive orders signed into law in the United States in early 2025.

The first anti-Jewish law in Nazi Germany was the Civil Service Law which banned the employment of Jews in government jobs. This law sought to terminate, or force into retirement, government employees who were deemed unfit to serve the new fascist regime. The Trump administration’s first major escalation in 2025, similarly, has been a purge of federal employees, also framed as the removal of those who refuse to support the new government. Actions have been taken to limit the employment of transgender people in the U.S. military, as well as to remove workplace protections for transgender federal workers in all agencies such as their ability to use their names, pronouns, and sex-designated facilities. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has also announced that they will no longer be defending the civil rights of transgender workers in any sector—private or public—despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that mandates federal civil rights protections for transgender workers.

Another early anti-Jewish law in Nazi Germany, in the spring of 1933, was a decree that ended government coverage of medical services performed by Jewish doctors. Similarly, we have seen efforts by the Trump administration to end government coverage of transgender healthcare for U.S. military families; to threaten to pull federal funding from any institution that practices transgender healthcare with minors or young adults under the age of nineteen; and there have been threats to end all Medicaid or Medicare coverage of transgender healthcare for Americans of any age, a policy that is currently the case in at least ten states.

Education was also an early concern of the Nazis. The so-called Law Against Overcrowding, also passed in the spring of 1933, limited the ability of Jewish students to access a public education. (The earlier Civil Service Law also effectively banned the employment of Jewish teachers.) Trump’s executive actions on education have similarly mandated that transgender students may not use their names, pronouns, or sex-designated facilities at school. These executive actions also prohibit the teaching of “gender ideology” in K-12 grades, effectively making transgender educators anti-government agents by virtue of our names, our pronouns, our salutations, or our dress. (Another similarity is how early Nazi educational policy explicitly promoted patriotism and obedience to the regime, just as Trump’s executive action of January 29th requires schools to promote “the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper,” among other guidance on “patriotic education.”)

One more example: In July 1933, Nazi Germany passed a Denaturalization law that stripped citizenship from “undesirable” Jews who had migrated to Germany from other countries. The effect was to render tens of thousands of people stateless. The Trump administration’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and unconstitutional attack on “birthright citizenship” are from the same playbook. But the regime has also stated that they will no longer issue correct identification, including U.S. passports, to transgender Americans. Some trans Americans have had their passports confiscated, with the ACLU now warning that trans Americans may lose their passports if they send them in for renewal. In some states there have been moves to prosecute transgender people for ‘fraud’ for using documents that do not correspond to their government-mandated sex. All these efforts have the effect of limiting transgender Americans’ ability to safely exit or enter our country’s borders.

So, have we found ourselves in that pot of water?

One might counter that anti-transgender laws are not the same as anti-Jewish laws because transgender is not an immutable status—that is, something unchangeable about ourselves—yet Jewishness is. This claim requires a bit of unpacking.

First of all, the idea that “Jewish” is an immutable characteristic of one’s being is a concept that requires us to see Jewishness not as a religion or faith, but as a racial category. Many German Jews tried everything in their power in the generations leading up to the Holocaust to shed their Jewishness and assimilate into the German nation, including taking on German names, converting to Christianity, and in every way giving up their Jewishness in deference to a new national identity. And yet, when the pot came to boil, Nazi eugenics won out over any socio-cultural-political assimilation. The Jew was a “biological” condition, the Nazis declared, governed by blood quantum.

And while transgender people might theoretically detransition to save their jobs and their citizenship, detransition must be understood as similar to the German Jewish tactic of cultural assimilation. It won’t save lives. For to detransition is to assimilate not only to the norms and values of the dominant society but to a state ideology of a regime that holds that there are only “two sexes.” And a regime hell bent on governing based on “biological truth,”as the Trump administration has declared itself to be—a regime that comprehends “gender dysphoria” as a mental illness rendering one incapable of service to their country—will likely view transness as an immutable characteristic of a diseased people. (Indeed, Hegseth’s memo barring transgender military recruitment states that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria at any time in one’s life makes one unfit to serve.) It is useful, therefore, to think of the Trump administration’s governance based on “biological sex” as a cognate of the “biological race” regime of the Nazi era.

The lesson of the museum exhibition room clogged with dangling posters announcing the anti-Jewish laws of Nazi Germany, month by frightening month, from 1933 to 1945, is that the fascist playbook for the eradication of a people is not merely to “flood the zone,” as the Trump administration is doing, but also, to slowly carve away at the civil rights of a people. To slowly delimit the citizenship of a people. Until one day, like a frog in a pot, we wake up and realize that there is no going back. We are cooked.