Trump’s executive order on homelessness and mental illness is transgender Americans’ nightmare.
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On July 24, Donald Trump signed an executive order, Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets, directing states to crack down on and effectively criminalize drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. Breaking with decades of research-supported practice that sought to place struggling individuals into housing first, under the logic that they might be safe and stabilized before pursuing further interventions, this order calls for states to detain, imprison, and in some cases institutionalize people experiencing these circumstances. The order cites issues of “public safety” and street harassment in America’s cities, which Trump and his party love to paint, against all evidence, as nightmares of decay and threat.
This order is, on its face, already horrifying—the American carceral system, as well as involuntary holds for mental health, are notoriously abusive to those inside. For us in the trans community, however, this has the makings of a truly nightmarish scenario, and I can’t help but think that this is by design.
The trans community already disproportionately experiences problems with homelessness and mental health issues, as well as substance abuse stemming from them. These problems are, of course, not unique to, or a result of, transness itself. Rather, these problems arise largely due to the mistreatment and nonacceptance of trans people by society as a whole. With the facts being that trans youth are much more likely to be kicked out of a family home than cis youth; that employers tend to discriminate against trans employees in the hiring and firing process; and that the experience of being harassed out in public for simply not passing perfectly is common, it’s no wonder that mental health issues and homelessness are so much more common.
So, as it stands, this order is already poised to disproportionately sweep up trans people. However, the potential impact of the criminalization of mental illness, especially, goes much deeper. For decades, far-right figures have laundered the hateful idea that transgender identities aren’t real and that any deviation from a strict gender binary must mean that something is fundamentally wrong with you. Many figures go so far as to say outright that transness is a mental illness in and of itself: Recall erstwhile presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy calling transness in youth “a mental health disorder” during a presidential debate, and Rep. Nancy Mace saying in a tweet, “Your mental illness is not our reality.”
Indeed, anti-trans folks have pushed for years to pathologize transness, perpetuating ideas like autogynephilia, which characterizes trans women as having a sexual disorder, and rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which falsely imagines gender dysphoria in youth as a “social contagion.” Despite being widely rejected by the psychiatric community, each of these pseudoscientific ideas has been cited repeatedly in anti-trans legislation and in defense of cruel practices like conversion therapy.
However, there is a much more straightforward problem. The legal definition of mental illness in the U.S. Code is any disorder that meets “diagnostic criteria within the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” And, despite not being classified as a disorder, gender dysphoria does appear in the DSM-5. Does this inclusion mean that experiencing gender dysphoria makes a person mentally ill? Absolutely not—gender dysphoria is best understood as the discomfort and distress a trans person feels when their gender identity doesn’t match the one they were assigned at birth. It’s much more akin to a complex emotion than anything else; it’s no more a mental illness than is the experience of grief, for example. Even so, with an order like this one, the verbiage of the U.S. Code puts trans people in a legally precarious position.
To be clear, the wording of this new executive order does not call for a blanket imprisonment or institutionalization of people with mental illness; rather, it calls for “commitment and treatment of individuals with mental illness who pose a danger to others.” It is of note, though, that nowhere in the order is it specified what it actually means by “danger.” And it’s in this likely purposeful open-endedness where the true threat for transgender people lies.
A long-standing conspiracy about queer people that has, in recent years, been turned specifically on trans people is that we are “groomers” and engage in the sexual abuse of children. This conspiracy has become mainstream among those on the right wing, with countless figures deploying it, calling trans people, and anyone who supports us, groomers. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida was even referred to by Ron DeSantis’ then-press secretary Christina Pushaw as “the anti-grooming bill.”
Trans women have been particularly villainized, with people like J.K. Rowling accusing us of simply being men who want access to women’s spaces in order to harm women (of course disregarding the fact that if a person wanted to harm women, they wouldn’t need to go through the process of transition to do it). All this while there is simply no evidence that trans women harm cis women at a rate any higher than any other gender group.
A similar discourse has fueled the recent crusade against trans women in sports, with some cis women forfeiting just for seeing someone they think is trans on the other team. This is in spite of the fact that when they have been on hormones for a sufficient length of time, trans women are shown to perform comparably, or even worse in some cases, than cis women in terms of physical fitness. Trans men aren’t free from this kind of stigma either. They have been subject to a long-standing, if slightly less well-known, myth that taking the testosterone required for hormone therapy leads to violence and aggression. There is, once again, no evidence of this being true.
Despite having no basis in fact, it’s this type of rhetoric that has led directly to bathroom and sports bans for transgender people, bans on LGBTQ+ books, and bans on discussion of gender identity in classrooms. And now with Trump’s executive order on homelessness, we have a new storm on the horizon.
States have not yet begun to enact legislation in compliance with this order. But given red states’ willingness to comply with Trump’s previous diktats, it’s only a matter of time. If and when they do comply, we are then just a step away from the nightmare scenario: If a state passes a law in full compliance with this order, all it would take is one more law—maybe a statute that officially designates gender dysphoria as a mental illness, or perhaps one that would criminalize affirming a trans minor’s gender—for the right to justify involuntary imprisonment and institutionalization. And there is no doubt in my mind that the “treatment” this administration would use for trans people would be forms of conversion therapy.
The right has been pushing for years to forcibly remove most of us from society, and to drive the rest of us back deep into the closet. What we are seeing in this executive order is the foundation being laid for a dramatic and terrifying escalation. If this sounds alarmist, please consider that we are already seeing the preliminary stages of the very same crimes committed in Germany nearly a century ago in Florida’s newly constructed “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp.
As a nation, we are on a dangerous road, and we have been for some time now. Every order like this, and every state that complies, is just a little bit closer to a truly dark destination. Are we there yet? No. But we are quickly driving past the signs, and if we don’t change course soon, it will be too late.
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