February Letter from the Board

Few of us who have been closely monitoring the anti-trans political animus in this country over the past couple of years were surprised by the slew of hate-driven executive orders that the new administration issued in its early days and continues to pen.  And yet, many of us have received these executive orders like visceral blows. 
    
The executive orders hurt despite our lack of surprise.  Perhaps the sheer violence of these words hurt more because we were so braced for them.
 
It seems, in this second Trump administration, that what used to be Tweets will now appear in the form of executive orders.  And yet, the form does not make any of this hate-driven rhetoric more legal.  
 
These repellent statements, and their implementation by government administrators, should not stand up in courts.  And they have been and will continue to be challenged.  While the purpose motivating the executive orders targeting the trans community, the LGBTQ+ community, the immigrant community, and every community that has benefitted from DEI is hateful discrimination, one implication may well be to test the very vitality of our country’s checks and balances.  If the courts fail us, they are failing our national experiment.
 
Trans people have existed throughout history.  No colonizing or fascist force has ever been able to affect the abiding truth of our existence, even as we have been targeted time and time again.  Such attempts to erase the trans community have failed repeatedly. It is no accident that the executive orders targeted inclusive efforts to expand the numbers of U.S. citizens. Right now, our legal existence in the United States is one of the test cases for a broader strategy of reducing the functional polity of this nation to a smaller circle of who qualifies as “us.”  By this logic, the aim appears to be to dramatically advance the recent political movement to return trans people to the status of “them,” in direct and intentional backlash to decades of successful efforts to be included.
    
Make no mistake: We have been targeted by the Trump administration because the very meaning of the LGBTQ+ community is to expand the definitions of both love—which is a significant antidote to hate and to fear-driven reasoning—and what it means to be human.  And because the LGBTQ+ community’s unifying feature is that we have queered the very boundaries upon which an us/them logic functions, by expanding the very possibilities of human existence.  Our existence and our authenticity continue to show what is possible and the fallibility and fragility of so many power structures we are meant to accept without question.
 
Therein lies our greatest strength.
 
The Trump administration has targeted communities that have made efforts to expand and support communities of care in this country.  The more of us who are excluded, the bigger the “them” tent becomes relative to the “us” tent. 
 
We—the trans community—transcend the very notion of us/them.  And we span every other impacted community.  We include non-binary people, women, men, immigrants, children, seniors, federal employees, people of color, speakers of all languages, and more.  We are communities of inclusion.  And that expansiveness and intersectionality is our strength.
 
So, we must keep our hearts and our communities open, and continue to bridge communities so that we can take on this administration together.  Our communities have long histories of resilience.  It is time to re-root in those histories, in the strength of our ancestors.  
 
Whether you work within the systems of government or you’re working to strengthen our community so we can survive when the government lets us down, we are proud to stand with you.  We are the trans legal community, and we are ready to fight to keep our communities safe.
 
In solidarity,
    
The NTBA Board