The Trump administration’s latest attack on trans people is the most terrifying yet: The Health and Human Services Department is now planning to establish a retrograde definition of gender aimed at making whatever gender is assigned at birth unchangeable, according to a memo leaked to The New York Times.
For the last 16 years, I have been involved with efforts to reduce the enforcement of gender categories on trans people and everyone. When I started doing this work in 2002, many state and local agencies and federal administrative regimes that keep gender marker data about people didn’t have clear policies, or didn’t have any policy at all, about whether someone could change their gender marker, or even what evidence or documentation the gender marker on someone’s records or ID is based on. As trans legal organizations began to emerge in the early 2000s, we worked to identify ways to reduce the harms trans people face because of gender norm enforcement.
As a poverty lawyer working at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, I saw this harm in my clients’ lives. One client was kicked out of school when she and her friend showed up dressed as women, coming out to their peers and teachers. Another client had her welfare benefits terminated when she showed up at her mandatory “workfare” assignment because the supervisor marked her as absent, saying she wasn’t “work ready” if she dressed as a woman. Another client needed placement in a domestic violence shelter but the shelters would not admit her because she was trans. One client was convicted on a drug charge and wanted to serve part of it in the drug treatment program, but the program would not take him because he was trans.
Homeless women clients complained they couldn’t go into the homeless shelter system because they would be placed at a men’s intake shelter where they knew they would be targeted with violence. Because they could not go into an intake shelter, they would not be able to get into other housing…