This is the fourth installment of an ongoing series about the Republican Party’s embrace of fascism as a political strategy. Click the hyperlinks to read parts one, two, and three.
One central component of fascism is the targeting of an “othered” population for either harassment or outright extinction. The reason the Republican Party’s embrace of anti-transgender politics reeks of fascism is because it follows the Nazi playbook almost to the letter.
Hitler’s first anti-LGBTQ pogrom
In the 1920s, Weimar Germany – particularly Berlin – was the epicenter of LGBTQ culture in Europe, according to the Museum of Jewish Heritage. There were more than two dozen LGBTQ publications prior to Hitler’s rise to power, including the magazine Das 3 Geschlecht, or “the Third Sex,” which was specifically for the transgender community. But after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he made the isolation of the LGBTQ community a central issue.
According to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Hitler’s troops looted and burned Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science – a prominent scientific landmark for the LGBTQ community – just days after he was elected. The remaining members of Germany’s LGBTQ population that didn’t flee or enter into heterosexual marriages in an attempt to conform to the new regime faced a horrific fate:
The police established lists of homosexually active persons. Significant numbers of gay men were arrested, of whom an estimated 50,000 received severe jail sentences in brutal conditions. Most homosexuals were sent to police prisons, rather than concentration camps, where they were exposed to inhumane treatment. There they could be subjected to hard labour and torture, or they were experimented upon or executed.
An estimated 10-15,000 men who were accused of homosexuality were deported to concentration camps. Most died in the camps, often from exhaustion. Many were castrated and some subjected to gruesome medical experiments. Collective murder actions were undertaken against gay detainees, exterminating hundreds at a time.
America inspired the Nazi regime’s cruelty
The extreme cruelty of Hitler’s regime was unmatched in Europe, though the Nazi regime in fact learned how to carry out tightly organized violence against marginalized populations from the United States. As Ira Katznelson wrote in The Atlantic, Hitler was heavily influenced not only by Jim Crow-era policies in the United States that relegated Black people to second-class citizen status, but by the United States’ history of oppressing Native Americans and Asian immigrants as well.
“As race law’s global leader, [author James Q.] Whitman stresses, America provided the most obvious point of reference for the September 1933 Preußische Denkschrift, the Prussian Memorandum, written by a legal team that included Roland Freisler, soon to emerge as the remarkably cruel president of the Nazi People’s Court,” Katznelson wrote. “American precedents also informed other crucial Nazi texts, including the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the future governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, who was later hung at Nuremberg.
“A pivotal essay in that volume, Herbert Kier’s recommendations for race legislation, devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—which went beyond segregation to include rules governing American Indians, citizenship criteria for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans as well as African Americans, immigration regulations, and prohibitions against miscegenation in some 30 states,” Katznelson continued. “No other country, not even South Africa, possessed a comparably developed set of relevant laws.”
This context is important to understanding America’s current anti-trans culture war politics: The institutional “othering” of marginalized populations is not a German invention, but an American one. When fascist politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene incite hatred against undocumented immigrants by invoking the so-called “Great Replacement” theory often propagated by white supremacists, they’re harkening back to America’s oldest traditions. And as the most recent wave of anti-trans bigotry has showed, they’re refining them to prime their base for an entirely new wave of institutionalized cruelty.
Transgender Americans: The GOP’s new political punching bag
The Republican Party successfully maintained control of the White House and both houses of Congress after the 2004 presidential election, which was largely defined by anti-gay sentiment (former President George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign manager Ken Mehlman would later come out as gay in a 2010 interview). Today’s GOP is utilizing a similar culture war playbook in an attempt to win back both houses of Congress, and in doing so, is singling out a population of millions of Americans for institutionalized oppression.
As author Brynn Tannehill documented in a 2021 Twitter thread, the Republican Party pivoted from homophobia to transphobia after the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision that effectively legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. The anti-LGBTQ evangelical group Family Research Council published a 2015 memo outlining its goals for transgender Americans, which included denying legal recognition, no gender-affirming healthcare, and advocating for harmful conversion therapy, which has been proven to lead to higher rates of suicide attempts.
To kickstart this campaign, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) – a far-right evangelical lobby – led the charge in state legislatures in the fight to pass so-called “bathroom bills” that force transgender Americans to use the bathroom associated with their biological sex. However, the backlash from one such bathroom bill in North Carolina resulted in then-Republican Governor Pat McCrory losing his re-election bid in 2016, even as Donald Trump won the state in the presidential election.
The bathroom bill push evolved into a more determined effort to target transgender children, and by 2020, religious conservatives published a comprehensive plan to pass laws at the state level requiring transgender kids be publicly outed, prohibiting them from participating in school sports, limiting their bathroom choices, and, of course, promoting conversion therapy. Some states took these laws to draconian levels, like Texas, where parents can be prosecuted for providing gender-affirming healthcare for their transgender children.
The GOP’s stochastic terror campaign against the trans community
The organized persecution of the transgender community has been exacerbated by both traditional and social media, taking anti-trans hatred to terrifying new lows, sometimes with deadly consequences. In April of this year, media watchdog group Media Matters for America noted that Fox News had aired a whopping 170 segments about the transgender community in just three weeks. This has been a pattern: In 2021, the organization reported that the network aired 86 segments about trans people in the two months after President Biden’s inauguration. This is despite transgender Americans aged 13 and up making up just one half of one percent of the US population.
Tucker Carlson – Fox News’ most-watched primetime pundit – has made the transgender population one of his favorite targets. As Brynn Tannehill wrote in March, Carlson called both the existence and tolerance of transgender individuals a threat to “the perpetuation of the species.” This is also a sentiment echoed by popular podcaster Joe Rogan and conservative icon Jordan Peterson, who once implied that fascism was a natural response to the acceptance of the trans community.
On social media, the Twitter account LibsofTikTok, which is run by former realtor-turned-anti-LGBTQ activist Chaya Raichik, takes transphobia to a new level. Earlier this year, Raichik baselessly suggested various children’s hospitals in Omaha, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Washington, DC were performing hysterectomies on minors (they weren’t), which resulted in doctors getting death threats, and in one case, the Boston Children’s Hospital having to evacuate due to a bomb threat.
Inciting others to commit acts of terror is known as “stochastic terrorism,” and 2021 was the deadliest year on record for trans people – many of whom may have been victims of stochastic terrorism. According to LGBTQ advocacy organization Human Rights Campaign (HRC), there were more than 50 murders of transgender and gender non-conforming people across the US last year, which was the highest number since HRC started tracking anti-trans murders in 2013.
“The rights of LGBTQ people — and especially transgender people — across the country are being systematically threatened and undermined by national anti-LGBTQ groups coordinating with anti-equality lawmakers to wage an unprecedented war on the LGBTQ community,” HRC president Alphonso David stated. “This crisis cannot be ignored and necessitates concrete action from all those with the ability to speak out.”
While it may be tempting to ignore the GOP’s assault on transgender rights and instead focus on so-called “kitchen table issues” like wages, taxes, and healthcare, that would be a betrayal of solidarity. We should all be rightfully alarmed at both the severity of the attack itself, along with the fact that those carrying it out are so open about their intentions. Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous Holocaust poem is a profound reminder of the importance of solidarity in the face of a rising fascist threat:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, for I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, for I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, for I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Carl Gibson is a freelance journalist and columnist whose work has been published in CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, Barron’s, Business Insider, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Twitter @crgibs.
