Genocidal logic and political action

Most times you can’t hear them talk — other times you can:

I don’t understand trans issues or trans identity. The whole phenomenon is fundamentally opaque to me, in a way that most other issues involving marginalized social identities are not, or at least I don’t think so. In other words, I have trouble conceptualizing what it means to feel that one’s fundamental identity in terms of gender is radically incongruent with one’s socially assigned gender, because I’ve never had any sense of having any sort of gender identity. (I understand this is probably an example of fish don’t feel wet phenomenon).

The point of this windup is that I don’t have strong or in many cases any opinions on various academic controversies surrounding what gender dysphoria is, how or if it should be dealt with as a medical issue, how it intersects with feminist theory and practice, etc. etc. etc.

But all of that is completely irrelevant to the ability to recognize that the kind of thing represented by this letter is truly monstrous and extraordinarily dangerous. When the state tells a certain class of people that their fundamental sense of self is not recognized as legitimate by the polity as a whole, and that this particular identity is going to be eliminated as a result, there’s a word for that.

The stated position of the Trumpist Republican party toward trans identity is fundamentally eliminationist, and therefore genocidal by definition. Doing what one can to resist this is not something that should be up for negotiation for non-fascists.