For all the talking heads still “asking questions” and demonstrating absolute ignorance, if not bad faith, after all these years, here are some very tangible takes as to why bathroom bans means genocide.
If people are to use exclusively the restrooms that match their assigned at birth sex, then all people must be the sex that they are perceived to be. Trans advocates were not paranoid enough to imagine that the right wants to wipe trans people out of public life to such a degree, that no ambiguity about a person’s sex can further be possible, except for those “extremely rare genetic accidents” Ben Shapiro keeps talking about. Public erasure, however, of transgender and gender-nonconforming people amounts to the enforcement of cisgenderism by a state that defines sex as a natural binary with no exceptions, and no behavioral, nor performative, nor psychological deviations from the norm. (From my previous essay on this.)
The rest of this post comes from the real experts on the topic, the Lemkin institute for genocide prevention.
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Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice
Genocidal ideologies are ideologies that deny or seek to erase the existence of a specific group because of the supposed threat it poses to the holders of the ideology.
Focusing primarily on the imagined threat posed by transgender women, gender critical ideologues believe that transgender women are in fact men who are seeking to dominate cisgender women (women whose sense of self corresponds with their birth sex) by impersonating them and thereby gaining access to women’s bathrooms, women’s locker rooms, women’s sports teams, and other women’s spaces.
Transgender women are represented as stealth border crossers who seek to defile the purity of cisgender women, much as Tutsi women were viewed in Hutu Power ideology and Jewish men in Nazi antisemitism.
Like the religious targets of genocidal violence, trans people are often described as somehow polluted, sinful, or against God.
A fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide.
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Red Flag Alert on Anti-Trans and Intersex Rights in the UK
Since the ruling, “birth sex,” “biological sex,” and “natal sex” have all been used interchangeably, ignoring the multiple relevant components of biological sex and the existence of intersex people. Analysts immediately warned that the decision could be used to render single sex spaces off limits for trans people, including hospital wards, sports, and domestic violence shelters. For a group especially vulnerable to domestic violence, exclusion from specialised shelters is nothing short of cruel and could, in some cases, prove a death sentence. Transgender and intersex people may find themselves excluded not only from spaces of their current sex but also from spaces for their sex assigned at birth. Trans men would find themselves excluded from both male spaces on the basis of their assigned sex at birth, and female spaces if they are deemed to look too much like men.
The EHRC has, in the past few years, seemed to become a lobby group for erasing the rights of intersex and trans people on the basis of gender critical views. This has been explicitly confirmed by leader of the UK’s Official Opposition Kemi Badenoch. Following the UKSC Ruling, the EHRC erased decades of established practice protecting transgender and intersex people by taking a restrictive interpretation of the ruling in their interim guidance and refusing to consider the welfare of intersex or transgender people. The guidance dictates that anyone who is not binarily male or female is excluded from single sex spaces, ranging from public toilets to groups such as a single-gender choir. This interim guidance has been noted by the Good Law Project to be either wrong in law or a breach of human rights.
Those who have transitioned will be forced to choose between being someone who is either excluded from society or who lives a criminalised life shrouded in secrecy. If the law in the UK makes people living beyond sex and gender binaries second-class citizens, it will also lay the groundwork for increased genital mutilation of intersex infants and conversion therapy of transgender people.
All of the actions described above fit neatly into the 9th Pattern of Genocide: “Denial and/or Prevention of Identity.” As we have repeatedly stated over the years, genocide does not only manifest in the killing of an entire group. In the case of trans and intersex people, genocide is often perpetrated by making it impossible for individuals to exist as their true selves.
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Red Flag Alert for Genocide - USA
An apparently committed transphobe like Knowles may believe that transgender people are not real and are instead misled by something called “transgenderism,” so that by eradicating “transgenderism” he would not be eradicating a real identity. To that line of thought we can only note that the arrogance of determining which identities are real and not real, and therefore which identities can be slated for elimination, is already a giant step in the direction of genocide. Moreover, once an identity is determined to be illegitimate, criminal, and threatening, the killing of people with that identity is never far behind.
The Lemkin Institute reminds American voters and legislators that “the gender critical movement is a totalitarian and genocidal social force that targets not just transgender people, but also all the institutions of democracy that protect individual and collective human rights,”
Anti-trans legislation, anti-trans organizations, and the anti-trans movement must be fought forcefully in the name of saving lives as well as securing democratic institutions from the accelerating threat of fascism in the United States.
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Red Flag Alert 2 for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States
The anti-trans movement in the US has made it clear that it will not stop at banning gender affirming care for children. Emboldened by this Supreme Court decision, they will continue their attempts to restrict gender affirming care for adults as well. Furthermore, they will ramp up their attempts to erase trans identity through various non-medical policies, including bathroom bans, bans on conversations related to gender in schools, preventing schools and workplaces from using pronouns or names that don’t align with a person’s sex at birth, banning trans athletes from competition, and criminalizing dressing as a gender other than the one assigned at birth.
The Lemkin Institute reminds people that the genocidal process involves far more than just mass murder. Most genocidal processes involve complex policies aimed at actively and systematically obstructing an identity from manifesting itself within the social world through laws, decrees, speech acts, and practices enacted by groups in power. As a result of these acts, people within a threatened community cannot live publicly as who they are and community identity development becomes impossible.
Given that leaders in the anti-trans movement view trans people as internal enemies and U.S. President Donald Trump has identified them a national security threat, the recent Supreme Court decision can be seen as part of a much larger internal cleansing operation aimed at creating a white, heterosexual, cisgender ethnostate
According to a commentator, TERFs lobbied UK Gov to stop companies from building gender neutral toilets
The full comment was this:
So this is not just a clerical ramification, but a genocidal move. See my other comment.