From The Forward: https://forward.com/opinion/412456/the-anti-trans-nuremberg-laws-are-upon-us/
By S. Bear Bergman
October 22, 2018
When I came out in 1990 as a fifteen-year-old queer (my gender-nonconforming nature required no announcement) and promptly started being public about it, my father sat me down for a talk.
My father, who attended a Hillel weekend in college that was surrounded by jeering anti-Semites from which he had to be snuck out a back door, whose own father never, ever spoke about his much-decorated service in World War II, sat me down and said: “If you do this, they will know about you forever. You will never be able to blend in and stay safe.”
I sat with that, for a moment.
It would have been characteristic of both fifteen-year-olds in general and me in particular to dismiss it out of hand. I took it seriously, though, after six summers at Camp Kinder Ring, sharing space with and being taught by Holocaust survivors, after seeing the versions of my family tree with the legend “all names in italics killed during the Shoah,” at the bottom.
“That’s okay,” I told my father in that food court, after an interval. “If we get to that point, you know I won’t be quiet anyway.”
He nodded quietly, as proud as he was resigned.
We are at the point.
The Trump regime’s memo, which purports to be a clarification of the definition of gender, is in fact a full-scale attack on the existence of transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer people. It proposes that a person’s gender shall be based on their assigned sex at birth, and that no remedy but genetic testing shall be sufficient to change that assessment.
Besides the fact that the memo conflates sex and gender as one thing (they’re not) and appears to have no sense of how many chromosomal variations of sex there actually are (5 are fairly common, with at least 4 others known), it’s also written to create harm for any American who is transgender.
The memo is, at the base, mean.
The entire structure is designed to exclude anyone who is trans from legal protection or recourse against discrimination.
Continue reading at: https://forward.com/opinion/412456/the-anti-trans-nuremberg-laws-are-upon-us/
Women Born Transsexual 