As I write this post, the president of the United States deployed 2000 National Guard troops to the city of LA to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers performing detainment and deportation raids that have resulted in over 100 arrests in the last 2 days. This was against the wishes of the state of California government and the LA city government. There will be no sanctuary cities in the second Trump administration and the only thing slowing ICE down is direct protest in the streets.
I have kinda, sorta, started to touch on how the Trump administration’s crack down on immigration connects with the values of patriarchal misogyny (PM) and Transphobia in post 47 0f 100, but after some conversations with awesome radical folks here in Seattle, I want to come back to talking about the connection between Transphobia and Anti-immigration sentiment within the framework of patriarchal misogyny being used by the Trump administration, because these have been 2 of the most successful rhetorical tools he has used to galvanize his base and win elections in particular counties and states that have swung federal congressional elections.
Maybe some of my readers might question whether it really makes sense to try to draw a connection between transphobia and the xenophobia of anti-immigrant rhetoric, as the immigrant community and the trans community are often depicted as being antagonistic to each other in media that paints immigrants as ardently religious and anti-LGBTQIA2S+, and the trans community as both predominantly white and fairly well off economically. In the few months of organizing and anti-authoritarian/anti-capitalist community building I have done here in Seattle, I have seen some tension in who will show up to events, actions and demonstrations centered around immigrant rights and safety and trans folks rights and safety, and I think it is natural for people to have specific issues and concerns that motivate them to action. However, within a PM framework, especially the one at the heart of 2nd term Trumpism, I think it is absolutely vital to understand where the attack on trans people and the attack on immigrant communities is intersecting and how they can be countered simultaneously.
In post 48 of 100, I talked about how hierarchies require essentializing value traits into the people these hierarchies are meant to control. This is why the very possibility of trans identity is an attack on patriarchy. Because patriarchy cannot exist if gender identity is any kind of flexible or fluid in nature. The authority of men over women has to be seen as fundamental or else it is exposed as arbitrary. In other words, when the border between masculinity and femininity becomes porous, the privileges and authority that comes with being identified as a man become vulnerable to critique and attack in ways that don’t happen when everyone believes that gender is fixed and based upon innate traits.
National identity occupies a much more similar place to gender than gets talked about in mainstream media, or even radical/academic criticism. Especially for white US Americans, our national identity is a deeply rooted building block of personal identity that feeds into everything from what language we think and speak in, what defines our “inalienable rights,” and thus what power and privilege we are entitled just by being born here. Perhaps most US citizens acknowledge that citizenship and national identity are a little more flexible than they think of gender, but making sure that national identity remains a very restrictive container for power and authority is absolutely why people like Stephan Miller, have risen so prominently in the Trump administration.
To be an immigrant is, inherently, to transgress the borders of national identity. For some, like the wealthy, identity categories that are used to control and enforce hierarchies have always been more fluid than they are for others, and you see this flaunted in ideas like Trump’s Gold Card Visa. But for pretty much everyone else, especially those trying to cross borders for reasons of survival and obtaining the most basic opportunities of living in a different nation, nation states lean heavily towards being restrictive about opening up the category of “citizen” to anyone who might jeopardize the power and privilege that having that national identity currently bestows. National identity tends not to be as binary as gender identity, as in people don’t usually immediate dismiss the possibility of being a dual citizen, or people changing citizenship multiple times over the course of their lives, but people do tend to lose their minds as soon as they start to think that just about anyone could come and start claiming the same national identity as them, infringing upon their access to the limited powers and privileges being a citizen in that country entails.
All of this tends to be a bit nebulous for most people in their daily lives, and thus easily ignored unless either their national identity or gender identity become something of concern to the people with authority in the immediate world around them, but authoritarian governments, like Trumpism, immediate draw this into much more real and practically situated terms when they do things like declare English to be the official language of the United States and try to create an essentialist definition of gender in an executive order. They absolutely know that creating legal barriers that force people into accepting essentialist identity categories is the first and most important step in establishing authoritarian control over society. The way they want to accomplish that is to label the people who step outside these essentialist categories of identity as criminal, not just in their actions, but in their very act of existing.
There is much more to say about these essentialist categories of identity and authoritarianism in future posts, like about why Trump relied on race baiting much more in his first term than he has thus far in the second term, and how much of that has to do with political expediency and how much his base already was looking at black people as inherently existing as criminals, but I think that will derail this specific conversation about the intersection of national identity (which also includes much more complicated racial components of identity than I talked about in this post) and gender identity.
So as the Trump administration promises to crack down more on sanctuary cities that are protecting immigrants and refusing to look at undocumented people as inherent criminals and threats to the national identity of US citizen, I hope people realize that the work of standing up to that repression and violence is the work of confronting patriarchal misogyny and transphobia at the same time. Because who we are is defined and constructed by the society around us and if we let authoritarians have that power—of defining what are safe and protected identities under the law and which are criminalized and not worthy of protection under the law, then the other world that could still yet be is already lost.