The Trump administration is trying to legislate trans people out of existence | Judith Levine

On Thursday, when Robert F Kennedy Jr announced an effort to block medical treatments for transgender youth, he used the term “sex-rejecting procedures” in place of “gender-affirming care”.

And where transgender advocates and healthcare providers view puberty blockers, hormones and (in rare cases) surgical interventions as suicide prevention measures, the health secretary claimed that these “procedures” will do the opposite: “rob children of their futures.”

Under his proposals, hospitals that provide transgender care to minors would lose federal funding, including Medicaid.

In language as in policy, Kennedy is negating everything, and everyone, trans.

Not content to harm transgender youth by denying medical care, however, the Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on nonmedical products like stretchy garments and silicon prostheses.

In attempting to regulate away commerce in gender-affirming garments and prostheses, it is attempting to regulate away transgender people.

On Wednesday, the FDA sent warning letters to a dozen purveyors of chest binders, underwear for tucking fleshly genitals or packing artificial ones, and fake breasts and penises. The letters charge the businesses, whose names – ShapeShifter Apparel, GenderBender LLC, TomboyX – indicate the nature of their wares, with neglecting to register these products as “medical devices”. “Failure to adequately address this matter may result in regulatory action being initiated by the FDA without further notice,” the letters warn. “These actions include, but are not limited to, seizure and injunction.”

The FDA has a lot of nerve. After all, its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, is helmed by a man who has promoted fake “cures” for autism, such as chelation, a treatment for heavy metal poisoning that killed a child this year. To head autism and vaccine “research”, Kennedy has appointed the charlatan David Geier, who, with his father, has published studies backing the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. To run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, he has named Mehmet Oz, who has promoted quack treatments like green coffee bean extract and raspberry ketones for weight loss.

This intensified federal regulation piles on more pain for transgender people, a crusade Trump launched on his first day in office with the executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”. The order requires the federal government to recognize only two immutable sexes – male and female – and to issue identity documents such as passports in accordance with that edict. Congress is collaborating: a bill passed by the House of Representatives on Wednesday would make providing transgender care a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

As the homeland security agency is doing to immigrants, HHS is attempting to disappear its own designated undesirables. But more than driving people into hiding or sending them to undisclosed detention sites, the Trump administration believes it can legislate and regulate transgender and nonbinary people out of existence.

The president’s definition of acceptable humanity is limited. If he had his way, it seems, all women would be white and blonde.

But like women who seek to end their pregnancies in states and countries where abortion is illegal, transgender people will continue to seek hormones and surgery – only they will be forced to do so through black markets and unlicensed providers, risking illness, impairment and death. Transmasculine people who don’t get top surgery will bind their breasts; transfeminine people will tuck their bits. If they want comfort and style, they’ll pay more for it.

Criminalization does not stop people from doing all they can to exercise the most fundamental human right: bodily autonomy. It just makes doing so more perilous.

Transgender and nonbinary people have always existed and will continue to exist. They may be driven underground, but they will not disappear. The Trump administration knows it cannot eliminate people whose genders do not match their birth certificates. So instead, it will use any means it finds necessary to do what it does best: make them suffer.

• Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism