National
U.S. in midst of ‘genocidal process against trans people’: study
Attacks rooted in Nazi ideology’s views on gender
Earlier this week, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security issued a haunting warning. Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, president of the Lemkin Institute, stated that the U.S. is in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.” Dr. Gregory Santon, former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, flags “a hardening of categories” surrounding gender in a “totalitarian” way.
Stanton argues that this is rooted in Nazi ideology’s surrounding gender — this same regime that killed many LGBTQIA individuals in the name of a natural “binary.” As Von Joeden-Forgey said, the queer community, alongside other “minority groups, tends to be a kind of canary in the coal mine.”
In his first year in office, Trump and his Cabinet’s anti-trans rhetoric has only intensified, with a report released late September by journalist Ken Klippenstein in which national security officers leaked that the FBI is planning to classify trans people as “extremists.” By classifying trans people as “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” far-right groups would have more “political (and media) cover,” as Abby Monteil reports for them, for anti-trans violence and legislation.
While the news is terrifying, it’s not unprecedented – the fight against trans rights and classification of trans people as violent extremists was included in Project 2025, and in the past several weeks, far-right leaders’ transphobic campaign has expanded: boycotting Netflix to pressure the platform to remove trans characters, leveraging anti-trans attack ads in the Virginia governor’s race and banning professors from acknowledging that trans people exist. In fact last month, two Republican members of Congress called for the institutionalization of trans people.
It’s a dangerous escalation of transphobic violence that the Human Rights Campaign has classified as an epidemic. According to an Everytown for Gun Safety report published in 2020, the number of trans people murdered in the U.S. almost doubled between 2017 and 2021. According to data released by the Gun Safety report from February 2024, 34 percent of gun homicides of trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive people remain unsolved.
As Tori Cooper, director of Community Engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative for the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, this violence serves a purpose. “The hate toward transgender and gender expansive community members is fueled by disinformation, rhetoric and ideology that treats our community as political pawns ignoring the fact that we reserve the opportunity to live our lives full without fear of harm or death,” Cooper said.
“The genocidal process,” Von Joeden-Forgey said, “is really about destroying identities, destroying groups through all sorts of means.” And just like the Nazi regime, former genocide researcher Haley Brown said, the Trump administration is fueling conspiracy theories surrounding “cultural Marixsm” — the claim that leftists, feminists, Marxists, and queer people are trying to destroy western civilization. This term, Brown states, was borrowed directly from the Nazi’s conspiracies surrounding “Cultural Bolshevism.”
As Brown explains, historians are just beginning to research the Nazis’ anti-trans violence, but what they are finding reveals a terrifying pattern wherein trans people are stripped of their identification documents, arrested and assaulted, and outright killed.
Before World War II, Germany – especially Berlin – was a hub for transgender communities and culture. In 1919, Dr. Magnus Hirschfield, a Jewish gay sexologist and doctor, founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexual Science. The Institute was groundbreaking for offering some of the first modern gender-affirming healthcare, with a trans-affirming clinic and performing some of the first gender-affirming surgeries in the 1930s for trans women Dora Richter and Lili Elbe.
Researchers at the institute coined the term “trassexualism” in 1923, which while outdated now, was the first modern term that Dr. Hirschfield used when working with Berlin police to acquire “transvestite passes” for his patients to help them avoid arrest under public nuisance and decency laws. During the Weimar Republic, trans people could also change their names although their options were limited. In Berlin, queer press flourished after World War I along with a number of clubs welcoming gay, lesbian and trans clientele, including Eldorado, which featured trans performers on stage.
But as Hitler rose to power, trans people were targeted. In 1933, Nazi youth and members of the Sturmabteilung ransacked the institute, stealing and burning books – one of the first book burnings of the Nazi regime. German police stopped recognizing the “transvestite” passes and issuing new ones, and under Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual relationships with men, trans women (who were misgendered by the police) were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
As the Lemkin Intsitute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security wrote in a statement:
“The Nazis, like other genocidal groups, believed that national strength and existential
power could only be achieved through an imposition of a strict gender binary within the racially pure ‘national community.’ A fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide.”
History professor Laurie Marhoefer wrote for The Conversation that while trans people were targeted, there was not extensive discussion of them by the regime. But there was evidence of the transphobia behind the regime’s violence, specifically in Hermann Ferdinand Voss’s 1938 book “Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Transvestitismus.”Voss noted that during the Nazi regime, trans people could and were arrested and sent to concentration camps where they underwent forced medical experimentation (including conversion therapy and castration) and died in the gas chambers.
While there is growing recognition that gay, bisexual, and lesbian individuals were targeted during the Holocaust, few know about the trans genocide through which trans individuals were arrested, underwent forced castration and conversion therapy, and were outright killed alongside gay, lesbian, disabled and Jewish individuals in concentration camps. Historians are just beginning to undertake this research, writes Marhoefer, and to delve further into the complex racial hierarchies that affected how trans people were treated.
As Zavier Nunn writes for Past & Present, trans people of “Aryan” racial status and those not considered to be homosexuals were sometimes spared from the worst violence and outright murder. Depending on their skills, they could even be considered for rehabilitation into the Volksgemeinschaft, or Nazi utopian community. As Nunn highlights, trans violence was much more nuanced and individualized and should be explored separately from violence against gay and lesbian individuals during the Holocaust.
Marhoefer’s research of violence against trans women, as recorded in police files (as is the persecution of gay and lesbian individuals), is groundbreaking but rare. He gave a talk at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in 2023, shortly after a 2022 civil lawsuit about denial that trans people were victims of the Holocaust. The German court recognized that trans people were victimized and killed by the Nazi regime, but in the United States, there is still a hesitancy by the wider LGBTQ community and leftist groups to acknowledge that we are living during a time of anti-trans violence, that trans people are being used as political scapegoats in order to distract from real problems of accountability and transparency around government policy.
As anti-trans legislation escalates, it’s important to remember and call out how trans violence is not only a feminist issue, it’s a human rights one as well. While Shannon Fyfe argues that the current campaigns against trans people may not fit the traditional legal definition of a genocide, the destruction and denial of life saving care, access to public spaces, and escalating violence is still immensely devastating.
Kaamya Sharma also notes that the term “genocide” has deep geo-political implications. As she explained, “western organisations are, historically and today, apathetic to the actual lives of people in the Global South, and put moral posturing above Brown and Black lives,” so the choice to use “genocide” is a loaded one. But as the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security writes in the same statement: “The ideological constructs of transgender women promoted by gender critical ideologues are particularly genocidal. They share many features in common with other, better known, genocidal ideologies. Transgender women are represented as stealth border crosses 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.”
Trans people are not extremists, nor are they grooming children or threatening the fabric of American identity – they are human beings for whom (like all of us) gender affirming care is lifesaving. As we remember the trans lives lost decades ago and those lost this year to transphobic violence, knowing this history is the only way to stop its rewriting.
Vice President JD Vance and his wife, second lady Usha Vance, will visit Hungary next week.
An announcement the White House released on Thursday said the Vances will be in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, from April 7-8.
JD Vance “will hold bilateral meetings with” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The announcement further indicates the vice president “will also deliver remarks on the rich partnership between the United States and Hungary.”
The Vances will travel to Hungary less than a week before the country’s parliamentary elections take place on April 12.
Orbán, who has been in office since 2010, and his Fidesz-KDNP coalition government have faced widespread criticism over its anti-LGBTQ crackdown.
The Associated Press notes polls indicate Orbán is trailing Péter Magyar and his center-right Tisza party.
President Donald Trump removed Attorney General Pam Bondi from her post Thursday, following growing criticism over how she and the Department of Justice handled a range of issues, including matters related to sex offender and Trump ally Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump announced Bondi’s removal on Truth Social, where he also said Todd Blanche will serve as acting head of the Justice Department.
“Pam Bondi is a great American patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my attorney general over the past year,” Trump wrote on the platform. “Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown on crime across our country, with murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900.”
Trump was seen as recently as Wednesday with the now-former attorney general at a Supreme Court hearing on citizenship.
The decision contrasts with Trump’s previous public praise of Bondi, the 87th U.S. attorney general and former 37th attorney general of Florida, who served in that role from 2011-2019 before joining the Trump-Vance administration. He has frequently lauded her loyalty and said he speaks with her often. Bondi was also one of president’s defense lawyers during his first impeachment trial.
Privately, however, Trump had grown frustrated that Bondi was not “moving quickly enough” to prosecute critics and political adversaries he wanted to face criminal charges, according to multiple sources. The New York Times reported that her inability to charge former FBI Director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James with any crimes is a large factor in the president’s choice to fire her from the government’s primary law enforcement agency.
The move comes as Trump has sought to minimize public turmoil within his administration, avoiding the perception of a revolving-door Cabinet that defined his first term.
Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from New York who unsuccessfully ran for governor, has emerged as a leading contender to lead the Justice Department. He has been one of Trump’s most reliable allies.
“He’s our secret weapon,” Trump said of Zeldin in February during a White House event promoting the coal industry, adding, “He’s getting those approvals done in record-setting time.”
Bondi has also growing faced scrutiny from Congress.
The House Oversight Committee recently subpoenaed her to testify about the department’s handling of certain files, where she declined to answer key questions during a contentious House Judiciary Committee hearing in February.
The Tampa native has a long history of opposing LGBTQ rights through her roles in government. As Florida attorney general, she fought against the legalization of same-sex marriage, arguing it would cause “serious public harm,” pushing forward a legal battle that cost taxpayers nearly half a million dollars. She also asked the Florida Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling that found the state’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional.
More recently, Bondi established a “Title IX Special Investigations Team” within the Justice Department focused on restricting transgender women and girls from participating in women’s and girls’ sports teams and accessing facilities aligned with their gender identity. She also told Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to turn over the medical records of anyone under 19 who received gender-affirming care.
Her removal follows Trump’s decision last month to oust another controversial female Cabinet figure, Kristi Noem.
The White House
VIDEO: Gay journalist detained for booing Trumps at ‘Chicago’ opening night
Eugene Ramirez booed first family at Kennedy Center
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attended the opening night of “Chicago” at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Tuesday. They were greeted by a mix of cheers, applause, and some audible boos.
Among them was Eugene Ramirez, a gay Washington resident, who later shared his account of the night after being briefly detained by security for booing the president and giving a thumbs-down gesture — an expression of what many would call a textbook definition of constitutionally protected speech to criticize the government.
Ramirez attended the opening night performance with a group of friends, hoping to catch a final show before the center undergoes two years of major changes under Trump oversight. The musical, based on a 1926 play of the same name, has become synonymous with Broadway success.
With music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Ebb and Bob Fosse, “Chicago” has cemented itself as a cultural staple — known for its signature Fosse choreography, stripped-down staging, and sleek, campy aesthetic. The story follows Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, women who murder their husbands but — with the help of the manipulative, charismatic, and narcissistic attorney Billy Flynn — walk away scot-free.
It remains the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, and its 2002 film adaptation famously won the Academy Award for Best Picture. On this night, however, the production also became the backdrop for a very modern moment of political protest.
“I accompanied five friends to opening night of ‘Chicago’, as a way to enjoy a final performance in the Kennedy Center as we know it,” Ramirez began to recount to the Washington Blade, describing the moment his group settled into their seats inside the ornate Opera House theater.
Just before the performance began, the twice impeached president and first lady appeared in the balcony box, drawing immediate attention from the audience below. Theatergoers stood, cheered, clapped, and waved, while Ramirez made a different choice.
While accounts of the crowd’s reaction have varied, Ramirez said his response was intentional, immediate, and within his rights. Moments after booing and giving a thumbs-down while recording on his iPhone, security intervened.
The video of Ramirez booing the Trump’s is here:
“Within moments, the director [of security] and another guard approached and escorted me to a side area where several other security guards were waiting,” he said. “I was detained until everyone was seated and the lights dimmed.”
As he was escorted away, Ramirez said his instincts as a journalist kicked in. A former lead anchor for Sinclair’s national evening news broadcast, he said the situation immediately felt off — or more aptly put — as if he could see the strings being pulled from someone attempting to control the narrative.
“Journalism is a vocation, not just a job. I immediately knew there wasn’t just an uncomfortable interaction with security,” he said. “The Kennedy Center is a federally funded cultural institution, and being questioned about speech related to the president in that setting felt like something the public should know about.”
Ramirez explained the difference between a standard visit by a public official and this performance: the president’s appearance wasn’t just ceremonial; it was very clearly a media moment.
“The White House press pool was there, and it was clear this was an effort to manage the president’s image in the media,” Ramirez continued. “The irony was not lost on me that this was happening on opening night of ‘Chicago’, a musical about manipulating the press to shape public perception.”
According to Ramirez, the explanation he received from Kennedy Center Director of Safety and Security Karles C. Jackson Sr., was brief, but illuminating.
“He said, ‘they don’t want booing,’ and even called out my thumbs-down gesture. He never clarified who ‘they’ were, but whether it was the administration or the Kennedy Center, the distinction felt meaningless,” he explained. “Mr. Jackson ultimately told me he was just trying to do his job, shook my hand, and allowed me to return to my seat once the lights dimmed and the overture started playing.”
Ramirez said he didn’t blame the guard individually, noting the broader context of the Kennedy Center’s uncertain future and the pressures staff were under.
“With the center closing in the coming months, some of these security guards being pressured to restrict our freedom of speech may only have a few weeks of work left.”
He believes the decision to remove him was driven less by disruption than optics, particularly given the presence of the press.
“It was very clearly about protection — whether protecting the president from visible dissent, or his image before the media present. There was no disruption as almost everyone was standing and reacting loudly to the arrival of the president and first lady, with cheers, applause, and hand gestures. The difference was that my reaction, unlike most, was negative.”
Drawing on his experience covering public officials, Ramirez said the incident felt more about controlling perception than security.
“Usually, law enforcement may monitor or intervene if there’s a disruption, but here there was no disruption at all. Simply expressing dissent in a public, cultural space drew the attention of security. It made it feel less like a matter of decorum and more like an effort to control the narrative around the president,” he said. “It’s about what happens when dissent is treated as disruption rather than a right.”
“The show hadn’t started. I threatened no one. Billy Flynn would have approved of the optics. The rest of us should be paying attention.”
Ramirez framed the incident as part of a broader constitutional concern, one that is plaguing the Trump-Vance administration as they continue to reject rules and normalcy set forth by other reserved presidents.
“Being singled out by security at a federally funded institution for expressing dissent shouldn’t be brushed off; it undermines the First Amendment,” he said, looking at it slightly distanced from it now. “Being of Cuban heritage, and a journalist, it’s a right I’m not willing to give up readily.”
“Publicly funded cultural institutions should allow visible dissent, even in politically charged moments,” he added. “Of course, I understand the need to manage disruptions during a performance, but that was not the case here.”
The themes of “Chicago”, a long-running satire about media manipulation and public perception, added another layer of irony to the experience, Ramirez explained.
“The satire truly leapt off the stage! A show about controlling the narrative, manipulating the press, and covering up truths by leaning on showmanship and distractions. The show is decades old, but could’ve been written today. We’re being razzle-dazzled daily and it’s getting harder to tell fact from fiction, no matter where you get your news.”
He, being gay, also acknowledged how hard it must have been for the performers on stage, assuming that at least some in the cast were also members of the LGBTQ community — and artists — two things Trump doesn’t always get along with.
“It was not lost on me that many of the actors on that stage, that the president and first lady presumably applauded, are members of the LGBTQ community which this administration has rolled back protections for under the guise of religious liberty and free speech, resulting in blatant discrimination.”
He pointed to a particular number that felt surreal given the circumstances.
“Its ‘Razzle Dazzle’ number celebrates keeping audiences off balance; at its climax, a massive American flag descends as the song celebrates blinding audiences to what is real. Watching that scene after being detained for a thumbs-down was surreal.”
Ramirez said the show’s closing lines were especially sharp given the presidential audience and what he just experienced.
“At the end of the show,
Velma says: ‘You know, a lot of people have lost faith in America.’
Roxie replies: ‘And for what America stands for.’
Velma: ‘But we are the living examples of what a wonderful country this is.’
Roxie: ‘So we’d just like to say thank you and God bless you.’
They had both just gotten away with murder!”
His closing lines, however, were a bit more pointed than “scintillating sinners” Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly’s were in the show.
“Democracy only works when citizens are allowed to boo,” he said. “Tuesday night at the Kennedy Center, ‘Chicago’ made that point better than I ever could.”
The Blade reached out to the Kennedy Center but did not receive a comment back.
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