Queer Memoricide and State Sanctioned Oppression

Tuesday, March 31 was the International Transgender Day of Visibility. This year’s day of visibility came at a bellwether moment as efforts intensified to suppress queer visibility, recognition and memory.

Let’s not beat around the bush here. There is evil afoot, and history is repeating itself, despite warnings echoing from our collective pasts. Case in point: President Donald J. Trump has openly adopted policies that directly harm LGBTQ+ people, especially trans and gender diverse people.

Through the Make America Healthy Again initiative put forth by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the administration explicitly targeted trans youth and the supposed “genital mutilation” endorsed by “radical leftists”—health care that is otherwise medically acceptable for gender and social transition affirmation. Far-right efforts like this derived from moral panics and manufactured fears that were circulated by openly anti-trans journalists (e.g., Bari Weiss, Jesse Singal, Pamela Paul, etc.) and several media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic, CBS News, Fox News and the BBC.

Without going too far down the rabbit hole of anti-trans collaborators, all of this is characteristic of a fascistic, authoritarian turn in the country’s political culture. It is frightening, to say the least. I am not a member of the transgender community. I am a cisgender bisexual man. I cannot speak to the personal and systemic challenges people in this community face. Powerful people here in the U.S. and abroad want to see this vibrant human community disappear entirely. Certainly, this is the case with a political climate that encourages the social genocide of trans and queer people. Never in my life have I seen such persecution against groups of people who want recognition and peace—a Nazi-esque occurrence. Yes, social genocide against folks who wish to exist peacefully.

The discussion is far more complex, both theoretically and practically. Consider the application of a term like “memoricide.” Memoricide is a derivative of the wider interdisciplinary study of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The word was reportedly first developed by the Croatian-French medical historian Mirko Grmek in his writings about the ethnic cleansing characteristic during the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s. As it deals with the actual destruction of human memory, acts of memoricide concentrate on the destruction of physical property that holds great significance to the impacted groups of people and wider communities. Considering the decades-long persistence of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans sentiments, a framework explaining memoricide has been applied to historical cases, including many cases found in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany—all genocidal.

The Nazis were not only flagrantly racist and antisemitic in their beliefs, but homophobic and transphobic to an extent that the sexual and gender minorities that fell under Nazi occupation were targets of general persecution and viewed as undesirables. In fact, scholars characterize memoricide as having been committed when Nazi youth and student groups were encouraged to discriminate and eventually storm the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a first-of-its-kind center for gender and sexual health studies formed by groundbreaking sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

In an analysis of historical events and evidence, researchers Matt Fuller and Leah Owen presented a theoretical structure to understand intentional invisibilization and direct extermination against the queer and trans populations of the time. Fuller and Owen published their assessment in the peer-reviewed academic journal Peace Review in 2022, affirming the strong historical case that sexual and gender minority groups, especially transgender people, were victimized during the Holocaust. While two years later, the transphobic author of the “Harry Potter” series, J.K. Rowling, made herself a fool once more by exercising blatant Holocaust denialism by claiming that no trans or gender-expansive people were targeted by the Nazis. Of course, this was a lie as she saw reason to express Holocaust denialism as a blatant excuse to promote trans erasure. Though the Rowling example provides context, it speaks to the efforts of far-right and anti-trans beliefs that become so sacrosanct to oneself that such absurdities become reality. Fuller and Owen’s research affirms this. Memoricide is a genocidal practice and it is now a case of public policy and agenda.

Upon his return to the White House last year, President Trump issued a flurry of executive orders declaring that sexuality and gender is strictly binary—biological male and female. Despite the vast majority of scientists recognizing that gender is a spectrum or continuum and biological sex as a multidimensional construct determined by genetics and sex traits, the belief in a biological binary has led to blind political ideology that translates to memoricidal and genocidal structure.

For example, Trump’s anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ executive orders led to the National Park Service erasing any mention of transgender and queer people from material and information about Stonewall National Monument. That is a textbook case of Trump’s memoricidal posturing.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued a “Red Flag Alert” in March calling out current developments in the United States as genocidal in nature. The institute notes that “the Republican Party’s anti-trans agenda has radicalized and continued to intensify.”

“The administration has moved from identifying transgender people as a threat to the family and to the nation’s military prowess to claiming that transgender people constitute a cosmic threat to the spiritual health of the nation and the greatest direct threat to…national security in the world.”

I find Lemkin’s assessment to be sobering and accurate. Considering that there are now extreme anti-trans laws on the books in states such as Tennessee, Kansas and Idaho, while paired with the excruciatingly oppressive proposed order prohibiting all gender affirming care procedures for young people at federally-funded medical facilities fronted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, there is a trend in the conservative-leaning governments of the United States that such efforts “protect.” In fact, they do the opposite. They kill.

History shows us that when memory is erased, people soon follow, and silence becomes complicity. If we value human dignity and the integrity of our shared past, we must resist efforts to erase queer lives from both public policy and historical record. Visibility, remembrance and truth are not luxuries—they are the safeguards that keep history from repeating its darkest chapters. Unfortunately, those chapters appear to be repeating. Only defiance and solidarity can overcome oppression and erasure.