It’s April 2025, and the government is trying to criminalize my existence as a trans person — again.
On April 3, the White House proclaimed April as National Child Abuse Prevention Month. While prevention of child abuse is something everyone can support, it is apparent that this proclamation is the administration’s latest ruse to spew anti-transgender hate.
Since his inauguration, President Trump has released several executive orders that seek to make it illegal to exist as a transgender, nonbinary or intersex person in the United States, literally trying to erase us from U.S. history, control our identity documents, limit our civil rights and ban or defund our medical care.
The president’s National Child Abuse Prevention Month proclamation claims that gender-affirming care for transgender youth is “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today.”
But gender-affirming care is life-saving. It is attacks like the president’s, and others we’ve seen the last few years, that put lives at stake.
Studies have repeatedly shown that access to gender-affirming care greatly improves the well-being of trans and nonbinary youth, including reducing rates of self-harm and suicide. Gender-affirming care is supported as a best practice by every leading medical association, including the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Research also shows that restricting medical care through anti-transgender laws has an alarming impact on doctors’ ability to offer care. It also impedes health care for people of all gender identities, not just transgender people.
Transgender young people, like all people, deserve the opportunity to thrive and get essential life-saving care. They deserve access to resources so they can have flourishing futures as trans adults.
In Jewish tradition, saving lives — pikuach nefesh — comes above all else. Jews also learn that to destroy a life is to destroy a whole world, and to save a life is to save a whole world. Entire worlds are being shattered right now as trans youth and their families fear for their lives: dealing with harassment and violence at school and in their communities, being pushed out of their states, and facing widespread and dangerous withholding of medical care.
The president’s so-called child abuse prevention proclamation is at its core an assault on the lives and well-being of all trans people and those who support us. Using made-up terms such as “gender ideology” and the ridiculous age-old trope that being transgender is a result of “indoctrination,” this nonbinding statement seeks to validate an echo chamber of hateful legislation. Hundreds of federal and state bills and policies are attempting to withhold access to passports and other legal documents from trans, nonbinary and intersex people. Drag bans, sports bans and bathroom bans are similarly being used to try to criminalize trans people and erase us from public life.
To put it simply, those in power want to legally eradicate trans people.
But it doesn’t stop there. The proclamation states that “the most powerful safeguard against child abuse is a stable family with loving parents, and that there is no substitute for a strong mother and father.” The broader LGBTQ+ community, with relationships and identities that do not fit within the construct of heterosexual marriage, is also being targeted by the current administration as a contributor to child abuse, because our very existence challenges narrow views of society and “family values.” Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney and expert on trans rights, noted in a recent Instagram that “the entry point [is] attacks on trans people, and the larger goal [is] the further erosion of any progress that destabilizes the traditional white Christian patriarchal family structure.”
As a descendant of Jewish immigrants who escaped persecution, these tyrannical actions are all too familiar to me. Destruction of information followed by widespread misinformation, along with censorship and limiting ID documents, are tactics Jews have experienced before by fascist regimes. Further, there is a horrific history of attacks on transgender and queer communities by fascist rulers. The very first medical clinic for transgender and gender expansive people was destroyed by the Nazis.
Now is the time for Jews to speak out and not stand idly by. Judaism teaches me I cannot be silent when human rights are under attack.
Jewish communities, and all people of conscience, have a choice to make. You can stay silent while transgender and nonbinary people, including members of our own communities, are under threat. Or you can boldly join the movement (tinyurl.com/keshet-trans-dignity) to ensure no one has to hide who they are in order to survive.
This is a call to action. The Jewish community has a moral obligation to loudly, unequivocally and unapologetically support trans, nonbinary and intersex people.
As Passover comes to a close, with Jews around the world having just retold the story of an oppressed people escaping tyranny and starting their journey to liberation, we must consider all of those in our communities today, people of many identities and experiences, who are being violently targeted by our government. Jews come from a sacred lineage of fighting against oppressive regimes. It is our responsibility to pick up the torch and fight for a world where all people are free.