In commemoration of the upcoming Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), President Joe Biden issued a statement praising trans people’s contributions to society and describing actions his administration has taken to counter transphobic bullying and extremism. Additionally, many members of Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also issued their own statements affirming that community health depends on supporting trans people too.
“Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our Nation,” Biden wrote in his statement. “Whether serving their communities or in the military, raising families or running businesses, they help America thrive. They deserve, and are entitled to, the same rights and freedoms as every other American, including the most fundamental freedom to be their true selves.”
They’re not an ethnic group, and unless everyone in the United States are trans, it doesn’t apply. Persecuted, discriminated, yes. Genocide, no.
And yet, if something so evidently man-made and contrived as nationality can constitute a grounds for the definition of genocide, then so too could we use any number of qualities more integral to the human condition to speak intelligently about genocide. It beggars the imagination to suppose we can gain anything by fretfully splitting hairs when we have a word to hand which quite precisely encapsulates the most ardent desires and aims of the perpetrators. People are being murdered, terrorized, made illegal, and hounded out of public life through political means by elected officials and the apparatus of state, whom themselves do not mince words. Historians are the ones who must take care with their words, and even they know when to say the word “quisling”.
It is being debated.
I’m glad it’s a subject among academics, that’s more or less as it should be. I am not bound by their findings in either case; the real world value of a “legal definition” in the international courts has been demonstrated to be of limited use to prevent or discourage genocide in any case; ask a Palestinian.