Authoritarian Surge Animates Attacks on Trans Americans
The right-wing campaign to create an autocratic state is also endangering long-held freedoms for all Americans, pushing U.S. democracy to the precipice. Trans people, its earliest targets, are among the most vulnerable.
by Billie Jean Sweeney
The Texas attorney general was busy last week. He was collecting lists of trans people from public records, while also urging folks to photograph and report to him any suspected trans people in restrooms — disregarding his own state law explicitly forbidding such photography.
So was the Trump administration, whose health secretary announced a blizzard of actions to dismantle health care for young trans people nationwide and to undermine its future for all trans Americans. Threats are the administration’s favored tactic, notably the unauthorized withholding of federal funds, along with a direct defiance of state laws that explicitly protect our care.
Trump’s attorney general has issued her own recent threats, designating trans people who speak up for civil rights as “domestic terrorists.” The Supreme Court, meanwhile, says the administration can impose its biased gender ideology on passports immediately — without the unilateral decree even being adjudicated in the lower courts.
If all this seems like America is hurtling headlong toward an authoritarian state, one group of analysts suggests that indeed it may be – absent organized resistance across society. The group, called the Steady State, describes an America today in which democratic backsliding is accelerating due to the “consolidation of executive power [and] erosion of institutional checks and balances.”
America, the analysts said, is on a “trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”
Their warning, in a report issued in October, might not have been so remarkable had it come from the far reaches of leftist discourse. However, the Steady State is a nonprofit consisting of more than 340 former national security professionals from the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies.
While the group’s analysis does not focus on examples relating to the trans community, gender is among the academic fields it cites as having been politicized. “Scholars studying politically sensitive issues, such as immigration, gender or the Middle East, face harassment and self-censorship,” it found.
Though the report got the attention of the Guardian US, it was ignored by big corporate news media in the United States, which nonetheless devote vast resources every day to repeating the falsehoods of the president and his administration, and to airing his vitriolic attacks on fellow Americans.
The Steady State’s warnings were delivered in the sober language of career analysts, yet they were stunning in their breadth and, in view of the past two months of authoritarian decrees and judicial acquiescence, they have proved to be prescient.
The report, which examines the deteriorating structures of American democracy, warns specifically that “the executive branch is actively weaponizing state institutions to punish perceived opponents and shield allies.” It found that the judiciary is “increasingly perceived as partisan and aligned with executive interests” describing that as a “critical facet of the U.S.’s autocratic shift.”
The analysts’ focus on the erosion of democratic structures, including a weakened legislative branch, leads to a broader discussion of threats to freedom of thought. “A growing number of American scholars — particularly in politically targeted disciplines — have resigned their positions or relocated abroad.”
Freedom of the press is under attack as well, as Trump has repeatedly labeled factual reporting as fake news and called critical reporters the enemy. “This rhetoric goes beyond criticism,” the analysts found, “and aims to erode the concept of neutral journalism.”
Public trust in democratic institutions is declining, they say flatly, as efforts to delegitimize dissent have grown.
The Steady State’s authors underlined that they were not acting as representatives of the U.S. government or in any official capacity, but as former intelligence officers “who believe the tools of structured analysis can shed light on concerning trends within our own democracy.”
These former senior U.S. government security analysts said that “given the stakes of the current moment” they were turning their discipline inward, taking the unusual step of employing the same analytic approach they once used to assess other nations to evaluate the threats to democracy from within.
During my nine years as editorial director of the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, I helped prepare hundreds of analyses about worrisome democratic and free speech trends worldwide and I read many hundreds more from other organizations.
The Steady State’s assessment is very familiar to me in its form and content, but it’s utterly chilling in that its focus is on my birthplace, the country I had called home.
Attacks on vulnerable groups, much like the attacks on the press we documented at CPJ, speak volumes about how free a nation truly is. China’s early attacks on independent Uyghur journalists signaled the inhumanity that was to come in which hundreds of thousands of Uyghur people have been detained. The Kremlin’s implicit endorsement of impunity in the unsolved murders of independent Russian journalists signaled its desire to suppress dissent by encouraging attacks on independent thinkers and promoting self-censorship among those who might dare to speak up.
America is at an inflection point. North Carolina officials have dismantled a library board to censor a single book about a trans child. Critical, fact-based journalism was sacrificed to political considerations this weekend when, at the behest of its new top editor, Bari Weiss, CBS pulled a widely promoted investigative report on the experiences of migrants sent to a brutal Salvadoran prison.
JD Vance, positioning himself to become the heir to Trump’s autocratic state, just refused to condemn antisemitic views and stated unequivocally that America "always will be a Christian nation” — in defiance of his oath to defend the Constitutional guarantee against establishment of an official religion.
The Supreme Court is now eager to hear a challenge to the 14th Amendment itself, which guarantees birthright citizenship and is the very soul of the multiethnic, multiracial and multifaith society that Americans thought their nation to be.
Is it too late, the civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill asks? Perhaps not, she wrote this month, given the “serious cracks in the Trump firmament.”
“But I do know that we cannot waste any more time refusing to listen to the voices of those who understand the nature of what we are facing at a deep, existential, and historical level,” Ifill wrote. “History is not a distraction. It is a critical source of information. The patterns revealed in our historical experiences can help us face the truth of what we are confronting. History urges us to move quickly, and to resist with greater intensity.”
Her stirring words remind us that history summons us all to become advocates for freedom and democracy — whether it’s running for the local school board, speaking up at public meetings, volunteering for candidates and causes we believe in, helping our neighbors under fire, using our skills as independent journalists to sound the alarm. Every moment matters now.
Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her) is a freelance editor, reporter and advocate. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an award-winning investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on young trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted and spread anti-trans disinformation.