Trump Pushes State-Sponsored Rape of Incarcerated Queer People
Leading Off: His latest lawless move defies an act adopted unanimously by Congress two decades ago. Anti-trans riders stripped from military spending bill. The week’s top story lines.
by Assigned Media
The Department of Justice moved unilaterally last week to end protections for LGBTQ+ inmates under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, according to a new memo. The memo calls for its inspectors to no longer take any special care in assessing transgender and intersex inmates for safety purposes or for investigating sexual assaults when the victim is transgender or intersex.
The cessation of these protections would apply not just to prisons, but to any form of incarceration, including jails, juvenile detention centers, and immigration detention centers. The memo justifies the changes by citing a day one executive order issued by Trump.
Advocates called the memo a reckless and bias-driven abandonment of protections enacted unanimously by Congress 22 years ago that would inevitably lead to state-sponsored rape.
The department did not officially comment on the memo, whose existence was first reported by the independent nonprofit news site Prism and then confirmed by NPR, The Guardian and others.
A ban on military funds going to gender-affirming surgeries has been struck from the National Defense Authorization Act, a large congressional bill that funds the military, as reported by Erin in the Morning. The earlier House version of the bill included a long list of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ add-ons (called riders) including a bathroom ban for all military facilities and a ban on Pride flags. The Senate version had fewer anti-trans provisions, but it did include a ban on military healthcare covering transition-related surgery as well as a military sports ban.
Although the Trump regime has banned trans people from serving and expelled all trans people currently serving, these riders targeted spouses and children, threatening a situation where simply having a parent in the military would have subjected a trans person to oppressive discrimination. During the reconciliation process, however, all of the House’s extra anti-trans provisions were struck, as was the Senate’s ban on transgender surgeries. The bill retains a ban on trans participation in athletics, but even there the language has been watered down from the original.
Reading between the lines, it’s clear congressional Democrats worked to remove anti-trans components of the defense spending bill, and Republicans were willing to agree to lose them. A similar process seems to have played out with anti-trans riders in the government shutdown compromise.
The Trump regime dead-named a former HHS leader, Rachel Levine, in her official portrait. The change, first reported on Friday by NPR, appears in the Humphrey Building in Washington, in a series of portraits of former leaders of the Public Health Corps.
Levine made history in 2021 with her appointment to the position of assistant secretary for health by President Biden, making her the highest-ranking openly transgender official in the federal government. During her time in the position, she led COVID-19 relief efforts and advocated in favor of access to gender-affirming care for transgender people.
Legal name changes are universally acknowledged the world over. Defiance of the rule of law has characterized Trump’s tenure.
In a statement to NPR, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said the department was committed to “gold standard science” ensuring that “biological reality guides our approach to public health." Under this “standard,” the administration has dismantled vaccine requirements and development, enabled the reemergence of measles and polio, promoted scientific disinformation, revoked food safety rules, erased and manipulated scientific data in official documents and much more.
In response to the change, Levine said to NPR, “I'm not going to comment on this type of petty action.” Her spokesperson, Andrew Shanker, called it an act “of bigotry.”
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