Trump's mission: Discrimination and destruction
Trump is not governing. He is destroying. And the response to it must be up to the destruction Trump is causing.
This Monday, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at a conference.
On Wednesday afternoon, I received an email that the conference was canceled.
What happened?
Well, the LGBTQ+ Health Care Conference, hosted by Indiana University School of Medicine, was set to take place virtually on April 23 and 24. From the invitation I received:
From the school’s website:
On Wednesday, though, I was told that “due to multiple emerging factors and circumstances beyond the control of the Indiana University School of Medicine, we are unable to move forward with the LGBTQ+ Health Care Conference as planned.”
Shall we visit the conference website?
Of course, we all know what happened.
Donald Trump is president, and he is empowering his people to disempower anyone not like him.
He is seeking to harm trans people and make discussions of diversity, quite literally, verboten. He took another step to that end on Wednesday, with an education-related executive order that purports to tie federal funding to forcing teachers to treat trans kids poorly and refuse to discuss diversity. There will be stories written about the ins and out of the order, including here, and the order will cause harm — if for no other reason than, like his other acts, Trump is encouraging the very worst actors to act even worse — but the order itself is not my central point tonight.
It was followed, moreover, by “guidance” from the Office of Personnel Management’s acting director, Charles Ezell, on implementing Trump’s day-one order defining “sex” to exclude transgender people. This is horrific, unconstitutional, and mean-spirited and absolutely should lead to lawsuits.
Even that is not my point tonight.
When you look at Trump’s acts in his first 10 days back in office, a substantial part of his time back as president has been spent rolling back or ignoring civil rights policies or advancing new policies that turn civil rights protections upside down.
Ken Klippenstein showed one immediate result of Trump’s efforts on Wednesday, reporting that the Defense Intelligence Agency announced on Tuesday a “pause” this year on recognition of, to give just some examples, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Holocaust Day, Pride, and Juneteenth.
Luckily for Martin Luther King Jr.’s memory, his birthday was celebrated for at least a half-day this year before Trump took office.
This is not all, and it’s awful.
I heard stories Wednesday about websites being archived and taken down; about current government funding being paused; and, as Erin Reed pointed out, about hospitals already stopping providing certain gender-affirming medical care.
All of this — the websites, the funding, and the health care — are being affected because of Trump’s discriminatory and hateful orders. Before many of the orders’ restrictions even purport to take effect.
None of them, of course, have been upheld in court against challenges.
Yet, people are already acting. They are compliant. And we’re not even two weeks in.
And there is no end in sight. Also on Wednesday, Trump proposed sending up to 30,000 migrants to Guantanamo Bay: "We don't want them coming back so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo."
This is what he’s doing.
I don’t have an up note to end on here, but I know that, come April, people across the country seeking to improve the lives of their patients by better understanding a community that they serve lost one way to do so on Wednesday.
That is the opposite of governing.
It is destruction, and the response to it must be up to the destruction Trump is causing.
Well, of course! Let’s “pause” Black History Month, Juneteenth, Holocaust Day, Women’s History Month and Pride. In its place? White History Year, Manly Man Year, Why Wasn’t the Final Solution Final Day, Women Is Nasty (women of color nastier) Month; and I Am the Lord Thy God Eternity.
The harm to LGBTQ2S+, as your lives are being turned upside down, is heartbreaking. As I understand it — but you would want to doublecheck — Canada grants refugee status to LGBTQ2S+ who are at risk in their home countries. I hope this will include American refugees. Canada benefits from the strength and courage of our refugees.