The Trump Administration is using rape to get rid of trans people

The US Department of Justice issued an immediate order stating that as of last Tuesday, US prisons and jails will no longer be held responsible for violations of standards meant to shield LGBTQ+ people from harassment, abuse, and rape; inspectors are to cease any compliance inspection activities.

Before I get to the point - that is, what you should take away from reading this - some context is key. The protections that the Trump administration are rolling back come from the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (Prea). 22 years later, Prea’s passage looks quite remarkable, if not totally unbelievable:

• Sponsored by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
• Passed the Senate by Unanimous Consent (Majority GOP, 51R-48D-1I)
• Passed the House Without Objection (unanimouslty) (Majority GOP, 223R-209D-1I)
• Signed into law by President George W. Bush (R).

The broad coalition behind the legislation is even more extraordinary: among its institutional supporters were the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and the Concerned Women for America as well as Amnesty International, the NAACP, Human Rights Watch and the Salvation Army.

Now, to be clear, the provisions that the Trump administration are rolling back were codified in 2012. But these codifications weren’t additions so much as filling in holes - the 2003 law mandated “zero tolerance” for rape, but didn’t tell prisons how to house populations at risk of being raped. The 2012 rules operationalized existing legislation - to argue otherwise would be to both miss the point, and, if one knows better, to be deliberately disingenuous.

The original argument in 2003 was absolute and universal, as Chuck Colson, an evangelical leader, would testify before Congress: “When the government takes away a man’s freedom, it assumes absolute responsibility for their safety.”

For evangelical leaders to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with progressive activists and demand better conditions from the government, it required an acknowledgement of the inherent limits of religion on society - as well as the moral character required to, perhaps, rise above the hypocrisy we so frequently attach to evangelical leaders. All of this is to say that they did not carve out provisions or exceptions. They did this because they believed above all else that human dignity was something the government was to treat with sacred duty.

The Trump administration couldn’t be more different in its gleeful depravity. There is no level of human dignity that rises above political gamesmanship here. The brutal ultimatum is that trans inmates should either detransition, or potentially face systemic rape with no accountability.

This is how the conservatives of today will twist and warp the idea of small government - and another example of why governing is often hard and multi-layered. If we don’t want a justice system that requires citizens to either be raped or have invasive, permanent medical procedures, these protections must exist. The Trump administration knows this. They just don’t care.