The Scare, Fear What Is the Purpose Of Oppression Of Transgender People?
We have seen it over and over again, anyone that studies history, any history will see it. Governments, leadership, Organizations, usually RELIGIOUS organizations trying to steer and control people. Defining what can and can't be done.
AND!!! There's a pattern that shows up again and again when governments and religious institutions decide a group of people has gotten too free, too visible, or too inconvenient to the order they want to maintain. It doesn't look the same every time on the surface — sometimes it's a law, sometimes it's a sermon, sometimes it's a school board meeting — but underneath, it's the same five moves, in the same order, every time:
- Name a threat. Frame the group's existence as dangerous — to children, to "natural order," to the family, to bathrooms, to sports, to the nation itself.
- Recruit authority. Bring in Pseudo science, scripture, or "tradition" to make the fear sound objective, "real" instead of invented.
- Convert fear into law. Turn the feeling into policy. Now it isn't bigotry, it's "just the rules."
- Point to the wreckage as proof. When the group suffers under the new rules, treat that suffering as evidence the original fear was justified. Justify being a bigot "it was for the greater good"
- Recast resistance as the new threat. When the group pushes back, the pushback itself becomes the next thing to fear. Rinse and repeat.
With this in mind, I want to walk through five moments where this exact playbook ran — Nazi Germany's war on queer and trans existence, the long fight for women's basic personhood in America, Jim Crow, the fight for gay rights, and what's happening to trans people right now, in 2026, as I write this. I'm doing this in that order on purpose. It starts with the oldest, deepest template — the control of women's bodies and roles — moves through the moment that template got industrialized into state violence, then through a century of American law built on the same bones, and ends where we are now, so that by the time we get to trans rights, you've already seen this exact shape four times. You'll recognize it instantly, because you're supposed to.
And running underneath every single one of these — not just the last one — is the same quiet demand: women belong in the home, having children, because that is where their worth lives. Men belong out in the world, hardened, dominant, in charge. AND Anyone who doesn't fit cleanly into one of those two boxes isn't just inconvenient to that vision. They're proof it was never natural to begin with. That's why they get burned, banned, and erased first.
1. The Original Template: Controlling Women's Bodies and Roles
Long before any of the other examples in this piece, there was already a working system for deciding what a woman was allowed to do with her own body, her own time, and her own life. For most of recorded history across most of the world, women couldn't own property, couldn't vote, couldn't get an education past a certain point, couldn't leave a marriage, and in many places couldn't refuse one. The justification was always some version of the same claim: this is natural, this is biblical, this is how God or nature designed things to work. A woman's value was her capacity to bear children and run a household. Stepping outside that role wasn't treated as a personal choice — it was treated as a disruption of the order itself.
In the United States, that template took legal form for most of the country's history. Women couldn't vote nationally until 1920. Married women often couldn't own property or sign contracts in their own name well into the 20th century. It took the women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s to even begin to dislodge the assumption that a woman's "true fulfillment" was marriage and motherhood — and the backlash to that movement was immediate and is still running today. The Heritage Foundation, in its recent 191-page family policy paper, makes the case plainly: it argues that "fathers and mothers are not generic and interchangeable 'parents'" and that each "brings unique and complementary assets to the vocation of parenthood" — explicitly tying this argument to concern over falling birth rates. The framing has softened over a century — nobody says "a woman's only value is children" out loud anymore — but the architecture is the same: distinct, fixed, non-interchangeable roles, with motherhood positioned as the role that matters most for women specifically.
Then came Roe v. Wade in 1973, which didn't grant women a new right so much as recognize one they'd been fighting for — the right to decide for themselves whether and when to become mothers. For fifty years, that was federal law. In 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturned it, and abortion access has been rolled back or eliminated in large parts of the country since. The same organizing infrastructure behind that rollback — the same donor networks, the same think tanks, the same legal groups — is, as you'll see in a moment, the same infrastructure now targeting trans people. That's not a coincidence. It's the same fight over who gets to define what a woman is, and what she's for.
The pattern, step by step: Threat named (women abandoning family weakens the nation) → authority recruited (scripture, "natural law," declining birth-rate data) → fear converted to law (coverture, suffrage restrictions, abortion bans) → suffering as proof (women who "chose wrong" held up as warnings) → resistance recast as threat (feminism itself, especially the 1960s–70s movement, painted as anti-family and dangerous).
2. Nazi Germany: When the Fear Became a Bonfire, Then a Law, Then a Camp
In 1919, a gay Jewish physician named Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin — the first medical center in the world devoted to the study of gender and sexuality. It wasn't just a research center. It was a home. Trans patients lived there, received some of the earliest gender-affirming hormone therapy and surgery in medical history, got legal aid, got counseling, got to exist as themselves in a building that treated their existence as a subject worthy of serious science rather than a moral failure.
Hirschfeld's central idea — radical for 1919, and still apparently radical to some people in 2026 — was that gender and sexuality exist on a natural human continuum, not as a fixed binary everyone is required to fit into. The Nazi Party, founded that same year, rejected this completely and made the Institute a target almost from the start. Hirschfeld was heckled at public appearances; smoke bombs were set off at his lectures.
On May 6, 1933, the Sturmabteilung — Hitler's brownshirted paramilitary, the SA — and a contingent from the Academy of Physical Exercise arrived at the Institute. They looted it. They hauled out a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and more than 20,000 books and case files documenting decades of research on queer and trans lives, piled them into the street, and burned them in one of the first and largest of the Nazi book-burning spectacles, captured on newsreel and shown across Germany as a demonstration of state power. Hirschfeld, out of the country at the time, watched the footage of his life's work burning from a movie theater in Paris. He never returned to Germany.
The destruction of the Institute wasn't a side effect of Nazism — it was a preview of its method. Name the threat (Hirschfeld's research and the people in his care were degenerate, a contamination of the German body politic). Recruit authority (Nazi-aligned doctors and the regime's emerging racial "science" to declare queerness and gender variance pathological and dangerous to the nation). Convert it to law: in 1935, weeks after Hirschfeld's death in exile, the Nazis expanded Paragraph 175, the law criminalizing homosexuality, to cover virtually all male homosexual contact. Around 50,000 gay men would eventually be prosecuted under it. Point to the wreckage as proof — queer and trans people, now stripped of legal protection, community, and medical care, could be pointed to as deviant and disordered, exactly as the regime had claimed all along. And recast resistance as threat — any defense of queer or trans existence was, by definition under Nazi law, an attack on the German family and nation.
This is the piece of history that should stop anyone cold who's watching book bans spread through American school districts today, or watching state legislatures debate whether trans people can access healthcare, use a bathroom, or exist in public records as who they are. The Institute for Sexual Science wasn't destroyed because it was dangerous. It was destroyed because it proved gender and sexuality were more complicated than the regime's vision of a nation built on rigid roles — disciplined, hyper-masculine men and fertile, domestic women — could tolerate. Anyone living outside that binary wasn't just unusual to the Nazi state. They were evidence the binary itself was a lie, and that had to be burned before too many people noticed.
3. Jim Crow: Making the Hierarchy Look Like Neutral Law
Jim Crow wasn't one law — it was a system of state and local laws enforced across the American South (and well beyond it) from roughly the 1870s into the 1960s, mandating racial segregation in nearly every corner of public life: schools, restrooms, water fountains, train cars, restaurants, waiting rooms. The legal cover for all of it was "separate but equal," a phrase the Supreme Court itself enshrined in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 — a ruling that gave the entire system nearly sixty years of constitutional legitimacy. The facilities were never equal. That was never really the point. The point was a legally enforced hierarchy, dressed up as neutral policy so it wouldn't have to call itself what it was.
Jim Crow also leaned hard on voter suppression — poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and violent intimidation — to make sure that even where Black Americans technically had the right to vote under the 15th Amendment, they functionally didn't. And it relied on anti-miscegenation laws that policed who could marry whom, tying racial purity directly to control over marriage and reproduction — the same lever you'll notice showing up again and again throughout this piece, just pointed at a different group.
It took the Civil Rights Movement, the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision overturning Plessy, and finally the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 to dismantle the legal architecture. Even then, the underlying hierarchy didn't vanish — it adapted, the way it always does.
What Jim Crow demonstrates better than almost any other example is step three of the playbook: how thoroughly a hierarchy can disappear into the language of "law" and "order" once it's been on the books long enough. Nobody enforcing a Jim Crow statute in 1955 had to say "I am oppressing people today." They were just following the rules. That's the trick. That's always the trick.
4. Gay Rights: Where the Church Led and the State Followed
If Jim Crow shows government as the primary engine of control with religious institutions providing supporting cover, the fight against gay rights largely runs the machine in reverse — religious institutions out front, government following.
The pattern goes back further than most people realize. The CNN historian Nicole Hemmer has traced a "century-long tradition" of right-wing women's mobilization, from the Women's Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s — which brought the Klan's anti-Black, antisemitic, and anti-Catholic politics into schools and churches — through 1970s campaigns like Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children," all the way to today's Moms for Liberty. Each one used the protective image of motherhood as the public face of a larger project: defending a rigid hierarchy of race, gender, and sexuality. Motherhood and "protecting the children" weren't the goal — they were the vehicle.
The Lavender Scare of the 1950s shows government picking up that baton directly: federal employees suspected of being gay or lesbian were investigated and purged from their jobs en masse, treated as security risks purely on the basis of who they were. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" carried a version of that logic into the military for decades after — the Heritage Foundation itself opposed even that compromise in 1993, arguing that mixing gay and straight troops would "degrade cohesion and combat effectiveness," a claim decades of military research never supported, and that the policy's eventual 2011 repeal then disproved in practice.
Marriage equality became the next front. Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 — and as of January 2026, a coalition of 47 anti-LGBTQ organizations has launched a coordinated campaign specifically to overturn it. GLAAD's tracking shows many of the organizations and spokespeople behind that campaign have long, documented histories of targeting transgender people specifically, as well as reproductive rights and the rights of racial and religious minorities. That's not three separate movements running in parallel by coincidence. It's the same coalition, the same funding, often the same individuals, working every front of the same project at once.
5. Trans Rights, Right Now: The Same Five Steps, In Real Time
This is the one happening to me, to people I love, and to people I've never met but recognize completely. I'm not writing about history here. I'm writing about this year.
Step one, naming the threat, is the most visible part. Trans people — and especially trans kids — are described as a danger to children, a contamination of girls' sports and women's spaces, a product of "ideological indoctrination" rather than a population that has always existed. Moms for Liberty, designated an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2023, has called gender dysphoria a "mental health disorder" being "normalized by predators," accused schools of "sexualizing children" through nothing more than asking students their pronouns, and labeled school board members who disagree with them "pedophiles" — a word strategically chosen because it doesn't require evidence, only repetition.
Step two, recruiting authority, shows up as legal and "scientific" cover dressed in respectable language. The Alliance Defending Freedom, designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, presents itself in media appearances as a neutral "Christian legal organization" while filing the amicus briefs and building the test cases — including 303 Creative, a case the Washington Post reported involved manufacturing a plaintiff who was never actually approached by an LGBTQ client — that have systematically rolled back protections. The Heritage Foundation has written and coordinated copycat state legislation targeting gender-affirming care for transgender youth, despite the fact that every major medical association in the country supports that care as safe and evidence-based.
Step three, converting fear into law, is where we are right now, state by state. Gender-affirming care for trans youth has been banned or restricted across more than twenty states. U.S. v. Skrmetti, argued before the Supreme Court, will help determine whether those bans stand. Bathroom bills, restrictions on updating identity documents, military service bans, sports participation bans — each one passed under the language of "protecting" someone: children, women, fairness, "biological reality." Each one requires a trans person to disappear a little further from public life to satisfy that protection.
Step four, pointing to the wreckage as proof, is maybe the cruelest turn of the cycle, and it's happening in plain sight. The CDC has reported that one in four LGBTQ teens attempted suicide in 2021, with half having considered it — a crisis driven substantially by exactly the hostility, isolation, and rejection this whole playbook produces, and one that research shows improves dramatically when trans youth are simply allowed to use their chosen name and pronouns. Instead of being read as evidence of harm caused by exclusion, that suffering gets pointed to by the same organizations as evidence that being trans is itself the disorder. The wound becomes the argument for the thing that caused it.
Step five, recasting resistance as the new threat, is the one running hardest right now. Visibility itself — a trans person existing publicly, a book on a library shelf, a drag performer at a community event — gets reframed as "grooming" or "indoctrination." Pushing back against a bathroom ban becomes "aggression." A pediatrician prescribing standard, decades-old endocrinology gets called a "predator." The target keeps moving because the goal was never really about bathrooms or sports or any single policy. It was about whether trans people get to exist in public at all.
And underneath all five steps, the same engine as every example before it: a vision of a properly ordered society where women have babies and stay close to home because that's where their value lives, and men are hard, dominant, and unambiguous because that's what strength is supposed to look like. A trans woman doesn't fit the first role no matter how completely she lives it. A trans man doesn't fit the second no matter how he's always known himself. Nonbinary people don't fit either box at all. None of that is incidental to why this movement targets trans people specifically, alongside its parallel fights against abortion access and "traditional" gender roles in the home. Trans existence is direct, walking proof that the categories were never as fixed, as natural, or as God-given as the hierarchy requires them to be — and a hierarchy that depends on a lie cannot afford to let the lie be seen.
Why This Pattern Always Repeats
Five examples. Different countries, different centuries, different specific language. The same five steps every single time. That's not me forcing a parallel where it doesn't belong — it's what happens when you put these histories next to each other and just look.
Power doesn't need everyone to agree with it. It just needs the fear to feel reasonable long enough for the law to catch up, and the law to feel neutral long enough for nobody to ask who it's actually protecting. Hirschfeld's Institute didn't get burned because it was wrong. Jim Crow didn't last a century because "separate but equal" was true. The Lavender Scare didn't purge thousands of federal employees because they were actually security risks. And gender-affirming care isn't being banned in more than twenty states because it isn't safe — every major medical organization in the country says it is.
What all five examples have in common, at the bottom of everything, is a very old, very specific picture of how the world is supposed to work: men in charge, hard and dominant, out in public, making the rules. Women at home, soft and fertile, making the children. Anyone who refuses to fit cleanly into one of those two boxes isn't just unusual to that picture — they're a threat to it, because their existence is proof the boxes were a choice all along, not a law of nature. That's why this keeps happening to women fighting for autonomy, to gay people fighting for the right to exist publicly, to Black Americans fighting for basic legal personhood, to the patients of a Berlin sexology institute in 1933, and to trans people fighting for the right to receive medical care and walk into a bathroom in 2026.
The pattern is the tell. Once you can see it, you can't stop seeing it — and that, more than anything else, is what makes it possible to fight.
Sources and further reading: GLAAD Accountability Project (glaad.org/gap); U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia entry on Magnus Hirschfeld; Scientific American, "The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic"; JSTOR Daily, "90 Years On: The Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science"; CNN Opinion, Nicole Hemmer, "Moms for Liberty may be new to US politics, but their strategy isn't"; The Nation, "The Real Agenda of Moms for Liberty"; Southern Poverty Law Center hate group designations.
