Genocide

Genocide against trans people takes on patterns that set it apart from the mass murder genocides that people commonly associate with the crime, such as the Holocaust. Currently, the genocide against trans people follows a pattern – denial of identity (pattern #9 in the Lemkin Institute’s Ten Patterns of Genocide) – that makes it more familiar to the colonial genocides against indigenous populations, including the residential/boarding school systems in North America and Australia, where indigenous children were “allowed” to go on living if they gave up their identities, including their languages. Denial of identity involves two main steps: preventing people from openly expressing an identity and destroying institutions that reproduce the identity. Given that the denial of identity is the consequence of a well-defined hostility, even hatred, for the identity, the pattern is often characterized by incitement against the group. Alongside suppression and incitement, perpetrators of this pattern of genocide will simultaneously criminalize the identity, so that expressions of it or institutions that reproduce it become characterized as threatening and corrosive to the body politic and warranting state violence and coercion. People who assert or support the denied identity then become criminal elements that must be eliminated. In the case of the boarding schools, children who used their mother tongue or otherwise showed signs of their independent identity were severely punished.

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What the anti-trans movement fails to understand is that trans people are not created through gender-affirming care. Their identities are real regardless of whether they have undergone any form of medical or even social transition. Gender-affirming care bans and policies forcing trans people to remain closeted condemn trans people to lives of suffering, but do not make them cis. 

Connecting all these dots leads to a fairly clear conclusion: Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza — through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment — into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area. Anyone caught outside its boundaries would be killed, and buildings throughout the rest of the enclave would likely be razed to the ground.

Without mincing words, this “humanitarian zone,” as Magal so kindly put it, in which the army intends to corral Gaza’s 2 million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.

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Perversely, the plan to establish a concentration camp inside Gaza may reflect Israeli leaders’ realization that the much-touted “voluntary departure” of the population is not realistic in the current circumstances — both because too few Gazans would be willing to leave, even under continued bombardment, and because no country would accept such a massive influx of Palestinian refugees.

According to Dr. Dotan Halevy, a researcher of Gaza and co-editor of the book “Gaza: Place and Image in the Israeli Space,” the concept of “voluntary departure” is based on an all-or-nothing principle. “Consider this hypothetical,” Halevy told me recently. “Ask Ofer Winter [the military general who, at the time of our conversation, looked set to be tasked with heading the Defense Ministry’s “Voluntary Departure Directorate”] whether evacuating 30 percent, 40 percent, or even 50 percent of Gaza’s residents would be considered a success. Would Israel really care if Gaza had 1.5 million Palestinians rather than 2.2 million? Would that enable the annexation fantasies of Bezalel Smotrich and his allies? The answer is almost certainly no.”

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Whether or not Smotrich, Katz, and Zamir have read Halevy and Shafer Raviv’s articles, they likely understand that “voluntary departure” is not an immediately executable plan. But if they truly believe that the solution to the “Gaza problem” — or to the Palestinian issue as a whole — is for there to be no Palestinians left in Gaza, then it will certainly not be possible all in one go.

In other words, the idea appears to be: first, corral the population into one or more closed-off enclaves; then, let starvation, desperation, and hopelessness do the rest. Those locked inside will see that Gaza has been completely destroyed, that their homes have been leveled, and that they have neither a present nor a future in the Strip. At that point, the Israeli thinking goes, Palestinians themselves will begin pushing for emigration, forcing Arab countries to take them in.

While serving as a contractor and senior adviser for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Alex Smith had a broad mandate.

He was tasked with offering insight on issues concerning gender, infectious disease, nutrition, and the health of mothers and children.

And all of those issues converged in Gaza, as Israel’s siege unfolded. […]

As he reflects upon his time in the Biden government, Smith notes a stark contrast between Biden’s support for war-torn Ukraine and his lack of support for Gaza, where entire neighbourhoods have been levelled.

“When we talk about Ukraine, we can condemn the bombing of hospitals. We can talk about the resilience of the people who are being attacked. We can talk about the perpetrators who are attacking them,” Smith said.

“But when it comes to Gaza, we don't talk about those people. We don't plan for their health systems to be rebuilt.”

When he voted in the 2024 presidential race, Smith knew he could not back Biden’s vice president, Harris, fearing a continuation of the president’s policies.

His home state of Maine employs a ranked-choice system, allowing residents to offer support to multiple candidates. Smith used his ballot to rank Harris as his last choice, behind the third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein.

Smith explained he has a grim view of Biden’s legacy will be perceived in the years to come. “He will be remembered as the US president who manufactured a genocide against children in Gaza.”

Erin Reed, a transgender rights activist and writer, tells Rolling Stone that it’s an absurd distinction. There is no difference between a ban on “transgenderism” and an attack on transgender people, she says: “They are one and the same, and there’s no separation between them.”

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 “I called to ban transgenderism entirely … They said that I was calling for the extermination of transgender people. They said I was calling for a genocide … One, I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology,” Knowles said, ahistorically.

“Nobody is calling to exterminate anybody, because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category — it’s not a legitimate category of being,” Knowles continued. “There are people who think that they are the wrong sex, but they are mistaken. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.” 

Carl Charles, a senior attorney at the LGBTQ rights group Lambda Legal, noted that Knowles’ goals are clear, even as he muddles the meaning of his words. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if by using the inflammatory term ‘eradicate’ Mr. Knowles specifically meant trans people should be killed. What does matter is the reality of what he is saying and the impact it is having and will have at this particular moment in history,” Charles says. “He is advocating that trans people should not be free to live their lives with dignity and autonomy like Mr. Knowles presumably does —  instead, they should be relegated to non-existence: carrying on in secret and shame and living a lie for the rest of their days, which, he must realize, will mean some trans people opt not to do.”