“Never Again” A Promise Betrayed, A Future Unwritten. Part 2

“Never Again” A Promise Betrayed, A Future Unwritten. Part 2

I recently posted the above tweet responding to an attack on trans people, claiming that they themselves were responsible for all the attacks on trans rights and on their very existence. There were some vile responses, ignorantly claiming I was making a comparison to the Holocaust, whilst my comparison was to 1930’s Nazi Germany. Being Jewish I will never compare to the Holocaust itself and the brutal murder of 6m Jews, but those who are Gender Critical never manage to stick to truth or facts, whilst I will never make a claim without having the evidence to back it up. This article does precisely that.

I did not make wild baseless accusations. I made a clear comparison to the exact same tactics deployed by the Nazis in the 1930’s to demonise an entire minority and to systematically remove them from every single aspect of society.

I will show the clear similarities to what we have witnessed over last 8 years here in the UK, with the deliberate targeted attack on trans people that clearly mirrors the calculated and cynical attacks on Jewish people in the 1930’s. Not surprisingly, Gender Critical Trans Deniers do not like any kind of comparison to such a vile stain on humanity, and who wouldn’t, but all I will say, is that if the glove fits ….

In Part 1, A Promise Betrayed, I exposed how the Holocaust Memorial promise of “Never Again” was being ignored, and how identical 1930s Nazi Germany tactics have been deployed in the UK with the targets of today being the trans community. If this is allowed to grow, what does the future hold for the 262,000 trans people, around the same number of Jews, living here in the UK.

Part 2: A Future Unwritten

The UK has always been just one step behind the USA, which is where the Gender Critical blueprint was established in 2017. In recent years there have been many US States that have pushed ahead with a targeted removal of trans rights, however the future for trans people in the US has now become all too clear and unbelievably bleak ever since the re-election of President Donald Trump who has wasted no time in implementing his Gender Critical plans marking the total destruction of trans rights and trans lives.

Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written for the Los Angeles Times for more than 40 years, and he described all of Trump’s actions in his recent article, “Trump’s all-out assault on transgender rights isn’t a sign of strength, but cowardice”, in which he clearly shows the full extent of Trumps anti-trans intentions.

With the issuing of Executive Orders that started on his first day in office, Trump firstly wiped out policies aimed at protecting transgender adults from discrimination, and moved to outlaw gender-affirming medical therapies for anyone under the age of 19 (therefore including 18-year-olds who are legally adults), by cutting off federal funding for healthcare institutions who provided such care. Once fully implemented there will be no healthcare or any future prospect for any trans child in the US.

He also implemented the ultimate removal of trans existence and acceptance by revoking an existing Biden directive aimed at preventing discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Trump declared that the federal government recognise only “two sexes, male and female,” which are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality”  – this being exactly what Kemi Badenoch still wants to implement here in the UK.

In a further move he ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to move all transgender inmates, regardless of their offence, into the general populations consistent with their birth genders, which exposes non-violent trans women offenders to genuine risk of physical assault. And only a month after we saw Kelly Holmes highlighting the UK’s 25th anniversary of the lifting of our ban on LGBT+ personnel serving in the armed forces, Trump has now banned all transgender individuals from serving in the US military.

On Women’s Sport, he issued a new executive order that will ban all trans women and girls from participating at both K-12 schools and colleges. Schools that violate this order will be denied federal funds on the basis they have violated Title IX (which prohibits sex discrimination in schools). It was also reported that Trump has told the media that he intends to prevent transgender athletes from obtaining visas for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

All this amounts to what legal commentator Mark Joseph Stern of Slate accurately labels as “the biggest, broadest, most vicious assault on transgender existence we’ve ever seen,” a campaign of “unfathomable” scope.

Prior to the election, Trump made an outrageous claim about trans kids, having said the following: “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s gonna happen with your child. And you know, many of these child’s 15 years later say, ‘What the hell happened?’ They say, ‘Who did this to me?’”

Statements like this clearly replicate the lies and scaremongering tactics used in 1930s Nazi Germany which saw the total destruction of Jewish rights and Jewish lives. At the start of Part 1 of this article, I stated that “I (couldn’t) decide which is worse; failing to commemorate the Holocaust Memorial Day, or each year simply standing up and repeating an empty promise of “Never Again” whilst turning a blind eye as it’s actually happening.” and unbelievably, a leaked Memo Suggests a Top U.S. Agency Will No Longer Recognize Holocaust Remembrance.

Words fail me. Donald Trump has demonstrated the implementation of exactly what we feared with executive orders all intended to completely remove a minority from society in exactly the same way as the Nazis.

So what does this all mean for the future of trans rights in the UK?

The UK’s Future is for now, still unwritten, but the danger is in plain sight

Here in the UK, both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, the leaders of our two largest supported Opposition Parties, have openly stated they would inflict exactly the same as Trump on trans people if in power in the UK, so unless the current political landscape changes, there is a genuine fear of what we face.

But as it stands, it cannot be claimed that Labour are fulfilling their pre or post election promise to protect and respect trans lives. Just this week Labour MP, Nadia Whittome, stood in Parliament stating that her own party has “been dragged in the wrong direction” on trans issues. “Our party must completely reject the tired narrative that trans people are a threat… It wasn’t true about gay men in the ‘80s, and it is not true about the trans community now.”

And in the latest move, Leader of Scottish Labour Anas Sarwar has made an extraordinary claim displaying either serious ignorance or a full-on commitment to Gender Critical beliefs and the destruction of trans rights. He has claimed in interviews that single sex spaces must be protected by Biological Sex and that this is the legal requirement of the Equality Act. The Equality Act protections of Gender Reassignment explicitly state trans people have legal protection against discrimination so single sex spaces are NOT restricted by Biological Sex. In misquoting the Equality Act he is advising employers to break the law in the same way Kemi Badenoch did with her schools trans guidance, and was precisely why she sought the help of the EHRC to change the Act, because even she understood that the Equality Act doesn’t protect single sex spaces based on Biological Sex.

This is just another example of todays political leaders pushing a Gender Critical narrative and spreading further fear throughout the trans community. So when will the words ‘Never Again’ truly mean ‘Never Again’ and not just a meaningless expression trotted out in every Holocaust Memorial. Can anyone reading this article fail to recognise the clear comparison to 1930’s Germany and the Nazis ‘hatred of difference’?

And I’m far from alone in calling out this comparison. This was a chilling message from Jewish-American Governor Pritzker, as there is a recognition that not only trans people are under attack in the US from hate comparable to the 1930s: “I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. “After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities — once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends — after that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next?” “All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history, then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.” “It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”

The world sat back in silence and did nothing during the 1930s. Please don’t sit back in silence when it’s clear it is happening again.

Are we really believing that as long as the Gender Critical Ideology doesn’t result in the building of Death Camps, that everything else is fair-game and just an acceptable expression of ‘Freedom of Speech’? Lives are being ruined, destroyed and ended. Families forever devastated.

I end by returning to the call from Keir Starmer at the Holocaust Memorial Service highlighted in Part 1, when he said;

“Never Again – today we have to make those words mean more.”

But to show these words really do mean more, action is needed. In the 1930s no one stopped the Nazis from completely removing the Jewish population from all aspects of society. In the 2020s no one is stopping the rapid erosion of trans rights and action is urgently needed.

Please don’t allow history to show that you said “Never Again” but failed to commit to it, and did nothing to stop