Who gets to be a person?
Plus, January 6 rioters return home
You cannot make humanity illegal, but you can try
On his first day in office, Donald Trump signed an edict declaring that the government would only recognize two genders — male and female. He also signed a series of sweeping executive orders declaring an emergency at the US southern border; ending the use of the app CBP One, which immigrants use to apply for legal immigration status; and an order undermining the right to birthright citizenship.
While fighting these orders in courts is a worthy cause, it’s also worth pointing out that the law isn’t as rigid or as clear as Americans like to believe. It’s a bendable structure, based on interpretation. And the decades-long effort to install conservative judges was designed for this moment.
CNN reports that Trump also removed senior leadership from key roles in the Justice Department agency overseeing the nation’s immigration courts.
Each of these moves has kicked off legal debate over, “Can he really do that?” But that’s beside the point. Nearly every time Trump has done something illegal, he’s gotten away with it. Pundits, armchair or otherwise, have already spilled a lot of ink wondering if these moves will really affect anything substantial. But I can tell you they already have.
Whether you like what he does or not, there is no arguing with the results. Trump is an effective president. He does what he says he will do. And these orders are sending a clear message to America about who gets to be considered a person over the next four years.
Pregnant people are not full humans. Because now they have fewer rights than their own fetuses. Children born to people the government terms “illegal aliens” are not considered full humans, because their 14th Amendment right to citizenship is now being debated. People who are queer, trans, and gender nonconforming are now denied their full right to humanity
This doesn’t mean that pregnant people, LGBTQ people, and immigrants will stop existing. But their humanity is now under attack not just in the courts but also in our culture.
On Monday, I took my kids to the African American Museum of Iowa. There, we listened to oral history videos where Black Iowans spoke of the reality of racism in America. In one video, Ruth and Ruby Haddix described Iowa’s integrated schools, explaining that they couldn’t go to prom because it was held at the Surf Ballroom, which at that time was Whites-only. The schools were integrated on paper, yes, but the disparities were vast. One thing that struck me watching these videos was the message that there didn't need to be laws enforcing segregation; people were shown their place through cultural enforcement. Through what was deemed as proper and acceptable and “the way things were done.”
It reminded me how injustice often happens in the name of niceness, in the name of propriety and keeping the peace.
Right before the election, I published an essay by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, V Fixmer-Oraiz, MJ Meidlinger, and Talia Meidlinger, who wrote about the harassment they were already experiencing in their progressive college town in Iowa. And what was stunning was not just the cruelty, but the silence from their “well-meaning” friends and neighbors.
Cruelty doesn’t need our consent to endure, and it doesn’t need our law enforcement. It just needs our silence.
So many pieces of advice over the next coming years will encourage people to stop reading so much news. I agree to some extent. I believe the online activism of our age has supplanted real-life community organizing and mutual aid. I also believe that endlessly scrolling through a loop of bad news can bring people to despair and not to action. But I don’t think the answer is to disengage entirely. We have to engage, but we have to do so in ways that result in solidarity and connection and community.
Cruelty doesn’t need our consent to endure, and it doesn’t need our law enforcement. It just needs our silence.
We don’t need Trump’s orders to be enforced through laws (although many of them will be in the coming months and years), because they’re already being enforced through harassment and everyday violence that reminds people who is allowed to belong and who isn’t. And they are also enforced through our silence.
Male rage returns home
This week, Donald Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,500 January 6 rioters. Many of these people were caught because the women in their lives reported them. Hundreds of the girlfriends, wives, and dating app matches of these men turned them in.
Now they are returning home, exonerated and aggrieved.
Despite news stories and cultural narratives that make women feel afraid to go out after dark, afraid of strangers and shadows, women are in the most danger from the men they know. In the United States, nearly half of all female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners. According to data from RAINN, about 8 of 10 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. Specifically, 59% are acquaintances. 34% are family members. Only 7% are strangers to the victim.
This weaponization of male rage is happening elsewhere. Anti-abortion advocates are encouraging men to report their partner’s abortions.
Now that White male grievance is sitting in the White House, and our country’s most powerful voices encourage the masculine colonization of public and online spaces, I wonder how men will feel empowered to act out these aggressions.
In a USA Today investigation from October, the estranged wife and children of Oath Keepers founder and January 6 rioter Elmer Stewart Rhodes said that his incarceration allowed them to feel peace. USA Today reported, “Rhodes’ incarceration brought a relief [his family] had dreamed about for years. The man who they say abused, threatened and physically and mentally hurt them had finally been caged.”
Rhodes has been sitting in jail. His ex-wife and adult son worry he is stewing, waiting for vindication and revenge. And his family told reporters they were making plans to leave if Rhodes returned, because they feared for their lives.
All these years of op-eds and essays hand-wringing over why women won’t date Republicans and how silly it all is, chiding women for being alone, extolling the benefits of marriage — and the reality is still if violence happens, it’s the men we know, not the men in the shadows, who pose the most danger. Policy initiatives and trend articles encouraging marriage were less about ending male loneliness than about curbing female independence.
January 6 rioters returning home with their male rage exonerated and weaponized are just another reminder of that brutal reality.
The anti-trans stuff is particularly pernicious. For one thing, none of those actions keep ‘men’ out of women’s spaces. Women’s prisons still have male guards and wardens. Women’s sports teams still have male coaches, trainers, and doctors. The ONLY thing those actions do is reinforce a brutal gender hierarchy in which cis males can interact with women ONLY IN POSITIONS OF AUTHORITY OVER WOMEN. This is exactly the model used for race relations under Jim Crow laws: there were NO spaces entirely for Black people — white males could go anywhere they wanted — and Blacks were allowed in white spaces only as inferiors. White women had Black domestic servants but no Black bridge club members or doctors. See the same pattern in gender relations now? All interactions reinforced the unjust hierarchy.
Many of the J6 insurrectionists, maybe most(?), are already put of jail. The point of their pardons, besides the messaging, is that many of them were legally barred from owning firesrms because of their convictions. And now they can buy and own them again.