This year, as the gates closed during the final service of Yom Kippur, I looked around the bimah. I was surrounded by my beloved community: all of the service leaders for Ne’ilah were trans Jews. It was a euphoric experience, particularly in the face of rising political attacks on trans people that assume we aren’t real and shouldn’t exist.
A wave of anti-transgender legislative attacks and rhetoric has been growing in the United States for years. 2024 was the fifth year in a row to see a record-breaking number of anti-trans bills considered by American lawmakers. In 2023, the number of anti-trans bills was more than three times greater than in 2022. These legislative attacks on trans people that aim to restrict healthcare access, censor education, criminalize gender expression, limit ID access, protect discrimination and deny access to public space (among other things) are likely to continue to skyrocket as Trump’s administration comes to power.
I’m paying close attention to this because it affects me and my family directly, and because I love trans people and want us to be safe and free. Trans people are sacred members of all of our families, neighborhoods and Jewish communities, and as the attacks on our community grow, all Jews have an obligation to fight for trans people’s safety and thriving.
All Jews are impacted by the current attacks on trans people because they are part of a broader strategy — rooted in the Christian right, and Christian nationalism specifically — that both targets trans people directly and uses trans people as a wedge to open space for even more expansive Christian nationalist goals.
For the past couple years, I’ve been working with community groups and social justice organizations — some of whom focus on and center trans communities in their work, many of whom do not — to make these connections explicit. One of the ways I’ve been doing this is in a training called Liberation for All of Us: Queer and Trans Liberation as Collective Liberation, which explores the current anti-trans aggression, and how it is connected to and rooted in other forms of oppression like white Christian supremacy. Anyone working for freedom and safety for all people should be very alarmed by the climate for trans people right now — both because trans people deserve protection from the right’s attacks and because these attacks threaten all oppressed communities and make us all less safe.
The Christian nationalist movement has latched on to the growing visibility of trans people, to leverage a tried-and-true tactic of the political right: stoking a moral panic about a particular group or issue with the overarching goal of building right-wing power.
This tactic is not new. In the late 1970s — decades after Brown v. Board of Education desegregated public schools — the IRS began threatening the tax-exempt status of private, segregated, white-only Christian schools. In order to fight this, the evangelical right latched onto an issue that they felt would be more acceptable than “preserving tax advantages for racist schools”: abortion. Previously, even years after Roe legalized it in 1973, evangelicals had not taken a collective stance on abortion, with many evangelicals supporting abortion rights in many cases. However, as the protected status of white-only Christian schools came under threat, white evangelical leaders intentionally stoked a religious moral panic over abortion — not because of their values about “life” but because they wanted to build power to deny Jimmy Carter a second term to support their real motive of protecting segregated schools.
We continue to see the Christian right leverage anti-abortion sentiment among evangelicals to build power; now, trans people are included as a target of moral panic as well. Much of the rhetoric of this moral panic is similar to the right’s rhetoric about other issues: “family values”; protecting children (from learning about queer and trans people; from accessing gender-affirming care; and from being exposed to queer and trans people, who are cast as predatory); and protecting women (read: “protecting” white, Christian, heterosexual, cisgender women from deviating from the roles laid out for them by oppressive systems).
Though the multiplying anti-trans bills may not name it explicitly, they are rooted in a very specific form of Christian theology/ideology — one that says that the United States is and should be a Christian country, with the Christian right controlling every aspect of society. They oppose reproductive rights and believe that women should remain in subservient roles. They are anti-gay and invested in strategies like “conversion therapy,” an abusive Christian practice that is (for now) banned in many states, though it continues to happen. They believe that protecting the environment and the climate is unimportant (and wrong) because only God controls the weather and because they have their sights set on the kingdom of heaven over the earthly realm. They believe in Christian Zionism, an antisemitic and anti-Palestinian religious ideology that wants all Jews in Israel so that the rapture will come (at which point, all non-Protestants will convert or die) and supports massive violence against Palestinians to achieve this end.
Though some Christian nationalists are people of color, they are more likely to be white, and there is a significant overlap with white nationalism. A recent survey from PRRI and the Brookings Institution found that Christian nationalism is frequently correlated with anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views, and antisemitism. In many cases, they believe a wide range of both implicit and explicit conspiracy theories about Jews, including the “Great Replacement” or replacement theory, which claims that Jews are orchestrating immigration and other strategies of the left as a plot to destroy the “white race.”
Antisemitic conspiracy theories often come up in anti-trans rhetoric in familiar ways — powerful Jews pulling strings behind the scenes, orchestrating the trans movement. Just as these types of conspiracy theories have been used against the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter and immigration movements, the implication is that Black, Brown and trans communities are not powerful enough on their own to achieve the wins that they have — entwining antisemitism with anti-Blackness, anti-immigrant racism and other forms of white supremacy as well as anti-trans sentiment.
Christian nationalist ideology isn’t niche; it is entrenched in the top levels of government, and supported by powerful and well-funded figures and institutions. Its anti-trans ideology is increasingly showing up in mainstream liberal publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times. The latter newspaper received two open letters in 2023 criticizing its anti-trans bias in reporting, one from GLAAD with other organizations and public figures, and one from more than 100 contributing writers. In many cases, this bias takes the form of “asking questions,” an often oversimplified and disingenuous approach that hides its bias in an insistence that it is simply “balanced reporting.” But this coverage often comes with a softer form of moral panic, couched as concern: raising alarms, for example, about the health impacts of gender-affirming medical care for trans youth like puberty-blocking medications but not mentioning that other medications widely prescribed for young people — such as Accutane, the acne medication — have the similar side effects. Or articles expressing concern over gender-affirming mastectomies for trans teens but not about cisgender (non-trans) teen girls getting breast implants, which is also a form of gender-affirming care and one that is much more common among teens than trans-related surgeries.
In order to support trans people, it is crucial to recognize and push back on these assumptions, including in these cases where they are implicit or subconscious. The fact that there are more out trans people in our society now than there were in the past is not a bad thing. Being trans is not a negative outcome, a pathology or a problem. Trans gender-affirming surgeries have much lower regret rates than other common surgeries, and the increase in accessibility of these interventions contributes to the thriving of trans people, including trans young people. The boundary-breaking, paradigm-redefining existence of trans people, especially trans youth, who are creating new beautifully gendered realities all the time, opens space for everyone to experience more freedom in their gender, including cisgender people, who are also subject to societal limitations based on strict gender roles and categories. Neither trans people nor cis people are served by a rigid, biologically determined gender binary that says that women and men are exclusive, sole and fixed gender categories, and that they determine a wide range of characteristics from how we emote to what our hobbies should be to who and how we love.
Supporting trans people also means reaching for a world in which everyone can live free from oppression and violence; in which no one is targeted, criminalized, defamed or harmed because of their identity or life circumstances. Because trans people exist in all communities and identities — and are targeted in specific and intersectional ways — they will not be safe as long as BIPOC communities, immigrants, disabled people, sex workers and other oppressed communities are targeted.
This also means challenging the violence of Christian nationalism wherever it shows up, including Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s initiative to overhaul the federal government according to Christian nationalist goals; and Project Esther, also from the Heritage Foundation, which purports to fight antisemitism (with close to zero Jews included in its planning or leadership) through targeting Palestine solidarity activism but ignores (and tacitly supports) the explicitly antisemitic aims of Christian nationalism, Christian Zionism and the white nationalist hate groups closely associated with the Christian right.
The coming years are going to be terrifying times for our communities, and we need to stretch our ability to take care of and fight for people. This means investing in our local communities; supporting each other as basic resources become increasingly unaffordable and unavailable; and protecting each other from the growing attacks on all of our rights. It means donating to trans organizations mobilizing for our safety and supporting trans-led groups doing organizing and care work in our regions and communities. As Jews, we root our commitments to care in gemilut hasadim (“acts of lovingkindness”), material care that are required of us as we build the world we long for in our every day.
To learn more about Christian nationalism, check out:
- Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America by Talia Lavin
- The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart
- “God and Country” (documentary based on The Power Worshippers)
- Articles from Political Research Associates and is podcast, “Inform Your Resistance”
And to learn more about the connections to anti-trans oppression:
- Imara Jones’s podcast “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine”
- Writing and commentary by ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio
- Bring the Liberation for All of Us training to your community
