A tornado of executive orders has arrived from the White House, with transgender people in the eye of the storm. A directive implementing these orders froze trillions of federal dollars, shocking our nation and federally-funded campus. Its central threat was this: eliminate “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” or federal funding will cease. As Prof. Kate Manne, philosophy, helpfully sums up the research, preferential U.S. hiring practices still favor white men. So Trump could have just cut to the chase, as his State Department appointee Darren Beattie did and declared “competent [sic] white men must be in charge.” Cornell’s leadership reassured us with a measured Jan. 28 statement. It was reassuring that Cornell was not making immediate changes in response to this threat, even if the statement was released after a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump's directive. No mention of trans people made it into that statement, but I recommend keeping an eye on us.
Cornell’s founding principle of “... any person … any study” and our core value of free and open inquiry and expression are under threat. Studying the White House’s attack on transgender people shows exactly how this threat is operating, what the stakes are, and how we can resist.
The executive order on K–12 education also explicitly targets the content of instruction, including trans issues alongside sex education/reproductive rights, racial justice and climate change. As Erin Reed has reported, many districts are publicly refusing to comply with this order, emphasizing that it is illegal and against core institutional values. Staffers at U.S.-funded medical facilities in Chad “had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die. They chose the children.”
We are already learning what compliance looks like at the United States Department of Agriculture, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Census Bureau. National Science Foundation grants are being vetted for ideological purity, with “woman” and “female” among the many banned words. Dr. Jeremy Faust is reporting that “the CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal,” and that researchers must censor these terms from their research: “Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.”
It’s beyond alarming that political censoring is happening at key institutions of research. But it should be crystal clear that if this practice were followed at Cornell, our core value of free and open inquiry and expression would be cooked. Forget the “What We Know” Project, hello “What We’re Banned from Considering” training.
This censorship is linked with policies that will result in the deaths of transgender, nonbinary, intersex and other gender-diverse people — policies which Cornell has a specific power and duty to resist. The White House also issued an executive order attempting to ban gender-affirming care for youth nationwide, including 18 year olds. This ban contradicts the expert medical consensus of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Reed provides a more detailed line-by-line analysis, arguing that this order contradicts medical evidence and existing law and rulings. Contrary to online moral panic, only 0.1 percent of American youth are accessing this care, and it consists mostly of interventions that remain legal for cisgender youth. This care brings the mental health of trans youth in line with their cisgender peers. Interventions aimed at ‘converting’ trans youth to cisgender identities appear to worsen mental health and to increase suicidality. And the largest study to date of this youth population found a causal link between anti-trans policies like Trump’s and significantly more suicide attempts. Prohibiting the study of these topics both harms our nation’s youth and mandates that researchers become complicit in concealing it.
Surely ‘... any… person...’ means that Cornell cannot permit making our community members politico-medical refugees. Because Weill Cornell Medicine is a healthcare provider and research hospital, there is a stronger responsibility to do no harm. Pediatricians at Weill Cornell previously advocated for treating trans youth despite political attacks. As of Monday, Feb. 3, this statement has been removed from their website. Weill Cornell, please, choose the children, and do not preemptively discontinue research and care of trans youth. Indeed, New York Attorney General Letitia James has just reminded you of your legal obligation to provide this care, and has joined 14 AGs in a joint statement defending the legal right to this care. Hundreds protested New York University Langone on Feb. 3 for withholding this care. Dr. Jeffery Birnbaum at the University Hospital of Brooklyn has vowed to his patients, “I’m willing to go to jail to continue to provide your care.”
Philosopher Thomas Hobbes theorized that “Reputation of power is power.” Trump creates this reputation with shows of power against targets of fear, which is used to justify bulldozing evidence and law to expand executive power, destroying people and institutions. Hitler also targeted trans and queer people, who then joined Jewish people in concentration camps. Hitler targeted Jewish people with “outsider” fear campaigns, and Trump is using that same strategy on immigrants now, including the establishment of an immigration prison in Guantanamo Bay. Trump plans to “combat anti-semitism” by (illegally) deporting international students who dare to join protests that question whether the mass killing of civilians in Gaza is justified or who might protest Trump’s plan to literally bulldoze Gaza and exile Palestinans. Simultaneously, Trump is removing Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Pentagon, and illegally permitting Elon Musk, a Nazi salute throwing civilian, to seize all executive funding agencies — just a week after Musk addressed the rising anti-semitic German AfD party, saying that their country has “too much of a focus on past guilt.” Just like Viktor Orbán, this gives Musk and Trump control of taxpayer money to enforce funding threats at the whimsy of the executive branch alone. After all, “white men must be in charge.”
Hobbes theorized power, but trans people lead lives of resistance, which also permeatesthe Black History we celebrate this month. This threatens Trump’s reputational power, and this makes the trans struggle everyone’s struggle. Gather your people, and compel your local groups, institutions and politicians to resist until we can’t.
Willow Starr is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. They can be reached at w.starr@cornell.edu.
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