The Trump administration’s persecution of trans people — endorsed by the extremists on the Supreme Court on Tuesday night — is not just about trans people.
The pain this crusade inflicts upon those who ask for nothing more than to live as their real selves is plenty bad enough: The six conservative justices allowed the Department of Defense to immediately purge from the military thousands of trans people who have been putting their lives on the line for us for years — even as legal challenges to that purge are still making their way through the courts. That will destroy thousands of careers, upending livelihoods, housing, and families. It will also deprive the military of vital expertise that took many years and millions of dollars to develop. The damage will be irreversible, even if the ban is ultimately struck down.
That is appalling enough. But state-sponsored cruelty towards trans people — or any minority — bleeds outwards, affecting other groups as well. It also hardens Americans’ capacity to tolerate more cruelty. And no one can avoid the harm caused by all of that.
A bathroom in a swanky hotel in a state that leads the nation on equal rights seems like an unlikely setting to illustrate all of this, but here we are.
On Saturday, Ansley Baker and her girlfriend were at The Liberty Hotel in Boston to celebrate Kentucky Derby day. Baker — tall, with close-cropped hair — was in the bathroom, minding her own business, when other women there decided she looked insufficiently feminine and was in fact a man. They alerted security. A guard at the hotel — an actual man — went into the women’s bathroom, banged on her stall door, and demanded that Baker show identification proving she belonged there. As she exited, other women in the bathroom called her a creep and told the guard to “get him out of here.”
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Baker and her partner eventually left the hotel in tears.
“It honestly just felt like my worst nightmare coming true,” she told my colleague Nick Stoico.
The hotel put the security guard on leave and issued a statement to say it “is and always will be an ally of the LGBTQ+ community and a place where everyone is welcome and celebrated.”
This is always where we were headed. Republicans’ electorally useful obsession with trans people was of course going to mean that others who don’t fit the stereotypes of what men or women look like would be targeted, too. And not just by party leaders, but by Americans who have bought into the hysteria and are just fine with its consequences.
“This administration is actively trying to create the people in that bathroom, who are doing their work for them,” said Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law.
Levi was one of the attorneys who argued the case that made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to recognize same sex marriage 22 years ago. For a while there, she saw a steady expansion of rights for LGBTQ+ people, including those in the military. Now she is representing 32 transgender service members and recruits fighting the administration’s attempt to purge them. The federal judge in D.C. who heard that case issued an injunction in March blocking the administration, and said the ban undermines national security, is likely unconstitutional, and is “soaked with animus and dripping with pretext.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly proven her point with hateful rhetoric. “No more dudes in dresses,” he said in a video posted by the department on Tuesday. “We are done with that s**t.”
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Levi is arguing that Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision — issued in a different case challenging the ban — should not affect her clients.
Whether or not she prevails, there is the potential for much wider damage here, as Baker’s experience shows.
As Levi sees it, attacks on transgender people are a kind of test.
“If people can tolerate the cruelty done to transgender people, they can tolerate a wide range of cruelty against other individuals,” she said. “You are transformed by living in a country that ... supports and endorses destroying the lives of people who are putting their lives on the line for you.”
We have seen that transformation before, the gradual acceptance of escalating acts of cruelty, starting with a single, demonized minority.
It never ends well.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com.