Transgender genocide
Transgender genocide or trans genocide is a term used by some scholars and activists to describe the targeting of transgender people as part of wider genocides, as well as describe an elevated level of systematic discrimination and violence against transgender people.
The term is related to the common meaning as well as the legal concept of genocide, which the Genocide Convention describes as an intentional effort to completely or partially destroy a group based on its nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. Some legal scholars and transgender rights activists have argued this definition should be expanded to include transgender persons.
Scholarship
International law
The acts that are constituent to the crime of genocide in the Genocide Convention, when perpetrated against transgender, non-binary, and intersex people as groups, are not viewed legally as genocide, but as crimes against humanity. Some scholars have argued that the definition of genocide should be applied to transgender persons, or expanded to cover transgender persons, because they are victims of institutional discrimination, persecution, and violence. Caitlin Biddolph in analyzing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia highlights how queer people have been repeatedly ignored as victim groups in the Genocide Convention due to being perceived as non-reproductive groups as opposed to the groups listed in the convention. Similarly, Jess Gifkins and Dean Cooper-Cunningham highlight how lesbian, gay, and transgender populations have only been received passing mention in scholarship of the responsibility to protect.In a 2008 academic article in the Journal of Hate Studies, Jeremy Kidd and Tarynn Witten argue that the abuse and violence against transgender people would qualify as genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention, if the definition was expanded to include gender identity and sexual orientation. In line with the convention, they argue that transphobic discrimination and violence are not random or atomized, but rather come from the intent "to eradicate a group of people who violate a widely held and popularly reinforced norm of binary gender with a connection to heteronormative sexuality." They say that this motive of "eradication/annihilation" is systemic, pandemic, institutionalized, and spread widely through media and film. They say that transgender people face an increased risk of abuse and violence throughout their lives and that, despite being targeted in ways that fit some criteria of the Genocide Convention, they do not have access to the same legal protections as other groups. This is supported by others such as Brayan Alexander Chávez Rivera who argues that acts defined in the convention are carried out with the intent to destroy LGBTQ people as a group, and L. June Bloch who describes how many of the bills and laws enacted by US legislatures in recent years fit the detailed genocidal acts of the convention, but as transgender people do not constitute one of the protected groups of the convention the attempts to cause "serious bodily or mental harm and inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of a group" is not classed as legally genocidal. Shannon Fyfe states that while the actions of US governments and legislatures do not meet the legal charge of genocide, due to transgender people not being one of the protected classes, this is a failure of the law, and that the actions of various state legislatures shows genocidal intent against the transgender community.
The Rome Statute, a 1998 treaty that established the International Criminal Court and codified investigations into genocide, outlines a definition of gender-based persecution. This definition, however, only "refers to the two sexes, male and female." Valerie Oosterveld attributed this definition to conservative political pressure from states like Azerbaijan, the Holy See, and some nongovernmental organizations in the lead-up to the treaty's adoption. While this definition has not yet been litigated at the ICC, it is likely that it would be used to exclude transgender people from international legal protections.
In a 2014 article, Brian Kritz assessed the ability of the International Criminal Court to protect and promote transgender rights, arguing that existing law should be explicitly extended to transgender people. He noted that the lack of existing protections for transgender people under international law was in-and-of-itself "a violation of the basic human rights of the global transgender and intersex populations." Scholars have made similar arguments regarding the legal definition of crimes against humanity.
In the past, international courts have interpreted genocidal sexual violence to be a problem of cisgender women alone, often classifying the same systematic sexual violence against all members, who are not cisgender women, as crimes against humanity, as was done by the United Nations International Fact-Finding Mission for Myanmar. David Eichert argues that this interpretation "discounts the suffering of victims and needlessly weakens attempts to identify, prevent, and punish the crime of genocide" and pleads for the field to adopt a broader understanding of genocidal sexual violence, which is not limited to cisgender women alone. While the International Criminal Court has not yet adjudicated on sexual violence in genocide, in Prosecutor v Ntaganda it accepted that cisgender men could be victims of sexual violence. Later the Office of the Prosecutor's 2023 Policy on Gender-Based Crimes connected gender-based violence to genocide, and included "LGBTQI+ people" in its understanding of "gender-based violence".
Genocide studies
Genocide studies research that focuses exclusively on transgender people is rare, with Lily Nellans noting that "the unique and specific experiences of queer people during genocide remain absent from this type of research, limiting our understanding of genocidal processes". Henry Theriault, former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, has argued that discrimination against transgender people is "largely tolerated" despite the fact that identical laws targeting other marginalized people would spark severe public outcry.Alexander Laban Hinton, an anthropologist focused on genocide, has criticized what he characterizes as "the prioritization of certain protected groups and not others" in established legal definitions of genocide, specifically noting transgender people as a group that could never be targeted by genocide in the status quo. Haley Marie Brown describes violence against transgender women as a "life force atrocity" that is justified using genocidal logic, describing how such violence is often coupled with attempts to eliminate any evidence of a person's transness through complete destruction of their bodies.
Leah Owen, a lecturer at Swansea University, has argued that anti-transgender ideologies rely on "discourses of 'toxification'", drawing on a paper by Rhiannon Neilsen that proposed "toxification" as a more precise alternative to the traditional fourth stage of genocide, dehumanization. Owen compares Nielsen's concept of toxification, in which groups of people are compared to pathogens or threats and their removal from society is necessitated, to statements from Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, Janice Raymond, Abigail Shrier, and Helen Joyce, arguing that regardless of agreement on other issues, anti-transgender activists consistently seek to reduce or eliminate transgender people's public presence. Nevertheless, she refrains from claiming that the modern anti-gender movement is inciting genocide yet, arguing that it lacks a securitizing urge to mobilize against transgender people.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has described gender critical feminism as "genocidal ideology that seeks the complete eradication of trans identity from around the world". In a statement on the issue, the Lemkin Institute argued that rhetoric from anti-trans activists depicting trans women as dangerous were not based on fact, but instead as essential to manufacturing consent for anti-trans violence.
Biomedical and genetic ethics
Some surveys have indicated that there is a concern among transgender individuals that trans-associated genetic research may lead to eugenics. A study conducted in 2021 found that many of those surveyed believe that genetic research could end up with a kind of "eugenics" that would, in effect, "eliminate" transgender people, while some respondents feared that, in more transphobic areas, trans-associated research would lead to "medical genocide". This concern has been supported by scholars who highlight the link between the medical care transgender people can access and receive and eugenics movements historically and contemporaneously. In 2022, a study found that almost of half of individuals interviewed feared the "weeding out" of LGBTQ people while a quarter explicitly referred to "cleansing or eugenics". Lawyer Agripino Kennedy shows the link of biological essentialist language in recent US laws and bills targeting transgender people to eugenic ideologies, and the history of eugenic laws targeting the queer community, and transgender people specifically in the US and Germany.Sterilization that is forced upon transgender people, in order to obtain legal recognition, is characterized by various researchers, including political theorist Anna Carastathis, as a violation of reproductive rights, eugenic, and genocidal. On the extent of this practice among European countries, she cites a 2013 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Recognizing that transgender persons are not covered by legal definitions of genocide, she argues "that trans people are systematically written out of legal existence" both through the compulsory sterilization and their exclusion from the Genocide Convention. In contradistinction to Carastathis, political scientist Jemima Repo argues that compulsory sterilization does give transgender people a political existence, but at the expense of a capacity to extend kinship into the future. As a result, Repo says that reproduction, at least in Finland, becomes a mode of transgender resistance in the face of sterilization demands.