Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice

Logo Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention is a registered charity in the state of Pennsylvania in the USA. On 29 November 2022 they published a statement on the genocidal nature of the gender critical movement’s ideology that is most clear. Below you can read a short summary of this heartwarming statement. (Click here to read their full statement.)

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention voices its concern over the growing number of laws introduced in the United States that target transgender individuals and the transgender community. The Lemkin Institute believes that the so-called “gender critical movement” that is behind these laws is a fascist movement furthering a specifically genocidal ideology that seeks the complete eradication of trans identity from the world.

The gender critical movement denies that transgender identity is real and seeks to eradicate it completely from society. Many gender critical ideologues identify themselves as feminists and believe themselves to be protecting women from men. They accuse transgender women of being stealth men and of transgender men of being self-hating women. They routinely accuse transgender people of being mentally ill. The movement calls for discrimination against and harrassment of transgender individuals and the transgender community through laws and policies that criminalize trans identity and trans life.

The ideological constructions of transgender women promoted by gender critical ideologues are particularly genocidal. Transgender women are represented as stealth border crossers who seek to defile the purity of cisgender women, much as Tutsi women were viewed in Hutu Power ideology and Jewish men in Nazi antisemitism. Like the religious targets of genocidal violence, trans people are often described as somehow polluted, sinful, or against God. They are blamed for a host of social problems that have nothing to do with them or with the free expression of their identities.

Transgender flag

The Lemkin Institute reminds readers that one of the first libraries to be burned under the National Socialists in Germany was the library and archive of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a groundbreaking research organization studying human sexuality and gender. The Nazis believed that national strength and existential power could only be achieved through an imposition of a strict gender binary within the racially-pure “national community.” A fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide.

“In the United States, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, 286 anti-transgender bills have been introduced between January 1, 2021 and October 13, 2022.”

It must be said that the reality of transgender identity cannot be challenged. Transgender people have existed throughout history. Scientific research on sexual development has demonstrated the complexity of biological sex and the biological basis for gender diversity. Furthermore, gender identity is a very private and subjective matter that engages with deeply felt realities and the social constructions that exist in society. It is a part of the process of human expression that is protected by universal human rights and the US Constitution.

The fundamentalist interpretation of gender and the obsession with the gender binary hurts all people who do not conform to traditional gender stereotypes, not just transgender people, by imposing strict norms on human expression and experience through the use of shame and stigma.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention points out that the gender critical movement is not about protecting women. It is about exacting control over the bodies of marginalized people and thrusting them outside of the community of moral obligation if they fail to conform to the norms of the gender that has been assigned to them by others. Anti-trans initiatives are closely tied to assaults on the rights of women, people of color, minority religious communities, and immigrants in the US and elsewhere. There is no shutting the floodgates once states and societies acquiesce to the eradication of a specific people from the earth.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention expressed solidarity with trans people across the globe. We ask people to choose to protect the human rights of human beings who do not fit easily into the simplistic gender binary. We ask people to question what agendas they are serving by supporting anti-trans hate speech and policy initiatives.

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