Among the vast wreckage that the new Trump administration has wrought across wide swaths of the government, many might have missed a small trans news item that will have grave consequences for trans kids. News broke that the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) would comply with the new administration’s order declaring that there are only male and female sexes, and that trans people do not exist.
At first blush, this may seem reasonable enough. How we define sex and gender has unfortunately evolved into one of the most hotly contested political debates of our time. But in practice, complying with the order means the NCMEC is losing important tools it needs in helping the public find missing trans children, of which the number is considerable.
According to an NBC News report, the Department of Justice ordered the NCMEC to remove all references to trans people from public-facing materials. “Our ability to locate and recover missing children and to protect victims of child sexual exploitation remains unchanged and will remain unchanged,” Derrick Driscoll, NCMEC’s chief operating officer told NBC News.
But according to a report by independent journalist Marisa Kabas, who first broke the news, agency insiders said they are throwing trans kids under the bus. “Rather than fight back, we chose to sacrifice trans children on the altar named ‘funding,’” an unnamed NCMEC staffer told Kabas. “If we are willing to capitulate to this, then the logical question must be asked: who’s next?”
Kabas’s report included snippets from a staff meeting last Wednesday during which staffers were ordered to deadname missing trans children in all reports as well as listing them by their sex assigned at birth in all cases.
Trans youth homelessness has long been a chronic problem. Parents often don’t accept their trans children and try all types of fly-by-night schemes and abuses to try to convince their trans child not to transition or to hold a “contrary” (in the parents’ eyes, at least) gender identity ever again, and said child finally hits a breaking point and leaves. It’s a queer tale as old as time.
As many as 40 percent of homeless kids are LGBTQ2S+, with a lot of those kids being trans. To say that trans kids are disproportionately represented amongst the NCMEC charges is an understatement. And yet, now the agency has to lie about critical personal details of missing trans kids just to appease Republican bigots.
Let’s walk through a hypothetical. Let’s say there is a trans girl whose birth name is Mark, but who goes by Lyndsay. She’s 15 years old and all of her friends know her as Lyndsay. Her parents do not support her and try all the usual tricks to try to tamp down on her gender identity: switching schools, cutting off internet access, taking away personal electronic devices, etc. Lyndsay decides enough is enough and runs away.
NCMEC puts out a listing for Lyndsay, but they are forced to use the name “Mark.” So now everyone is looking for a “boy” named “Mark,” when she’s really a girl named Lyndsay. No one knows they’re actually looking for a trans teenager. It’s clear on its face how ineffective the NCMEC’s approach would be. They may as well not even put out a listing—that kid is never being found.
That’s the thing I keep thinking about as Trump trods all over the government, erasing all of the disfavoured minority populations the Republican party has come to hate. Just because the president rules by fiat that trans people don’t exist doesn’t stop us from being here and going about our own trans lives. It just means that the government now becomes much less effective when we are involved.
This doesn’t just apply to trans people either, as the administration has rushed to erase references to Black people, Hispanic people, Jewish people and a host of other racial and religious minorities from official government communications. I focus on trans people because it happens to be the identity I personally belong to and have the most experience with.
The bottom line is that the NCMEC has one job, and that’s to prevent children from going missing and to help find them when they do. Their capitulation to Trump’s executive order stops them from finding missing trans children. I suspect, in the end, that’s what Republicans actually really want out of all this.
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