Trump’s campaign ran on the word “again,” the promises to “take back” a sense of safety and “bring back”  a simpler time. When he pledged to build the wall or to fight a variety of non-existent crime waves (urban, immigrant) he was promising to shield Americans from the strange, the unknown, the unpredictable. Here, too, queers can serve as convenient shorthand. By tweeting that he has decided to ban transgender people from the military, Trump shows that he is the autocrat that he was elected to be: he can control people by issuing an order. The order juxtaposes the military—the symbol of Americans’ security—with transgender people, who make so many Americans feel so anxious. 

Looking at a person who embodies choice—the possibility of being or becoming different—can be like staring into the abyss of uncertainty. In this sense, seeing a Pride march or a trans person can make a person feel very queer: it demonstrates possibility, making the world frightening. It speaks to the modern predicament the social psychologist Erich Fromm wrote about in his book about the rise of Nazism, Escape from Freedom: the ability to reinvent oneself in almost every way. One is no longer born a tradesman or a peasant, or the lifelong resident of a particular quarter, or a man or a woman. This freedom can feel like an unbearable burden. No wonder the most notorious piece of American anti-transgender legislation—the North Carolina bathroom bill—focused on the birth certificate as the most important document. In mandating that people use public bathrooms in accordance with the sex assigned at birth, the law created a situation where some people who looked, acted, smelled like—who identified and lived as—women were required to use the men’s bathroom, and vice versa—but it established that one’s position in the world was set from birth.

For the last half-century, the American LGBT movement has bent to accommodate the belief that a person’s identity is already present at birth. “Born this way” has been the mantra that has enabled many of the political advances and much of the cultural acceptance for LGBT people, even as it has pushed out of view many queer people’s lived experience of choice. But no amount of reassurance that LGBT people “can’t help it” can alleviate the anxiety brought on by the spectacle of people transgressing gender roles. This is the kind of anxiety Trump addressed as a candidate and has addressed again with his apparent promise to purge transgender people who are already serving in the military. This is no distraction: it is the very heart of Trumpism.