As expected, Trump wrapped up his first week in office with yet more executive orders advancing the anti-trans agenda that he campaigned on. Late on Monday, the White House released the noxiously titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” banning trans people from the military. By Tuesday afternoon, six service members who are trans filed a suit in federal district court to block the executive order, represented by GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Other suits are reportedly in process. As with Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology,” issued last week, the scope of the order is broad and bombastic, meant to send a message as much as it attempts to communicate actionable changes to law and policy. All the same, it is an indication that despite what some dismissed as mere campaign rhetoric, Trump’s and his fellow Republicans’ scapegoating of trans people over the past year was indeed previewing his plans. Those plans are dangerous.

Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from serving in the military is one element of what appears to be a wide-reaching plan to erase the idea that trans people exist. Via saccharine appeals to honor, humility, and country, the order advances the idea that trans identity is a form of dishonesty. The rhetoric is also far more extreme than past Trump administration rhetoric about trans service members.

First, the order offers a bogeyman that is widely promoted on the right, with the mock diagnosis that “the Armed Forces have been afflicted with radical gender ideology.” Then it isolates trans people, stating their identity is “inconsistent” with “the........

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