The name Dan Bishop probably won’t stand out for many in the current rogues’ gallery of American politics. But as the sponsor of North Carolina’s infamous 2016 HB2 Bill, he is influential.
This so-called “bathroom Bill”, sought to compel government and state facilities to allow people to access bathrooms only based on the sex listed on their birth certificate. It was the catalyst for a new wave of discrimination against trans people in America, and is now a key tenet of make-America-great-again (Maga) authoritarianism.
Given the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ Bills since, it feels almost quaint to recall that back in 2016, HB2 generated substantial opposition across civil society. In subsequent years, the trickle of anti-trans Bills became a flood of anti-LGBTQ Bills.
In 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union tracked 533 anti-LGBTQ Bills across America. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk, and those who orbit Maga authoritarianism have made attacking trans people both ideology and policy.
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In a television interview last month, the actor Laverne Cox cut to the chase: “This has been happening on a state level for many years ... Now it’s happening on a federal level ... At the end of the day, trans people are less than 1 per cent of the population, and trans people are not the reason you can’t afford eggs. We’re not the reason that you can’t afford healthcare. We’re not the reason that you can’t buy a house or your rent is too high. I think they’re focusedon the wrong 1 per cent. I think the other 1 per cent is the reason for all those things.”
That statement frames anti-trans propaganda as a distraction tactic, which is part of it. But why trans people? To know how and why certain levers are being pulled, we need to understand them.
It is 20 years since the social and political scientist Karen Stenner published The Authoritarian Dynamic, which analysed why authoritarian personality types become politically activated. Reading her research, it helps to understand the work of the psychologist Bob Altemeyer, who developed the RWA (right-wing authoritarianism) Scale.
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While we tend to look to political beliefs and ideologies as indicators of a political “type”, the social science on authoritarianism focuses not on politics, but personality. Authoritarian personality indicators include an aversion to difference in all forms; a desire for “oneness and sameness”, as Stenner puts it; cognitive incapacity regarding one’s ability to deal with complexity and diversity, and a lack of openness to experience.
Distinguishing between traditional right-wing conservatism and authoritarianism is key. Conservatism does not like novelty. Authoritarianism embraces radical change. As Stenner said on the Larger Us podcast, “you think of authoritarianism as an aversion to difference across space – complexity, diversity, variety, disorder – and conservatism as an aversion to difference over time, which is change”.
Taken together, this sheds light on the types of people and conditions that trigger authoritarian movements. It is the followers, not necessarily the leaders, who propel the movements.
Stenner writes, “what authoritarianism actually does is inclines one toward attitudes and behaviours variously concerned with structuring society and social interactions in ways that enhance sameness and minimise diversity of people, beliefs, and behaviours. It tends to produce a characteristic array of stances, all of which have the effect of glorifying, encouraging, and rewarding uniformity and of disparaging, suppressing, and punishing difference ... ultimately these stances involve actual coercion of others.”
A mindset that enhances sameness and minimises diversity fetishises rigid gender roles; macho and virile masculinity, and subservient femininity. It is no coincidence that US federal protection for abortion ended just as anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ Bills surged.
Anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ policies are characteristic of the global authoritarian playbook. In the recent past, this includes Russia banning gender-affirming healthcare and representations of LGBTQ+ people in public. Last week, Hungary banned Pride marches. But similar moves were also characteristic of 20th-century authoritarianism and its extreme form, totalitarianism.
There is no need to reach for historical analogies; we can simply look at what the Nazis did to trans and queer people. They revoked the “transvestite pass” (the terminology is of its time), an early form of gender recognition documentation; they shut down queer clubs in Schönenberg in Berlin, then the global epicentre of queer nightlife.
Magnus Hirschfeld (after whom the landmark LGBTQ+ rights centre in Dublin was named) was assaulted and his citizenship revoked, his Institute for Sexual Science was raided. Thousands of books, journals, and documents were burned on what is now Bebelplatz, as Goebbels speechified to a backdrop of flames.
Last November at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, it was depressing – but not surprising – to witness some of the loudest cheers reserved for transphobia talking points. Anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ drives are a key indicator that authoritarianism, at the leader and follower level, is gaining traction. That was the case in the 20th century and it is the case now.
