Genocide is a process. The important thing is to recognize the mechanisms. Waiting until some arbitrary number of people (say, 80%) are exterminated before giving it the official embossed and perforated genocide stamp is an entirely useless and navel gazing act. At the end of the day, the semantics are immaterial. It is the mechanisms which must be identified and combated, and they must be combated long before the editorial boards of the bourgeois papers start writing opinion pieces 10 years ex post facto saying "aww shucks, it really is a tragedy we allowed this to happen."

I've been doing that shit for a while now, and nah it's totally a genocide even if it's not like, a bombing campaign and is just the quiet separation, relocation, and traumatization of families. The mode for a specifically trans or queer genocide will always be different than ethnic genocides, we are evenly distributed across every country on the planet, ethnicities concentrate in specific regions that can be targeted militarily.

I don't think it's in bad taste, the genocide in Gaza is at a much later and more intense stage, but the conservatives are fucking trying, they're clearly trying. It's at an ambiguous early stage in many respects, but it is very much already happening. The full force of it is more likely to be stopped and is also farther away. Importantly, the intent is absolutely here.

Beginning? Until somewhat recently being trans in this country was all but a death sentence and for many still is. Over the past few decades that has been getting better for us and I’m actually in a relatively safe place. What’s going on in those states feels more like an attempt to return to the days where our suppression and eradication was the status quo. It is not the beginning but the end unless the US goes full fash (look up Magnus Hirschfeld and the institute he founded).

The only ways I see it being insensitive is that most trans people in the us don’t currently experience anything like the horrors that Palestinians do. Also calling it the beginning is ignoring what has been going on in this puritanical hellhole since it’s inception.

I think the invitation to contrast existential oppressions is risky because so many people subscribe to binary thinking. They start a thought process of, say, "X is a genocide and I think Y is a lesser oppression, so it's not genocide". Is that a useful or helpful thought process? I don't think so.

Instead, we should emphasize our commonalities. Your Twitter user is both Palestinian and trans, facing both oppressions. They come, fundamentally, from the same sources, from capitalism, whether it's reinforcing normative gender identity to build a false consciousness for its own protection (fascism) or creating Lebensraum for its ethnic supremacists carrying out an ethnic cleansing project in the interests of empire (fascism and imperialism). Both are reactionary and violent. Both rely on appeals to ancient authority and tradition to justify their violence. Both rely on the dehumanization of their targets. Both will only be opposed through solidarity and building power as durably and quickly as we can.

I feel like whenever capitalists propagandists cynically use the term genocide no one seems to act like its wrong. When the left uses the term correctly to refer to programs of systemic eradication of people it always gets questioned.

They call Ukraine a genocide and invented one about Uighurs. They even tried ~~inventing~~ appropriating concept of cultural genocide because the Uighur thing couldn't hold up, and people ate it up without question.

The left couldn't even call the concentration camps on the US border concentration camps without libs getting up in arms that it "diminished the real concentration camps" or something like that.

We're the only ones using the terms correctly.

No child trans genocide is real and on equal footing with all the other genocides. We shouldn’t debate what genocide is worse but instead try to find solidarity with the lgbt and the Islamic community.

Definitions of genocide tend to use gendered language that definitionally disallows trans people from being the target of a genocide.

Said Twitter user also said that she felt that election results are showing that people roundly reject those beginning stages.

I remember from a documentary, The House I Live In, an anecdote:

There's a historian, Richard Miller, who describes the American "War on Drugs" ,as a similar parallel species of fascist control, as a campaign to destroy people. People who are mostly poor, and mostly of color.

He calls this process, the "chain of destruction". As follows: identification of "who is responsible for our woes", ostracization of those identified people, confiscation of their property, concentration of people in prisons or camps, and finally annihilation of people.

It isn't in bad taste to notice echoes and parallels of social destruction. We can rightfully notice that fascism is self-destructive and cannibalistic, but as we have learned in the late 20th and 21st centuries is that fascism can be malleable and adaptive as it shuffles between its open nature and liberal democracy. The problem of liberal democracy is in its toleration of fascist ideology, its adherents; the greater problem lies in disempowerment of the masses of people who abhor or are disgusted by fascists, yet wield no counter-ideological faith and tenets reaffirming values of life and liberty supreme over rights of property and scapegoat.

"Any genocide I agree with is not a genocide until it's over."

From a purely academic standpoint (and therefore useless) It depends. For my money, I'd say that what the U.S. right (and to a lesser extent Democrats) is attempting to engage in is the outright social murder of the trans community, in particular attempting to make supporting them and their causes a football and wedge to divide voting rightwing and liberal (same thing I know) 'moderates'. While murder and assault is tacitly approved by the cop culture, it is not outright approved by the majority of people in the U.S.

However, if this could easily proceed into a direct genocide or sexual minority cleansing should things get worse. It wouldn't be unprecedented, as the LGBTQ community arguably already suffered from such cleansing policies previously in the 80's during the AIDS crisis (there are horrifying pictures of just rows and rows of beds along hallways in SF wards during the peak of the crisis, with no emergency support and even outright denial from the federal government).

This is one of the things that I personally like to point to when liberals wring their hands about things 'getting worse' for the LGBT community. It already happened, and the strong activist community was a result of those policies! Things were already much, much, worse and you folks did absolutely nothing except acknowledge the suffering decades later, your lukewarm support cannot be relied upon in times of crisis. LGBT communities will have to figure out ways to protect their own, and it is ultimately better that they do so than rely on fairweather liberals. Is it better to have the government on your side? Sure! But not when that government tries to make that support conditional on you also supporting crimes against humanity overseas.

Unless there's a specific ethnic group being attacked, maybe "persecution" could be a more appropriate word?

Edit: I've been thinking a bit more. I think the real problem is that "genocide" has changed from being a type of atrocity to a measure of scale of atrocity.

i think it's a little linguistically weird to say "trans genocide" because our demographic origin isn't really like genocide-targeted groups, but that opinion doesn't diminish the importance of protecting trans people up to and including murdering fascists (in minecraft)

i would put forth "trans holocaust" as a better term since we (although i use the collective more loosely this time as agender invisibility meant i would've been sent to a camp for being a communist not for lacking gender) were targeted. not every genocide is a holocaust and there was more to the holocaust than genocide.

by way of comparison i would not also not call components of the holocaust a "communist genocide" or "trade unionist genocide"

yikes