The Nazis Made A Horrifying Move In 1933. I’m Terrified Trump Is Now Doing The Exact Same Thing.

I’d brought my 11-year-old son E. to the protest so he could rage in community with other trans and queer folks, so he could see how many grown-ups were fighting for him, and so he’d feel less alone. Watching him speak off the cuff before a crowd of hundreds on a sunny Saturday last month, however, had not been on my bingo card. I hadn’t known the organizers planned to open up the mic after powerful speeches from activists like Angelica Christina Torres and Denise Norris — or that my sixth-grader would feel moved and brave enough to sign up.

“Only give them your first name,” I cautioned.

Fear stole my breath, but pride kept me from pulling my baby back into the anonymity of the crowd.

Children like my son — a “Stranger Things” superfan who spends hours perfecting illustrations of characters he’s created and texts with his friends late into the night — are, somehow, public enemy No. 1 for the current administration. This was another turn of events I would never have expected until this fall, when it became impossible to ignore the central place that E. and other trans kids occupied in the rhetoric of the Republican Party.

We’d gathered at that monument, a slim triangle in Greenwich Village between Christopher Street and Grove Street across from the Stonewall Inn, the traumatic birthplace of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. It was there that icons like Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson and other trans women of color risked their lives in 1969 to confront oppression on behalf of the broader community. I’d taken E. there two years ago, shortly after he came out, to teach him about those who came before and place his experience in the context of history. But our government is now erasing and rewriting that history while my son is still learning it.

“Put the ‘T’ back in ‘Stonewall,’” we chanted. “No ‘LGB’ without the ‘T.’”

The effort to scrub government websites of any acknowledgement that queer people exist — have ever existed — has yielded some almost-comical errors, like the removal from the Defense Department site of archival photos of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima because it was called the Enola Gay. It also has a less immediate impact on the daily lives of trans Americans than many of President Donald Trump’s other proclamations. However, it shares with them a common historical antecedent that leaves me shaking — not only as the parent of a trans kid but as the granddaughter of a German-Jewish refugee.

Well before Hitler implemented the “Final Solution” to wipe Jews themselves from the face of Europe, his government erased them from public life and from history. But a parallel effort has often been overlooked and was only recognized by the German Parliament for the first time on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2023: Hitler’s crackdown on the LGB — and T — community.

One of Hitler’s first acts after ascending to power was the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science, a global pioneer in LGBTQ+ research, therapy, gender-affirming care, advocacy and community. Hirschfeld was both Jewish and queer — “undesirable” identities linked inextricably in Nazi ideology.

On May 6, 1933, Storm Troopers looted the Berlin center and torched its library, the first of the infamous book burnings intended to incinerate all traces of any “un-German” culture. Deleting mentions of LGBTQ+ people from U.S. government websites may not be as fiery, but it is the digital equivalent of this fascist censorship. According to scholar Heike Bauer, the calculated spectacle at the institute followed “months of observation and threats … inaugurat[ing] a new phase in the intensification of Nazi terror.” With the benefit of hindsight, we know where that terror led.

We can’t go back there.

In front of the crowd, sporting a trans flag like a suit of armor, my son E. began, “It has always been — and is especially right now — incredibly difficult to be a trans minor. Even at my middle school, which supposedly accepts everyone, I’ve faced hate from many of my classmates.”

E. didn’t go into detail on stage, but from how he describes the casual transphobia and homophobia he witnesses, not as much has changed as I’d like to think since I was his age 30 years ago. His peers still say things like, “Whoever moves first is gay,” and share anti-LGBTQ+ memes. E.’s younger sister, a third-grader, reports that her classmates play the same loaded “games.”

This is happening in New York, in progressive schools and (relatively) accepting communities, where LGBTQ+ students are for the most part comfortable being out, supported by teachers and administrators, and protected by state and local laws. But when the president of the United States targets those same children for erasure, he empowers this bigotry in every part of our country and at every level of society.

One of the many powerful signs I spotted at the protest read, “We are older than your laws and we will outlive them. There are queer and trans kids, adults and elders in the future.” It is a message of resilience and hope to which I cling in these dark times.

During this Trans Month of Visibility — but at all other times too — it’s critical to remember that President Trump can no more erase transgender Americans from the future than he can from the past. But that’s only true if allies echo and amplify the loud voices of the trans community. Their words — E.’s words — could be heard far beyond the fences of Stonewall National Monument that afternoon. As his parent and greatest champion, it’s my job to make sure you hear them, too.

I’d brought E. to the protest to show him the power of his community, but it turned out he’d taken the stage to impart that very message to others — the only part of his remarks he’d prepared before getting up there. He paused to collect himself, fingers dancing with nerves along the edge of the cape that marked him as a trans superhero, before ending on this resonant note: “To all the trans and nonbinary kids out there — you are not alone.”

The crowd thundered in agreement as E. stood awkwardly by the mic, uncertain of what to do next. I beckoned him to come down so I could wrap him in the tightest mama-bear embrace. E. beamed, reveling in having overcome his stage fright and charged with the energy of hundreds of protesters. On our way out of the park, he was stopped five times by grown-ups who wanted to voice their pride in him and let him know the community has his back. So I had achieved my aim after all. Angelica Christina Torres, a board member of the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative who’d stirred the crowd earlier with her own speech, came up to tell him how proud she was of him and asked for a picture. “You get in here, too, mama,” she encouraged me. “You’re doing a great job.” I hadn’t realized it, but I desperately needed to hear that.

Parenting a trans kid right now means walking through the world with the weight of his health and safety on my shoulders — a much more arduous load than I carry for my cisgender daughter, than I carried for E. mere months ago. The intensity of this burden — the visceral fear that bares its fangs throughout my days — has awoken in me the intergenerational trauma that is my legacy as the granddaughter of a woman who fled Nazi Germany as a teenager. Although she died before I started kindergarten, my grandma has remained an animating force throughout my life. I grew up asking myself, “Would I have been as brave as her?”

Until recently, the question remained theoretical. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that President Trump is running plays straight out of Hitler’s playbook. And it’s not just the hypervigilance I inherited that makes me take note. Trans kids like E. are canaries in the coal mine. If we don’t stand up for them and stop Trump in his tracks, history makes patently clear where this path leads. You may not bear the brunt of this persecution yourself. Your children might be fine. But, as M. Gessin argues with ferocious eloquence, “The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others.”

Ali Moss (she/her) is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker working on a memoir about her commitment to breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma.

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