{"id":279602,"date":"2025-06-07T15:43:55","date_gmt":"2025-06-07T15:43:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/activist\/fighting-back-as-a-team\/"},"modified":"2025-06-07T15:43:55","modified_gmt":"2025-06-07T15:43:55","slug":"fighting-back-as-a-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=279602","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Back as a Team"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Erasure has always been a tool of autocratic regimes. If a group of people are deemed not only lesser, but also illegitimate in the eyes of the regime, then they can be scapegoated and brutalized.<\/p>\n

Those in the Trump regime have yet to find a history textbook they don\u2019t want to censor. They\u00a0seized<\/a>\u00a0the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the nation\u2019s capital and\u00a0canceled<\/a>\u00a0LGBTQ+ Pride events that had been scheduled to take place there in June. According to civil rights leaders, they have\u00a0started removing<\/a>\u00a0precious artifacts from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. (The Smithsonian Institution\u00a0disputes<\/a>\u00a0this allegation). They think that by scrubbing our history of injustice, laws to remedy those injustices become illegitimate.<\/p>\n

This strategy has been used to devastating effect against transgender people. The erasure\u00a0began<\/a>\u00a0immediately upon Trump\u2019s return to office in January. One of the administration\u2019s first actions was having the National Park Service remove transgender and queer people from the website of the Stonewall National Monument, a federal memorial honoring the Stonewall uprising in 1969, a multiday battle outside a New York City gay bar that launched the modern-day gay rights movement.<\/p>\n

As CBS News\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0in February, \u201cThe park service website on Friday was still filled with information about the uprising, including photographs of noted transgender activists. But the words \u2018transgender\u2019 and \u2018queer\u2019 had been deleted from text that had been on the site. Also, the letters T and Q were cut from various references to the acronym LGBTQ and replaced with phrases like the \u2018LGB rights movement\u2019 or \u2018LGB civil rights.\u2019 \u201d This occurred despite the fact that transgender heroes like\u00a0Sylvia Rivera<\/a>\u00a0led that bloody struggle in New York\u2019s Greenwich Village.<\/p>\n

Some within the Trump Administration are simply rank opportunists. Others, like Elon Musk, harbor a deep, disturbing anti-trans animus. Musk, for example, speaks of his twenty-one-year-old trans daughter, Vivian Wilson,\u00a0as if she is dead<\/a>, a victim of the \u201cwoke mind virus.\u201d As a result, she had to\u00a0leave the country<\/a>\u00a0to protect herself from his savage, incel fanboys while remaining, to her great credit, her father\u2019s\u00a0most trenchant critic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another devastating development is the way that sports has been used to further these violent efforts at erasure. In the previous issue of\u00a0The Progressive<\/em>, I\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0about how Martina Navratilova, one of the leading cisgender female sports trailblazers of the past generation, has helped blaze a new and quite treacherous trail for the radical right to use sports to\u00a0attack trans children<\/a>\u00a0and the existence of trans people in general. The effects of this work were first seen at the state level with\u00a0statewide bans<\/a>\u00a0on trans children playing sports. This was a new poisonous arrow in the rightwing\u2019s quiver: preemptive erasure.<\/p>\n

The very idea of banning the few trans athletes we have, of holding up scant individuals like\u00a0swimmer Lia Thomas<\/a>\u00a0as if they were the first in a wave of people seeking to destroy Western civilization, as South Africa\u2019s Musk is\u00a0so fond of saying<\/a>, is the beginning of an agenda that has moved from erasure to a form of extermination. What else do we call a federal agenda that\u00a0weaponizes Title IX legislation<\/a>\u00a0to attack the rights of trans people in public spaces and harasses teachers over signs in their classrooms that declare \u201cEveryone is welcome here<\/a>\u201d?<\/p>\n

In sports,\u00a0formerly trans-friendly leagues<\/a>\u00a0have now banned trans athletes. This is even happening in\u00a0sports like chess<\/a>! Canadian women\u2019s teams have understandably\u00a0not crossed the border<\/a>\u00a0in order to avoid being harassed or detained. Again, all of this effort, fearmongering, terror, and costly legislation aims to attack a subset of an already incredibly small community. Call it a final solution in search of a problem.<\/p>\n

However, one thing the anti-trans Furies did not count upon is that if sports can be used as an entry point to enact such terror, it can also be used to fight back. What the Trumpists never calculated was something that exists at the heart of sports: the team. While the regime highlights every young woman thrilled at the bans, there are dozens\u00a0standing up<\/a>\u00a0for their teammates\u2019 right to play. That\u2019s our best defense: a reminder that in sports\u2014and in society\u2014we must stand for inclusion, acceptance, and the joys of friendship and play.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n
\n \t\"Zirin<\/a><\/p>\n

Dave Zirin<\/a><\/h3>\n

<\/p>\n

Dave Zirin writes about sports for The Nation and The Progressive and hosts the Edge of Sports podcast and \u201cEdge of Sports with Dave Zirin\u201d on The Real News. His most recent book is \u201cThe Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more by Dave Zirin<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

June 5, 2025<\/p>\n

1:14 PM<\/p>\n

<\/time>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Erasure has always been a tool of autocratic regimes. If a group of people are deemed not only lesser, but also illegitimate in the eyes of the regime, then they can be scapegoated and brutalized. Those in the Trump regime have yet to find a history textbook they don\u2019t want to censor. They\u00a0seized\u00a0the John F. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[20753,12795,20752,19395,46469,93189,2083,329,3705,44369],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-279602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-dave-zirin","tag-donald-trump","tag-edge-of-sports","tag-fighting","tag-homophobia","tag-june-july-2025","tag-magazine","tag-sports","tag-team","tag-transphobia"],"yoast_head":"\nFighting Back as a Team - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=279602\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fighting Back as a Team - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Erasure has always been a tool of autocratic regimes. 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