Last week, the Trump administration issued a directive to the Department of Health and Human Services, instructing them to consider “sex” as an unchangeable condition determined by a person’s genitals at birth. The suggestion is that the administration intends to oppose an emergent legal theory that asserts that gay and transgender people are protected from discrimination under federal law, and to limit other civil rights protections for trans people in particular.

Just days later, the far-right Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán banned gender studies programs at the country’s universities. “We do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially constructed gender rather than biological sexes,” an Orbán deputy told the press. Meanwhile, Brazil’s far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, a Rio congressman with fascist leanings, retains his polling edge ahead of this Sunday’s run-off election – despite, or perhaps because of, his routine issue of rabidly misogynist and anti-gay sentiments. Bolsonaro has publicly said that women who are raped “deserve” it, and that he would be incapable of loving a gay son. In 2002, he remarked: “If I see two men kissing each other on the street, I’ll beat them up.” Bolsonaro aims to pack Brazil’s supreme court, in part with the goal of reversing a 2013 decision legalizing gay marriage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán banned gender studies programs at the country’s universities. Photograph: Bernadett Szabó/Reuters

On Thursday the Guardian reported that the US delegation to the UN has been seeking to remove references to gender from international human rights documents. The move signals that the US will wield its considerable diplomatic power with the aim of discouraging efforts to protect gay and trans people around the globe; sparking the ire of western European allies, according to the Guardian report, and putting America in line with some of the world’s most oppressive regimes.

The moves by these far-right leaders around the world to limit the rights of LGBT people reaffirm the right’s long-standing hostility toward gay rights, transgenderism, and gender variance. They suggest, too, that strong man leaders like Trump, Orban and Bolsonaro view their own power and legitimacy as derived from their maleness, which they regressively understand as mandating a masculinity composed of brutishness, peevish intolerance for difference, obliviousness to nuance, and a bully’s contempt for the vulnerable.

Before the global rise of the extreme right, LGBT rights, at least in the west, had seemed to be a nearly settled issue. Early predictions from the 2016 election speculated that even a Trump administration would be lenient toward the queer community. The rapid shifts in popular opinion that surrounded gay marriage in the first decade of the 21st century seemed to be mirrored during the second by an increasing level of understanding and acceptance for trans people. But acceptance of gender variance is anathema to the emerging ideology of the globally ascendant right wing. Given these leaders’ intolerance for diversity and eagerness to unite their followers around a distrust of those different from them, this distain for trans rights is not exactly surprising.

#WontBeErased: reports of US trans policy shift spark protests Read more

But another reason I think the far-right opposes trans rights lies in the moral vision of the trans narrative. The Trump administration and its global ilk hold an implied understanding of gendered behaviors as immutably tied to biological sex – naturally preordained, fated and therefore correct. But the arc of trans lives demonstrate something different: that biology is not destiny, and that individuals have the capacity and imagination to lead different lives, lives that are more free and more honest.

It’s a project that is part of a long history of queer and feminist efforts to expand the definitions of “man” and “woman” so that either category can encompass any kind of life, and so that those who choose to reject both labels altogether can do so in peace and dignity. To live this project – to reject the idea that the coin flip of nature that determined your genitals will also dictate the life you will lead – requires a great deal of integrity and resolve. People who live with this kind of courage, imagination, and honesty are a great threat to a right wing ideology that holds that the most regressive and limiting way of life is the only correct one.

Of course, no law can “define trans people out of existence”, as the early reports of the Trump administration’s memo to the HHS put it, and no amount of academic censorship or hostile, bloviating rhetoric from politicians will extinguish gay and trans people’s presence. The law cannot get rid of LGBT people, although it can allow others to hurt them with impunity.

Trump administration trying to define transgender out of existence – report Read more

But in some ways, the very futility of the Trump administration’s efforts to define trans people out of existence may be the point. The far-right ideology spouted by these strong men asks its adherents not only to limit their lives, but to limit their capacity for understanding, even for observation. It demands that they reject the obvious fact of trans life in favor of a politically convenient myth of gender uniformity.

In a speech this July, Trump told the crowd: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” He was talking about the negative news coverage of his botched trade war with China, but the same imperative is implied in his demands to have the law ignore the lives of the trans people who are very obviously still here. The call for ignorance is there, too, in Orbán’s demand that inquiry into queer and trans lives be snuffed out at Hungarian universities. The far right wants to pretend that trans people are not real, or that the way they live should not count. They can keep their heads in the sand all they want, but the reality of trans life won’t go away.