As activists protest the White House’s reported effort to define gender as unchangeable from birth, trans people express their fears of what may come

Transgender activists are pledging they #WontBeErased, as the campaign cry has been coined on social media, after a report revealed the Trump administration’s efforts to define gender as unchangeable from birth – but panic and fear simmers below the protests.

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The proposed change could make it impossible for trans people to be protected under the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination, Title IX, and would betray decades of scientific research that establishes a person’s gender is not determined by their anatomy at birth.

Zeke Christopoulos, who works at a bank in North Carolina, said reading about the draft memo, seen by the New York Times, felt like a “kick in the stomach”.

“I pass seamlessly through our culture and our society – people interacting with me and looking at me have no idea that I am a person who is transgender, a man of transgender experience,” Christopoulos told the Guardian. “It still frightens me, it still scares me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ezekiel Christopoulos. Photograph: Ezekiel Christopoulos

The draft memo reportedly included language to specify an individual’s gender is determined by the genitalia they are born with, despite the American Medical Association (AMA) ruling last year that gender and sexual identities are not always binary. It would also have people submit to genetic testing if they want to dispute the gender identity as entered on their birth certificate.

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Christopoulos owns a home, is married and has helped raise a foster child for the past two years. He was unnerved that all of these things could potentially change if the draft memo was enacted. “The erasure of your identity and your very existence makes you panic at your core – and I feel that panic at my core,” Christopoulos said.

Christopoulos is also director of the advocacy group Tranzmission. He said people there are afraid, angry and ready to take action – the midterm elections are a constant thread in every conversation about the memo. He said the group has also increased its emergency support services in response to the report.

“We’re strong, we’re resilient, we survive,” Christopoulos said. “We always have, for millennia, and we always will.”

Trans Lifeline, an organization supporting trans people who are in crisis by providing grants and a hotline, on Monday encouraged people to contact the group if they were feeling fear and despair from the news. “Let us remind you that there are people in this world who care about you,” Sam Ames, interim executive director, and Elena Rose Vera, deputy executive director, said in a public letter.

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An estimated 1.4 million Americans identify as a different gender than that which they were officially assigned at birth – less than half of 1% of the US population.

Trans people said they would benefit from support from the cisgender majority, whose gender identity corresponds with their birth sex, in order to fight back hard.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shakina Nayfack: ‘It’s suddenly harder to keep up the mask of confidence.’ Photograph: Marc J. Franklin/Marc J Franklin-Playbill

“We don’t have the numbers and the strength to, quite frankly, defend ourselves at the level we would need to in order to make sure something like this doesn’t become law,” said Shakina Nayfack, a New York City actor and artistic collaborator. “So it really is a call to action for people with gender privilege.”

The Trump administration has also tried to bar trans people from the military and challenge their protections under US health law.

Nayfack said being trans was “great and wonderful and vibrant”, but described the constant fight for recognition as exhausting.

She said she was putting on a brave face, joining the chorus of people uniting under the social media campaign #WontBeErased, but felt pings of vulnerability when friends sent messages of support and love.

“It’s awesome and wonderful to receive those kind of affirmations, but it’s suddenly harder to keep up the mask of confidence,” Nayfack said. “It’s just that gentle touch reminds you how weak you are.”

Nayfack said she was especially concerned about the genetic testing provision in the draft memo.

“I’ve already gone through transition, changed all my legal documents, so at this point, if that memo passes, the things I’ve worked really hard to attain for myself through a lot of self-sacrifice and time and money and emotional labor, will be stripped from me,” Nayfack said. “If I fight for them I will have to submit to the government testing my blood.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Taylor Lianne Chandler: ‘I’m just amazed once again how people don’t understand this is an attack on human rights, civil rights.’ Photograph: Handout

There are also concerns this draft memo could encourage violence towards trans people.

“It makes me feel unsafe … and I’m very white,” said Will Davis, a theater director, in New York. “It’s trans women of color who bear the brunt of it.”

Of the 102 trans people murdered between 2013 and 2017, an overwhelming number were people of color, according to a 2017 Human Rights Campaign report. HRC reported 86% of the victims were black, Hispanic or Native American, 11% were white and 5% were unknown.

“I didn’t immediately think, ‘Oh no, I’m going to have all my rights stripped from me’ but for sure you’re afraid of that when the person in the highest office in the land says shitty things about us,” Davis said. “It leaves the door open for anyone passing you on the street to feel confident about their prejudice and more of an invitation to hurt people in my community.”

Taylor Lianne Chandler, external affairs at the non-profit LGBT community center Casa Ruby, protested the draft memo outside the White House on Monday.

“I’m just amazed once again how people don’t understand this is an attack on human rights, civil rights,” said Chandler, who identifies as trans and intersex.

“It treats us like we’re second-class citizens and people just want to think they are doing us a favor or luxury by allowing us to change our gender marker, our name or have gender confirmation surgery, and that’s just completely untrue,” she said. “Why would someone just willingly want to be part of one of the most hated groups in America?”