Since Donald Trump was elected president, he has threatened to declare martial law in Chicago. He's ramping up deportations of undocumented immigrants. He implemented a Muslim ban that he would prefer everyone stop calling a Muslim ban, even though he campaigned on a promise to implement a Muslim ban. And he's courted the support of neo-Nazis and white supremacists and tacitly endorsed the resulting rise in anti-Semitism, only offering a weak rebuke of it after months of pressure.

Report: Donald Trump's Handlers Planted Friendly News Stories to Try and Prevent His Twitter Meltdowns This sounds like the hardest job in the world.

This is all to say that the first month of the Trump/Bannon regime has been a disaster for pretty much every marginalized group you can think of. But there was one group that had somehow seemingly avoided being directly attacked by the leader of the free world, and that was the LGBTQ community. That's not to say we in the queer world felt like we were in good hands. When bigots get bigot-ing, it's only a matter of time before they come after you. On Wednesday, the Trump regime did exactly that and rolled back federal protections that Barack Obama's administration had put in place to protect trans students.

Officials with the federal Education and Justice departments notified the U.S. Supreme Court late Wednesday that the administration is ordering the nation’s schools to disregard memos the Obama administration issued during the past two years regarding transgender student rights. Those memos said that prohibiting transgender students from using facilities that align with their gender identity violates federal anti-discrimination laws.

Make no mistake. This attack on trans rights is little more than hateful bullshit. The entire debate that implicitly sexualizes what are essentially toilet depots is ridiculous and insulting. It's the kind of thing a second-grader who doesn't yet understand sex would think happens in a bathroom. But the fact is, the mere existence of trans people scares a segment of the population, and rather than realizing that trans people are just people trying to live their lives, this group invents scary fictions to justify what is essentially their own agenda. You may recognize this tactic from such American classics as "racism!" and "sexism!" and "xenophobia!" (See: Black people are dangerous, strong women must be lesbians, and Mexico sends us rapists.)

But let's not just get caught up in the evil of this nonsense; it also proves how Donald Trump is an ineffectual leader, as effective leaders have actual principles. Here, he's just an idiot cypher for other people's agendas.

For example, this is what Donald Trump said about protecting the LGBTQ community at the RNC last year:

And here's Trump addressing the specific issue of bathroom access last April:

Now, not even a year later, Trump has gone from Caitlyn Jenner can use any bathroom at Trump Tower she likes to Do these trans kids need to be protected by anti-discrimination laws? What the hell just happened? There's already evidence that Trump will do whatever people like Jeff Sessions want him to do, and in this case, it's implementing policy built on transphobic bullshit. If Trump really believed what he said about LGBTQ people last year—and since he's a man who has spent most of his life living in cosmopolitan cities, I believe he did—then it confirms what we already knew about him: that he's a coward and a puppet.

The Intel Community and the Slow Death of a Trump Presidency: