We saw it when this administration removed any reference to the civil rights movement from that same site. Because if you can’t study the country’s long history of slavery and racism, there must never have been any racial injustice.

We saw it on Holocaust Remembrance Day, when somehow the White House’s statement failed to make any mention of Jewish people. Because if there aren’t any Jews, there must not be any anti-Semitism.

And then there are all those deleted tweets — the ones supporting Luther Strange, the ones criticizing the mayor of Puerto Rico. Obviously, if you delete something you’ve posted on Twitter, it’s the same as if you never said it in the first place.

Speaking of Puerto Rico, the administration deleted data on the post-hurricane crisis there in October. Problem solved!

Finally, there’s the ban on transgender people serving in the military. Even though trans people — including the former deputy assistant secretary of defense, Amanda Simpson — have been serving valorously for years, apparently if we erase them from the armed forces, we will stop having to think about them. (A federal judge, meanwhile, has kept the ban from going into place, calling it “capricious, arbitrary, and unqualified.”)

Transgender people are a part of this country, and will continue to be part of this country whether or not Republicans admit that our lives are real. I’ve always thought that the many attempts to deny trans folks the dignity of using the proper public facilities had nothing to do with bathrooms and everything to do with the simple fact that conservatives just don’t like the fact that there are transgender people in the first place. Making the mere mention of us in the C.D.C. budget process an impossibility is just one more attempt at creating a world in which our lives can be effaced.

But trans people are just as real as climate change, or science or fetuses. Or diversity. Or science-based research.

Instead of making the Peek-a-Boo Baby Doctrine into law, the Trump administration — and all of us, in fact — would do better to accept the complexity of the world, with its contradictions, and its joys, and its mystery. Because the best part of that game is not the part where you’re hiding and asking, “Where’s the baby?” It’s the moment of revelation, when you take your hands away from your face. “There he is!” you say. And your child recognizes that the two of you, and the vulnerable world we share, are all still here.