What do I mean by "eliminationism"
You don't say, out loud, "we want to eliminate these people". You just pursue policies that are predicated on our elimination
In my recent blog post I mentioned J.K. Rowling’s “eliminationist” rhetoric. Although nobody commented on it that time, I sometimes get pushback when I say that there’s a political movement calling for the elimination of trans people. So I thought I’d give a brief rundown of the concept of eliminationism.
People object to the term “genocide” or “extermination” because there’s no literal call, by any reputable public figure, for trans people to be herded into the camps and gassed. But the term “eliminationism” was coined precisely as a result of misconceptions about public opinion in Germany in the hundred years leading up to the Holocaust.
As Jonah Goldhagen documented in his still-controversial book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the 19th-century liberalization of the political climate for Jewish people, which opened up professional and business opportunities for Jews, was not accompanied by acceptance of Jewish peoples’ right to live as Jewish people. It was instead accompanied by a lot of rhetoric, particularly from liberal reformers, that Judaism would fade away once Jewish people were fully integrated into the German polity. As Goldhagen writes:
The most influential book urging the emancipation of the Jews and, more generally, written in Germany on the Jews' behalf, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's On the Civic Improvement of the Jews, published in 1781, accepted the need for the Jews to be remade, not just politically but also morally. For Dohm, emancipation was a bargain to be struck: the Jews would receive political equality in exchange for their willing reformation of their ways, especially of their moral outlook and their underhanded economic practices. The Jews, he believed, freed from the debilitating cocoon of their social and legal isolation, would, under conditions of freedom, naturally accept the bargain: "When the oppression which he [the Jew] experienced for centuries has made him morally corrupt, then a more equitable treatment will again restore him." Dohm, the Jews' greatest "friend," agreed with their greatest enemies that the Jews were "morally corrupt," that as "Jews" they were not fit for citizenship, for taking a place in the bosom of German society.
“Eliminationism” refers to the unspoken assumption underlying some policy or rhetoric that, if it is enacted, the given group of people will simply fade from existence. Eliminationism is often an outgrowth of nationalism, because nationalism seeks to identify the country and the people as one. Germany was the country of the Germans. But what if not everybody in Germany is a German, what then? It’s an almost intolerable contradiction, particularly if the minority group comes to possess more wealth and status than the average German.
It’s simple to say, well, why not just redefine “German” to include “Jewish German”. After all, this happened, to some extent, in Germany, where both Protestant and Catholic German people were redefined, for the first time, as one people. I can’t really answer the question here—both nationalism and eliminationism are interrelated forms of madness, so who is to say why madness takes the form it does?
By the end of the 19th century, the hopes for elimination through assimilation had been dashed, and by now virtually every member of the German body politic agreed that there existed a “Jewish Problem” that needed to be solved:
The antisemitic barrage grew still more fearsome in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the "Jewish Problem" was written about in Germany with a passion and frequency unmatched by any other political subject. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, according to one estimate, 1,200 publications devoted themselves to examining the "Jewish Problem," the vast majority of which belonged to the overtly antisemitic camp. The number of publications during this period that focused on the relationship between the nation and minorities (in which Jews necessarily figured prominently), according to another tabulation, exceeded the number of "political-polemical publications" devoted to all other topics combined. If judged solely by the volume and character of the society's verbal and literary production, then the conclusion would be unavoidable that German society was focused on an urgent mortal threat of the first order. Such was the centrality of this objectively insignificant issue in the public discussion of German society.
Jewish Eliminationism is related to supersessionism, which is the idea that Jesus, in his coming, replaced the covenant with the Jewish people with a new covenant. However, supersessionism gave rise to some logical problems that created debate as long ago as the time of St. Paul. In one of his epistles, Paul argues very vociferously that God would never abandon his promise to the Jewish people.1
At the same time, if the Jewish covenant is still in force, then why should Jewish people become Christian? There is no need—indeed one could even argue that by becoming Christian they would be breaking their own covenant. Thus, supersessionism becomes a lot more convenient and logical if there simply…aren’t any more Jewish people around. It’s the same as the center-left American’s belief that this land was stolen from the indigenous people. If it was stolen, why not give it back? Although the belief is ostensibly pro-indigenous, it relies on an eliminationist logic: it requires America’s indigenous people to be gone.
Eliminationism is thus an outgrowth of liberalism—it’s caused by precisely our belief that people have certain rights, which we cannot just trample upon or ignore. Jewish people have the right to live, and yet…it is intolerable for there to be such a thing as a Jewish German.
The most prominent example of an eliminationism policy in America today is bathroom bans. If people are required to use the bathroom of their natal sex, that seems, on its surface, to not be eliminationist: everyone still gets a bathroom.
The problem arises not from the existence of trans women, but of trans men. Recently there have been several examples of trans men beaten because they used women’s bathrooms—onlookers assumed they were really trans women. Thus trans men can’t use women’s bathrooms safely, as they are legally required to, but they can’t use men’s bathrooms legally. Their existence is made illegal.
Trans men offer the same issue when it comes to the prison system. Most trans men cannot be distinguished from cis men. Neither you nor I could ‘clock’ them. But if they were arrested, would they go in a woman’s prison? That would result in a transphobe’s biggest fear: a man in a woman’s prison. Yet the transphobe has precisely situated the trans man as not a man. Yet if the trans man goes into a men’s prison, they’ll likely be subject to rape and sexual violence—violence against a woman being precisely what the transphobe is against. The world the transphobe wants cannot be reconciled with the fact that trans people exist. This is eliminationist logic.
It’s the same with bills requiring students and/or teachers to use the pronouns associated with a person’s natal sex. What happens if a parent reports that a teacher is being referred to by opposite-sex pronouns? What is the enforcement mechanism? What if you have a transmasculine teacher who is visibly indistinguishable from a cis man, and their colleagues slip up and use male pronouns for them, in violation of the law? The existence of a man who you need to call by female pronouns (exactly the thing anti-trans policies are meant to prevent) comes about as a direct result of the policy!
The problem is that the more anti-trans bills you pass, the more friction there is between trans people and the state, which means trans people seem to be a bigger and bigger problem, and the population gets whipped up into more and more of a frenzy over the issue, until it suddenly starts to seem like an existential threat.
Eliminationism is distinct from discrimination or segregation. Those policies are a result of feeling like a given group is lesser and needs to be cordoned off from society. A minority group can survive hundreds or thousands of years under a discriminatory regime (e.g. Christian Greeks in the Ottoman Empire). But then the rhetoric turns. When Turkey became a Turkish nation-state, the Greeks were suddenly inconvenient in a way they hadn’t been before, and within five years, initially through violence and then through a large-scale population transfer with Greece, the three-thousand year presence of Greek-speaking people in Anatolia came to a forcible close.
The seductiveness of eliminationism is precisely that it eliminates the problem. Turkish reformers wanted Turkey to be a liberal democracy. But they also wanted it to be a Turkish ethno-state, one people unified under one law and one government. But from the moment they pursued these clashing objectives—equality under the law and the privileging of one national group—they unwittingly switched over from discrimination into eliminationism.
Turkey couldn’t be a liberal democracy and a Turkish ethno-state state and have a sizeable population of non-Turkish and/or Christian people, because if the latter were accorded equal rights, then the country would need to accord minority languages and religions the same rights and privileges as those of the majority. The country needed now to no longer discriminate against minorities, but its self-conception couldn’t tolerate the consequences of that action.
If Republicans were willing to say, “Trans people are sick, and they should only be allowed to transition if they jump through X, Y, and Z hoops” then they could avoid eliminationism, because in doing so, they would accept the fact that under some circumstances trans people could exist. But Republican lawmakers don’t want to say that, because it’s politically unpalatable and would mean creating a regulatory framework that would, in some cases, condone transitioning, so instead they pursue eliminationist policies. Republicans want to oppress trans people as a political tactic, but they don’t want the political liabilities involved in creating functional, enforceable laws. Because the moment you legislate on trans issues, you need, if you’re going to create a functional law, to start adjudicating transness in courts: how trans is trans enough? How do you prove you are or aren’t trans? The only way to avoid doing that is to not make laws about it. You can’t make a law about a people, if you’re not willing to consider the concrete, practical realities of bringing those people into your legal system. Or, rather, you can, but the end result will only be a piling-up of legal difficulties until your legal regime either collapses or you are put into a situation where it becomes very convenient for those people to disappear.
In Florida, their aim is just to run every trans person out of the state. It is currently impossible to get a prescription for HRT in Florida, for kids or adults. Eighty percent of adults on HRT have had their prescriptions invalidated due to recent changes in the law. Doctors are refusing to write new prescriptions until a regulatory agency in Florida writes new rules on what is considered “informed consent” about the risks of HRT. The regulatory commission has met several times without creating final guidelines, and right doctors are terrified: nobody really knows under what circumstances you’re allowed to prescribe HRT. Their aim is simply to drive all trans people out of the state (which, let’s remember, is America’s third-largest and constitutes something like eight percent of America’s population).
And that’s fine, leaving Florida doesn’t equal genocide. But if they gain power nationally, they are almost compelled to try and pass these laws nationally too. And then what? Trans people cannot live without transitioning. We will transition no matter what. If it’s illegal for us to get our meds or to exist as our gender, then we will do those things illegally—which brings our existence into the oribit of the criminal justice system. And since the criminal justice system poses unique issues for trans people, it’s a short step to…special prisons for trans people. But what will the conditions be like in those prisons (there certainly won’t be HRT in them). They’d simply be concentration camps for forcibly detransitioning people.
I highly doubt that DeSantis wants to put us in concentration camps. But eventually, if you pursue these policies long enough, the only course is either to reverse yourself or to eliminate the problematic population. And that, in a nutshell, is eliminationism. It’s a rhetorical position that relies, for its fulfillment, on a group of people disappearing.
Will it happen? I highly doubt it. The Supreme Court will intervene. The voters will intervene. In a few years, this particular madness will be behind us. But still, no matter how slow they’re going, you never want to look in the rearview mirror and see that you’re sharing the road with someone who’s arguing for your own extermination.
Some of the most eloquent and heartfelt passages in the whole Bible come when Paul argues that God will certainly save the Jewish people (KJV Romans 11:26-33).
And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: 27for this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins. 28As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. 29
For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. 30For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief: 31even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy. 32For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all.