Rose, Knife, Policy

“Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.”
―Mae West

Bench Pressed’s cute little stationary and gifts store in Minneapolis sells, along with a wall of greeting cards and tchotchkes, and along with a good selection of Fuck I.C.E. posters and stickers, black t-shirts that read “Protect Trans Kids.” 

The three words, in a white crusty gothic font, are broken up by similarly white handdrawn graphics of a bowie knife and a rose. The juxtaposition shows an open-hand, closed-fist approach: the rose as something to be protected, the knife as the willingness to resort to violence. It’s a shirt that signals to whomever, but especially trans youth, ‘Trans kids are special and beautiful’ and in the same moment ‘I’m ready to cut up anyone that tries to fuck with them.’

Even before the tidal wave of anti-fascist design that helped codify and define the inclusionary and mutual-aid minded opposition to I.C.E. surges, the knife and rose shirts provided a bold wearable political statement for aesthetically minded protectors of trans rights. Now is this time for the protection-oriented new neighborism birthed by opposition to I.C.E. to return to the open-hand, closed fist message of support for trans community members. Now is the time for advocates and elected official allies to push for policy help against this new surge of fascism. 

The phrase ‘Protect Trans Kids’—originated in 2016 by none other than Caitlyn Jenner, in response to the South Dakota anti-trans school bathroom bill pushed by none other than former secretary of DHS and MAGA apparatchik Kristi Noem—is today unfortunately more relevant than ever. And it’s not just the trans kids who need real protections these days, but trans adults, too, who need safety from those committed to a cruel and oppositional version of “protection.”   

Just this week, as at time of writing, the House of Representatives passed HR 2616, a federal bill that “requires public elementary and middle schools to obtain parental consent before altering a minor student's gender markers, pronouns, or preferred names on school forms, as well as before changing sex-based accommodations.” The name? “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act.”

In a similar vein, the FCC just announced that the agency would consider putting warnings on television programs that include LGBTQ characters, “specifically if they are trans and nonbinary,” in order to warn viewers of the threat of seeing a trans character.  

The recent wave of anti-trans bills continues the escalation of anti-trans actions by various levels of American government. Back in February, the state of Kansas, in a similar move to South Dakota a decade ago, singled out trans residents and attacked them by revoking drivers licenses and birth certificates with residents' chosen genders. In March, Idaho’s Republican governor signed a bill to go into effect on July 1, 2026 that makes it a crime for a transgender person to enter a restroom or changing facility that aligns with their gender identity. Over one-third of U.S. states have already passed laws banning transgender students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity. 

In response to the expansion of nationwide anti-trans initiatives, The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security released its third Red Flag Alert for the USA. The organization’s notification comes after 2025 marked the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for the number of anti-trans bills considered across the country.

It is not cis children who need protection from "transgender ideology," but trans individuals, children and adults, who need protection from an increasingly brutal attack on their rights—at least outside of the paranoid style of American politics. Thankfully, states like New York, Washington, California, and Minnesota have responded with their own shield laws, in line with ‘sanctuary’ cities and states. Unfortunately, these actions have made much smaller legal impacts than the attacks, and the policies have also made them targets of the Trump administration’s federal anti-LGBTQ executive orders.

The double-speak language of American victimization and violence has never been more clear than it is during Trump’s second term, and the discourse differs only slightly from the ‘look what you made me do’ domestic abuser language so prevalent in the Administration. These assaults on LGBTQI+ folks are happening at a time when the bold open turn towards fascism in the American federal government has sent paramilitary I.C.E. thugs to occupy cities under the guise of ‘protection’ against immigrants. The escalating moral panic around the LGBTQI+ community, just like immigration panic, provides another channel for the Right’s verbal, physical, and legislative bigotry around gender.     

As Adam Serwer has repeatedly pointed out with regard to the Trump presidency, “The Cruelty Is The Point.” Even more deeply, the cruelty provides the guidelines for action and identity for MAGA by showing how to act one’s self and towards others. Like a classic bully from an 80's movie, whether against immigrants or different sexualities or even against cis women, the exclusionary tactics create the bonds and camaraderie of their ‘in’ group. 

With regard to I.C.E. as exclusionary concept of protection, here’s Serwer on The Bulwark podcast in January: 

For a lot of online, far right MAGA types, it's actually a thesis statement. And so they thought of this mass deportation project as their great, masculinizing, saving Western civilization thing, where they would get to prove that they were manly men. They would finally get the manly execution of violence in defense of a great cause that would give their lives meaning.

Importantly, regardless of target, the cruelty highlights the connection between the individual gender-signaling and the systematic violence excesses of the administration. Whether it’s RFK bizarrely doing push-ups in his jeans in a sauna with Kid Rock or Pete Hegseth trying to do pull-ups with cadets or even Trump’s cabinet wearing ill-fitting shoes, the individual’s gender-signaling and bizarre focus on bodies drives the personal exclusivity that then drives policy and ultimately state violence. 

As Alan Elrod pointed put it in “Pervert Politics: Trumpism’s Body Obsessions” here in Liberal Currents back in March:  

I’ve written in the past about how Hegseth’s vision of the American military is preoccupied with an ideal of the male form—one that’s a kind of modern mishmash of Spartan imagery and homoerotic fascist machismo. But that is only one facet of the Trumpian right’s fixation on the body. Another example is the now well-known phenomenon of Mar-A-Lago Face, wherein the women of the right doctor their appearances with filler, cosmetic surgeries, and absurd excesses of makeup. My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has astutely observed that the prevalence of steroid use and plastic surgery on the right constitutes its own form of gender-affirming care in an era of reactionary fantasies. 

What matters here to me is that the body is the primary subject of Trumpian politics. This is true both in the affirmative sense of right-wing aesthetics and in the punitive sense of managing the bodies of others to display power and contempt. I detailed this when I compared Kristi Noem’s CECOT photo op last year to a lynching postcard. Noem utilized the shaved, barely-clothed bodies of the prisoners as her backdrop. It was an act that took voyeuristic pleasure in the domination and brutalization of others’ bodies and turned their subjugation into both a political and entertainment product.

Like Elrod, many commentators identified the gendered political theater of Noem’s CECOT visit, while also highlighting the hyper-feminized drag-like visuals of “ICE Barbie” mixed with the pure violence of caged humans and masked guards outfitted with assault weapons. (The entire symbolism of hetero-performance also adds an incredible amount of fuel and discussion to the revelations of Noem’s husband’s fetish for dressing as a buxom woman.) 

Months after her prison press conference, and several violent episodes from her DHS later, the New Republic declared in summary:

The Department of Homeland Security has been grotesque and incompetent from the start. In Noem, the department finally has a leader cruel and campy enough to match its stated mission. 

Noem got the DHS gig to target, harass, and deport BIPOC immigrant communities by sucking up to Trump, yes, and has embodied the MAGA brand. But she also effectively auditioned for the job by the earlier cruel signaling of “protecting” her state of South Dakota from trans people, along with other anti-immigrant rhetoric. 

The context of this vicious MAGA discourse and the immediacy and gravity of harm against trans people makes the simple statement Protect Trans Kids merch (Bench Pressed has bumper stickers, pins, and even a butterfly sticker) so powerful and so necessary. The same context means that the necessity of pro-trans political art must also connect into broader social support and actionable legislative protections for LGBTQ+ people. 

As for legislation, cities have led their states in passing ordinances to make day-to-day life safer for trans people. Before Minnesota’s aforementioned shield law, for example, Minneapolis passed its own executive order that established the city as a sanctuary for gender-affirming care, and ordered city departments not to cooperate with out-of-state investigations targeting individuals seeking or providing care. The city also advanced a gender-neutral restroom policy for “safe and equitable access to restrooms increases public safety by preventing the risk of harassment or assault in restrooms.” 

The important lessons of the new neighborism starting in Minneapolis and currently developing around the country in response to I.C.E. raids on BIPOC communities can and should apply directly to community support for LGBTQ+ neighbors during the exclusionary fascist attacks of the Trump administration and MAGA movement. 

As Serwer went on during the discussion on that same episode of The Bulwark Podcast: 

The right has a social theory that multiracial, multi-faith communities cannot be, quote unquote, cohesive, that our chaos is the result of the presence of people who are different from us. And then you see this multiracial community in Minneapolis coming together in defense of each other in this broad, nonviolent way.

And it's just inspiring. And it just refutes the idea that the problem with, quote unquote, cohesion is the presence of people who are different from us. The problem is people who make an issue out of someone being different from you.

The anti-I.C.E.-pro-trans-support connection was even recently made by progressive candidate for Minnesota Governor and trans woman Kobey Layne in her DFL convention speech. In her remarks, Layne started by saying Minnesota met the moment in opposing I.C.E., then implied that the eventual nominee and longtime corporate Democrat Amy Klobuchar hadn’t. (Klobuchar, who regularly voted to fund D.H.S. didn’t even mention the I.C.E. occupation until Renee Good was murdered.) A minute later, Layne remarked:

White candidates ask immigrant communities for their support. Yet some candidates can't even stomach the words of “Abolish I.C.E.” … If we want to be the big tent party, we cannot leave anyone behind. Fighting for our communities means standing up for what is right, not what is politically convenient. We cannot leave trans kids behind and ask the LGBTQ community to vote.

Featured image is by the author