When a Sign of Hard-Won Progress is also an Act of Stunning Hypocrisy
by Harper Jean Tobin, Director of Policy
On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke at the opening of an unusual Department of Justice Hate Crimes Summit. The event was unusual for bringing leading advocates for communities of color, immigrants, religious minorities, and LGBT people — including NCTE — together with Trump Administration officials who have dedicated much of their energy to rolling back policies protecting the lives and well-being of those same communities.
Civil rights advocates came with lists of specific recommendations for the Justice Department, but also with a strong, united message: you cannot combat hate crimes without combating hate. Advocates sat politely through Sessions’s speech, many wearing “NO MUSLIM BAN” stickers in silent protest.
Most of Sessions’s speech might have come from any attorney general, and might in large part have drawn applause from advocates. But coming from this particular attorney general, they were hard to take. Even Sessions’s headline-grabbing promise to investigate attacks against transgender people sat uncomfortably beside his lifelong and continuing record of hostility toward LGBT Americans. To be sure, his words were a reflection of years of demands for recognition and justice from transgender people and their loved ones. And yet, again and again, Sessions’s words at the summit were also stunning for their moral hypocrisy.
A few excerpts illustrate the troubling contradictions at work in Sessions’s stand against hate crimes:
“Making America safe” through mass incarceration
The Trump Administration and the Department of Justice are committed to reducing violent crime and making America safe. As you know, hate crimes are violent crimes.
The Hate Crimes Summit itself is an offshoot of President Trump’s Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, a body announced the same day AG Sessions was sworn in. The Task Force’s main aims, though, are prosecuting immigrants and reviving failed mass incarceration policies despite crime rates at nearly a 50-year low. This is bad news given already-high rates of incarceration among transgender people.
Deeds vs. words: “Protecting civil rights”
No person should have to fear being violently attacked because of who they are, what they believe, or how they worship. So I pledge to you: As long as I am Attorney General, the Department of Justice will continue to protect the civil rights of all Americans — and we will not tolerate the targeting of any community in our country.
We wish this were true. But the fact is that the Justice Department and the Trump Administration is actively undermining civil rights nearly every day. Far from not tolerating the targeting of communities, it is actively targeting transgender people — not only by bullying transgender students, but also by refusing to defend in court the Affordable Care Act’s health care protections for transgender people. The administration is targeting immigrants with fear-mongering rhetoric, creating special offices and grants specifically to target crimes committed by immigrants.
Consider the following things that happened on the very day of the Attorney General’s speech:
- the House passed two vicious anti-immigrant bills that Attorney General Sessions had effusively praised the day before;
- the Department of Homeland Security, with the help of the Justice Department, announced the re-implementation of President Trump’s discriminatory Muslim ban;
- President Trump named as the head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division a lawyer who has made his career seeking to weaken civil rights laws, including defending North Carolina’s HB2.
Targeting communities is exactly what the Trump Justice Department does.
Deeds vs. words: do transgender lives matter?
We have and will continue to enforce hate crime laws aggressively and appropriately where transgendered [sic] individuals are victims. Last month, Joshua Brandon Vallum was sentenced to 49 years in prison for assaulting and murdering Mercedes Williamson. This is the first case prosecuted under the Hate Crimes Prevention Act involving the murder of a transgender person.
I personally met with the Department’s senior leadership and the Civil Rights Division to discuss a spate of murders around the country of transgender individuals. I have directed the Civil Rights Division to work with the United States Attorney’s Offices and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to identify ways the Department can support the state and local law enforcement authorities investigating these incidents and to determine whether federal action would be appropriate.
Mercedes Williamson was one of over two dozen transgender people — mostly women of color — who were murdered in 2016. The federal prosecution in her case was initiated under the Obama administration, with the final sentencing hearing occurring last month. The Justice Department’s involvement, and this Attorney General’s mention of it, are a sign of the hard-won and still-inadequate progress we have made in standing up for transgender people’s very lives. At the time of its passage, however, Sessions was the Senate’s fiercest opponent of the passing the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act, denouncing the idea that transgender people should be protected.
We recognize the efforts of the career Justice Department lawyers who worked on this heartbreaking case, and we will hold the Justice Department to its commitment to investigate other killings.
But we do not measure justice in the length of prison sentences, and we do not measure our leaders by their willingness to say we should not be killed in the streets — not when everything else they say and do makes transgender people’s lives more precarious. Not when the Justice Department is sending signals to schools that it is acceptable to single out transgender students as different and inferior, endangering their health and safety. Not when the Justice Department is sending signals to hospitals that it is acceptable to turn transgender people away from lifesaving care. These actions undermine the effectiveness and credibility of any work on hate crimes.
So far this year, 15 transgender people have been killed that we know of. From coast to coast, many more have been attacked, raped, and threatened because of who they are. We expect government officials to denounce this violence. We also expect them not to be hypocrites who contribute to the very ugliness they are cleaning up after.
We will talk to government officials where we can to share the stories of our communities and our recommendations for change — and we did just that at this week’s summit. But we will not allow the Trump administration to use the issue of hate crimes to whitewash either its dangerous rollback of civil rights, or its equally dangerous agenda of mass incarceration.
Can all Americans live their lives without fear?
Let me close by thanking you all once again for coming to this summit, and for your commitment to this cause. Hate crimes are not only violent attacks on our fellow citizens; they are an attack on our country’s most fundamental principles. We have a duty to make sure that all Americans can live their lives without fear.
The Attorney General’s hate crimes speech is full of sentiments anyone would agree with. When it comes to violence against transgender people, it is full of words that until recently were too rarely heard from government officials — and were certainly never heard from Sessions himself. These words are signs of transgender people’s hard-won progress. But we cannot ignore the outrageous hypocrisy of an Attorney General who on a daily basis is working to ensure that more Americans live their lives in fear.
Follow NCTE on Twitter, Facebook, and Medium for the most up-to-date news on issues affecting the transgender community, and visit transequality.org for in-depth resources and information on what you can do to support the transgender people in your life.
