Things are bad lately in so many different areas that you might be finding it hard to keep up. One of those areas is the arts, with Trump and his administration making several recent moves that target trans people in particular.
On Wednesday, Trump made good on his promise of the previous week and became chairman of the board of The Kennedy Center, a national site for theater, music, dance, and performance in Washington DC that you might best know for its annual Honors. According to The Washington Post, “This marks the first time a president has removed his predecessor’s board members at the Kennedy Center and installed himself as chair.” The Post also quotes Trump as saying
So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things… I’m going to be chairman of it, we’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke.
The Post also writes that “Trump has cited the Kennedy Center hosting drag shows as one reason he wanted to reshape the institution.”
At another long-standing arts institution, the National Endowment for the Arts has cut its “Challenge America” funding, a program that “offers support for projects that extend the reach of the arts to underserved groups/communities” according to an archive of its site. The NEA writes that “This change is to focus NEA staff resources on the Grants for Arts Projects category;” that project focuses on “celebrat[ing] the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America.” America’s 250th anniversary is the focus of an executive order by Trump. The updated NEA guidelines note that
The applicant will not operate any programs promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws, in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173.
The applicant understands that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168.
This news hits particularly hard for me. Before I was in journalism, I devoted my career to trans art, writing plays and putting on a theater festival and co-founding a small press dedicated to trans fiction. Institutions like The Kennedy Center and the NEA weren’t on our radar back then, because we knew no grant-making organization or national arts center would touch the kind of work we were doing: trans work for trans people, instead of trying to explain ourselves to cis audiences. We funded it ourselves or from our community; we rented cheap space and bartered our labor and leaned on our networks. While some of the work itself has been lost to time, I’ve always been so proud to see what’s grown from its foundations; we might not have been part of the infamous “trans tipping point,” but performers we showcased and writers we published and worked with have gone on to make culture-changing work with more reach than I ever thought possible. The more mainstream acceptance of trans work today was unthinkable to me back then, and I’m in awe of the current trans artists finding success or security through doors I always thought of as permanently closed. But the political and artistic time I came up in means there’s a part of me that’s long thought trans people’s presence in an art world dominated by cis people has always been conditional.
Something that made me reconsider that stance, if only for a night, was actually a show I attended at The Kennedy Center while living in DC, the American Opera Initiative’s performance of three short operas that I went to in the winter of 2023. I consider myself an opera fan, with all the high-mindedness and squinting at subtitles the name implies, but the operas in the showcase were experimental and raucous; the audience laughed and cheered and leapt to their feet during the performance. One opera in particular focused on trans issues, and as much as I like to see myself as beyond the need for “representation,” my aloof posturing melted away at seeing trans people in such an old art form, on one of the nation’s most prestigious stages. I was, despite how I see myself, hugely moved by the performance, and it reinvented how I saw opera and trans people’s place in it.
The loss of opportunities like that is a tragedy, even if I don’t find it a surprise. Here’s where the suspicion I’ve never put down maybe serves me, or at least protects my heart: I always thought this would happen, one way or another, and I built an artistic world that didn’t need such institutions to survive and thrive. These decrees aren’t some kind of “end” to trans art, and whatever overtures these moves make toward eradicating it can’t help but fail, because I don’t believe we’ve ever truly needed cis people’s support to do our work, and there is an entire world out there outside of national organizations and grants. But it still hurts to see such an explicit focus on erasing trans people from the arts. As much as I tell myself I’ve been here before, this is something different than the disinterest that defined my early years. As Casey Plett pointed out in the Toronto Star, writing about Trump’s passport orders
Some have called this a “rollback” of trans rights. But that’s not quite the right term. A rollback implies a return to a previous state. But various forms of those rights had always existed… The totalizing Trump ID restrictions are not regressive, they are new.
This holds true for the NEA and The Kennedy Center too; previously, they just wouldn’t have considered us– now, they’re literally barred from doing so. I’ve said before that I was able to live my trans life and make my trans work not because governments or systems protected or wanted it, but because they couldn’t stop me from doing it. That’s changed now, in ways that take my breath away when I let myself feel the full weight of it all. There’s a kind of progress in the world going from disinterest in trans people to caring so much about us, and while much of that care–the greater amount, I hope–is good, there’s also a group of people willing to put their full energy into hating us, into trying to make sure not just that progress is erased, but that our lives are worse than before, pulling every lever in their power to do so.
It’s strange to be so angry and sad about the loss of horizons I never thought it was possible to sail toward, but while the Trump administration might own the institutions, they can’t ultimately do away with trans art in any meaningful sense. At my core, I’m not afraid of them; Trump and his cohort don’t matter to me in a way that really matters, despite how very bad and dangerous and even unlivable they are eager to make my life. My confidence comes from a lot of places–my politics, my faith–but also from trans art, from the work we’ve made with and for each other for decades upon decades, which didn’t depend on them for its existence and doesn’t now. I’m sad about the losses we’ll see in the next four years and maybe beyond; I mourn the art we won’t get because of this. But that art found its way before, and will still, and will again. We never needed them, and we still don’t need them, and they’ve never been able to stop us.
