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Is this just about driving trans people to suicide, though? I'm not sure this is the only, or the most important aspect of the argument. Would encouraging desistance in FtM teens, assuming that it does not increase their suicidality (or indeed brings it down in the long run), still kinda count as a genocide? I'd expect that most activists will bite the bullet and say it does. What about a drug or other intervention that'd prevent children from being born trans (assuming this is a thing) – would that be moral, seeing as the condition of transgenderism predicts such a massive hit to quality of life? No, and I believe there's no research being done in this direction precisely because it'd be associated with genocidal intent.
Speaking of genocide and body modification of children... This reminded me that Jews sometimes argue that various things are akin to Holocaust: notably, assimilation – and, more to the point, the ban on male circumcision.
ADL uses a more diplomatic phrasing:
(Curiously, the counterargument also mirrors the transition debate «Its a human rights violation. Only the consenting adult owner of the genitals may rightly decide»).
The logic is sound enough, if circular: as per the definition of Raphael Lemkin, the word «genocide» is
The annihilation is often assumed to ultimately take physical form, with all those stratagems being mere groundwork – as a case in point, consider Uighur genocide, which atomized Westerners mainly identify with purported fertility suppression and mass sterilization, as opposed to attacks on Uighur culture and ethnoreligious assabiyah. The thing is, Lemkin's definition doesn't work like that! The terminal goal, the annihilation of a group, is not the same as the extermination of its members::
So, Jews are a people, a national/ethnic group. Denying them the practice of infant genital mutilation that they – for reasons other people, me included, may find frivolous or inane – steadfastly assert is crucial for belonging to their group, can be construed as an attack on the group's continued existence, at least within the borders of the polity; thus, genocide. Trans people argue that denying children the body-modifying practice that is crucial for becoming a full-fledged trans person is genocide. The parallel is clear to me. Now the problem is, who are trans people as a group?
They are not an ethnos nor a genos, but a community built around an identity which is downstream of a differentiating trait.
We've heard similar rhetoric with regard to deaf people, bearers of other disabilities (the geneticist Kevin Bird, a disabled person himself, speaks very cogently on the matter of how defining disabilities to be undesirable is a eugenicist framework) – and of course abortion of fetuses with Down's is a genocide too. The whole eugenics-genocide rhetoric is obviously cribbed from racial rhetoric which is, in turn, heavily inspired by reflections on Holocaust after WWII; it's all the same words, and sometimes even the same activists.
We can discuss this as a postmodernist issue, as a memetic process, as a problem of hyperindividualism, but eh... Contra @Tanista, I think this is not toxic individualism but precisely misapplied tribalism, tribalism of people who have only found community through the commonality of their alienation.
In principle, the innate human drive toward tribalist behavior is a potent tool for coordinating collective negotiation in individualist societies, and this is the bulk of what we call politics. In practice, collective identities can hold their bearers hostage and demand investment in their own proliferation; unlike some run-of-the-mill meme like an ideology, this is a very specific mechanic – it cuts to the core of human social instinct, of helping those most similar to yourself (and, the intuition goes, more related) in the competition with alien groups. A trans person who weaponizes the genocide rhetoric is defending not only their own right to exist, but rights of the Trans Tribe as a whole - both its extant members and its historical perpetuation... Which unfortunately has to be outsourced to other tribes on the pesky biological side of things.
Perhaps neologisms would fit these observations? In the vein of “parthenogenesis”:
Memogenic: created from memes/the mind
Identigenic: created from an identity/similarity - the prefix is literally sameness
Laliagenic: created by talking
Genogenic or cisgenic: created by genes/created normally
Memoethnic, identiethnic, genoethnic, etc.: a people/tribe created suchly
Identicide: killing an identity / killing a sameness.
I suspect, were we to start using these, identigenic and genogenic would be the winning memes, along with identicide. Transgender people would be, from a gender essentialist POV, part of a memogenic pseudoethnos. There would be genogenic Jews, identigenic Jews, and pistiethnic Jews (faith-originating) comprising a meta-tribe.
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