To say that I’m disappointed would be an understatement.

A month after the inauguration of President Donald Trump’s second term, I’m left feeling exhausted and depressed by how quickly things have spiraled. Swaths of critical federal employees have been fired, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement rounds up immigrants. We’ve even shipped off around 100 people to a camp in Panama and there’s talk of annexing Canada.

It is right for the Japanese American community to come out strong and unambiguously condemn what is happening today. After years of repeating “never again,” now is the time to make those words count.

Yet, while our community is standing firm to pledge support with immigrants facing deportations or denouncing the ethnic cleansing proposed in Gaza, I have heard almost nothing on the matter of LGBTQ rights, much less on trans gender issues from our community’s leaders.

It’s true that the Japanese American community has no historical ties with the trans rights movement — per se, the closest we have is support for gay marriage following Redress, and the fight for trans rights being inexplicably entwined with the LGBTQ movement. The experience may be closer to the holocaust, as I’ve often heard many community leaders quote Pastor Martin Niemöller’s words of “then they came for me,” to call for intersectional solidarity today.

However, I must point out that Niemöller only starts with the socialists and trade unionists, before they came for the Jews. In reality, the Nazis had already been working to eliminate other groups, but Niemöller couldn’t be deigned to name them. For those who never realized, the books burning in those famous photos from the 1933 Opernplatz book burning were from the Institute for Sexual Science, which was researching transgender people.

While I don’t mean to discount the gravity of everything else, I want to stress that trans issues cannot be a strategic sacrifice. According to a Feb. 20 Gallup report, 9.3% of U.S. adults self-identified as LGBTQ+ in 2024. Among them, 1.3% are transgender. A small percentage, but that is 3.4 million people when you do the math.

One of the first executive orders Trump issued Jan. 20 took aim at trans people, citing a “biological reality of sex.” In the days since, this and other orders have sought to systematically erase trans people from public life, whether it be through passports, the military, medical care or academia. Labeled as “gender ideology extremism,” I have been essentially relegated into becoming a second-class citizen.

Of course, as with everything else this administration has been doing, these orders and changes have been challenged in the courts and there have been victories in the interim. Yet, even as a federal court blocked the Trump administration from withholding funding for hospitals providing gender-affirming care to people under the age of 19, the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles located in the “safe” state of California, did not restart issuing care after the order was stayed by a court for over a week, even ignoring an earlier warning from State Attorney General Rob Bonta that withholding care could be in violation of state law.

And even with the legal victories, the onslaught is relentless. Most recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered a permanent visa ban Feb. 25 for those who “misrepresent their birth sex on visa applications,” according to The Guardian. Though written in the context of trans athletes seeking to compete in America, the language of the order could apply to all trans people seeking a visa to enter the U.S.

While the systematic erasure of trans people today is through the Web and not done through literal fire like in 1933, the sentiment feels far too similar to what happened 90 years ago. And Japanese Americans have been quiet in the face of these attacks.

In general, I have often heard trans people equated to canaries in a coal mine, a warning for greater transgressions to come, but canaries were considered an acceptable loss. We cannot be your canaries or a sacrificial chess piece in this fight. I am demanding people show vocal solidarity to defend trans people for the sake of trans people themselves, and not as a bulwark for battles yet to come.

No amount of institutional erasure nor outright murder will ever totally get rid of trans people, but I hope that more of us can survive and live knowing we aren’t out here alone.

Tomo Hirai is a staff writer at the Nichi Bei News and a Shin-Nisei trans woman. The views expressed in the preceding commentary are not necessarily those of the Nichi Bei News.

Tomo Hirai, Nichi Bei News

Tomo Hirai is a Shin-Nisei Japanese American lesbian trans woman born in San Francisco and raised in Walnut Creek, Calif., where she continues to reside. She attended the San Francisco Japanese Hoshuko (supplementary school) through high school and graduated from the University of California, Davis with degrees in Communications and Japanese, along with a minor in writing. She serves as a diversity consultant for table top games and comic books in her spare time.