The 2016 US presidential election dramatically disrupted the lives of many Americans, but this was particularly pronounced for transgender children and their families. In particular, it created a change in how they historicized their individual experience and that of their struggle for acceptance and legal protections. The experiences highlighted in this chapter come from an ongoing ethnographic study of young transgender children's experiences in school, family, and peer life in the United States. Prior to the election, they drew encouragement and hope from comparisons with the LGBTQ, women's rights, and civil rights movements and their associated victories; these comparisons emphasized pride, visibility, and trans rights as human rights, and appealed to the American progressive moral compass. However, when Donald Trump won the 2016 election, parents and children radically scaled back these emphases on pride, liberation, visibility, and appeals to progress, replacing them with a focus on survival and safety. Further, instead of identifying with progressive movements’ histories of struggle and victory, parents began identifying with the histories of the victims of Nazism. These comparisons spoke especially to participants’ feelings of running out of time, and of confusion and urgency. Said one mother, “I don't know what to do, but I feel like time is running out… . What if this is Vienna?”—which is to say, what if this is the moment of a great shift in vulnerability, after which things would get unimaginably worse? Like the Austrian Jews who awoke to the shock of Kristallnacht in 1938 and had to decide what actions to take, these families were faced with determining how to plan for unimaginable futures in a suddenly unrecognizable country.

The Viennese Jews faced gradually escalating anti-Semitic harassment and violence, beginning immediately before the Anschluss, or joining of Austria and Germany, and continuing in intensity as the Nazis attempted to push as many Jewish Austrians as possible to emigrate. Nonetheless, survivors and witnesses describe the Kristallnacht events and deportations as sudden and unbelievable.