APRIL 17, 2026 OPINION GROUNDCOVER NEWS One Struggle, One Fight: The link between the struggles for trans rights and Palestinian liberation JOE KONCZAL GEO Queer/Trans Caucus “Fascism is colonialism turned inward.” As the crisis of capitalism worsens at home, we have seen this quote permeate discourse on the increasingly violent and chaotic state of American politics. But what does this idiom truly mean? To answer this, we must turn to history. The concentration camp, whose history is often understood to begin with the genocides carried out by the Nazis, does not have its origins on the European continent. Concentration camps have a long, bloody history in the colonies of every European power: the Spanish in Cuba, the British in South Africa, the Germans in East Africa. Then, the Germans at home. In a piece of historic irony, surplus khaki uniforms of the German Colonial Police in Africa were bought by the Nazi Party and became the uniforms of their paramilitary branch, commonly known as the Brownshirts. This concept has been termed the “imperial boomerang,” the process whereby imperial powers “bring home” the assortment of apparatuses, institutions and techniques developed in their colonies in order to repress dissent in the empire’s heartland. The boomerang returned home and colonialism was turned inward when the first concentration camps were built in Germany. We do not need to look far to see this “imperial boomerang” in action today. Consider the arsenal of oppression used by Israel. The Palestinians in Gaza have been subjected to a brutal genocide for two and a half years now, and the Strip now has the highest number of childhood amputees in the world. The Zionist occupation employs a broad range of sophisticated military and surveillance technologies developed by U.S. and Israeli companies to control the lives of Palestinians under occupation. Freedom of movement in Gaza is nigh-on impossible and restricted in the West Bank through almost complete elimination, with checkpoints, patrols and artificially-intelligent surveillance that watches, lists and tracks the movements of Palestinians everywhere. In the boundaries of the state of Israel established after the mass ethnic cleansing in 1948, Palestinians are subject to a complex system of legal discrimination which renders them less autonomous, gives them less access to democratic institutions, and levies harsher penalties on them for crimes. In Zionist prisons, particularly those housing prisoners from the West Bank and Gaza, sexual assault, murder and psychological torment are routine. (In all of these things the University of Michigan plays its own part, acting as a hedge fund for weapons companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin that supply the Zionists and maintaining holdings of Israeli shekels that directly support the Zionist currency and economy. This is not to mention the weapons technologies it develops in plain sight in its various aerospace labs, nor its academic partnerships with Zionist academic institutions and tech companies. See tahrirxmich.org/ research.) As crises mount at home and abroad — out of control price inflation, rampant unemployment, a prolonged and wildly unpopular imperialist war with Iran on behalf of Israel — the boomerang is returning home, and it's on a collision course with our trans comrades. Technologies of surveillance and the apparatuses of legal repression long used in the global south are now being used in the nationwide Republican “war on gender ideology.” Government data and surveillance was used in these past months to revoke the driving licenses of all trans people in Kansas, leaving them unable to drive legally. Similar surveillance undergirds a recent effort in Tennessee to create a public register of all trans citizens. People are beginning to realize now how the facilities used to house people kidnapped by ICE are not very different from concentration camps. Less people know about the fact that the Trump administration recently made all Federal Prisons into conversion camps. All forms of gender-affirming care have been banned, and trans people will now be subject to conversion therapy, which means taking hormones away from trans prisoners and forcing them to ingest cocktails of mood altering drugs. This will result in disastrous physical and psychological damage: depression, anxiety, insomnia and eventually for those who have undergone certain types of gender-affirming care, a severe loss in bone density and structure, potentially disabling them for life. The use of these technologies of repression (prisons, legal status, …) in the service of “anti-gender-ideology” fascism is not an end to itself, either. We can see how trans people, who the government paints as dangerous threats to children, the family and almost everything else, are a tool in the arsenal of distractions that allow the ruling classes in this country to maintain the status quo of imperialist foreign policy. In all their endeavors to “eradicate transgenderism from public life” as one conservative commentator eagerly put it, the administration has found a willing ally in the University of Michigan. At home, the University has worked to isolate its trans students, especially trans women, by apparently banning them from participating in intramural women’s sports leagues which play primarily for fun. They did this with no direct public pressure from the U.S. Presidency at all, citing an executive order regarding “keeping men out of women’s sports.” It has also begun to dismantle trans healthcare upon its own volition. Even before Robert Kennedy Jr. attempted to institute a nationwide ban on trans youth care by banning Medicaid reimbursements for gender-affirming care, the University of Michigan — via Michigan Medicine — stopped providing gender affirming care to anyone under the age of 19. Now with ICE being authorized to detain people whose gender markers do not match across various documents — birth certificates, passports, visas — the University's history of assistance in detaining and deporting students places trans international workers at outsized risk as well. This policy is unlikely to remain solely on international workers. Eventually, it will be applied to everyone regardless of citizenship, giving ICE carte blanche to terrorize anyone who has transitioned. The University is on both ends of the boomerang. They helped perfect the technique overseas, and now they have assisted in bringing it home. So how can we fight the genocide at home and the genocide abroad? It is a waste of our time to appeal to the hypothetical "good conscience" of university administrators or politicians. When State Attorney Dana Nessel expresses her outrage at Michigan Medicine, we must remember how she colluded with the University and the FBI on the violent raids that brutalized trans student organizers of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment on the Diag. When some Regent makes sympathetic noises to the plight of our trans comrades we must remember that those same regents allow the University to be run as a hedge fund that directly and indirectly supports the Zionist air force that in June 2025 struck the “trans wing” of Evin Prison in Tehran, killing hundreds of trans women in a heartbeat. It is no use signing petitions or working within non-profits whose strategies are constrained by funding guidelines; we must organize ourselves and take direct action. We must learn how to access hormone care ourselves, build mutual aid networks independent of our Bosses, and create a coalition capable of escalating a campaign of organized, collective action to force the University to give its trans workers what they are owed: safe working conditions and basic, fundamental, life-saving healthcare. We must force them to cease their genocidal work beside the Trump Administration at home and abroad. The liberation of Palestine and the liberation of our trans comrades is one in the same. One Struggle! One Fight! Palestine, Trans Rights! GEO is the University of Michigan Graduate Employees' Organization. 11
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