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Trump, the C.D.C. and the Peek-a-Boo Doctrine

Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times

In case you were keeping score at home: In Donald Trump’s America, you’re allowed to refuse to make me a cake, because pastry is free speech. But if you’re a researcher studying medicine at the leading national public health institute of the United States, you can’t say “science-based” in a budget request.

Because science, apparently, is a less protected form of communication than buttercream frosting.

The Washington Post reported, late Friday, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has banned seven words or phrases from agency budget documents. And although an agency spokesman later pushed back against the report as a “mischaracterization,” other sources inside the agency confirmed that avoiding the seven phrases was part of a strategy to get funding approval from congressional Republicans. So by all means, if you want your research funded, don’t use the deadly seven: “vulnerable,” “evidence-based,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus” or “science-based.”

Surprised? I’m not. This is part of Donald J. Trump’s governing philosophy, something I call the “Peek-a-boo Baby Doctrine,” the belief that if you cover your eyes, the things you do not like suddenly disappear.

If you’ve ever spent time with a young child, you’ve played this game. There’s a nice scene in the movie “Ice Age,” in which a saber-toothed tiger is trying to amuse a human infant. “Wheeere’s the baby?” the tiger, Diego, asks, covering his giant face with his razor sharp claws. “There he is!” (“Stop it, you’re scaring him,” replies Sid, a giant ground sloth.)

Developmental psychologists call this phenomenon “object permanence.” The Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget theorized that it takes a child until about the age of 2 before she is able to use reason to discover the fixity of things she cannot see.

A lack of object permanence is perfectly normal in a 24-month-old baby. As a guiding principle of public policy, however, it’s problematic.

You don’t have to look very far to see evidence of the Peek-a-boo Baby Doctrine on display.

Back in March, for instance, the Trump administration refused to include information on gay and lesbian people as part of the proposed 2020 Census. Because if you don’t count us, we must not be real.

We saw it the day of Mr. Trump’s inauguration, when information on climate change was purged from the White House web site. Because if we do not study climate change, clearly it isn’t happening.

We saw it when this administration removed any reference to the civil rights movement from that same site. Because if you can’t study the country’s long history of slavery and racism, there must never have been any racial injustice.

We saw it on Holocaust Remembrance Day, when somehow the White House’s statement failed to make any mention of Jewish people. Because if there aren’t any Jews, there must not be any anti-Semitism.

And then there are all those deleted tweets — the ones supporting Luther Strange, the ones criticizing the mayor of Puerto Rico. Obviously, if you delete something you’ve posted on Twitter, it’s the same as if you never said it in the first place.

Speaking of Puerto Rico, the administration deleted data on the post-hurricane crisis there in October. Problem solved!

Finally, there’s the ban on transgender people serving in the military. Even though trans people — including the former deputy assistant secretary of defense, Amanda Simpson — have been serving valorously for years, apparently if we erase them from the armed forces, we will stop having to think about them. (A federal judge, meanwhile, has kept the ban from going into place, calling it “capricious, arbitrary, and unqualified.”)

Transgender people are a part of this country, and will continue to be part of this country whether or not Republicans admit that our lives are real. I’ve always thought that the many attempts to deny trans folks the dignity of using the proper public facilities had nothing to do with bathrooms and everything to do with the simple fact that conservatives just don’t like the fact that there are transgender people in the first place. Making the mere mention of us in the C.D.C. budget process an impossibility is just one more attempt at creating a world in which our lives can be effaced.

But trans people are just as real as climate change, or science or fetuses. Or diversity. Or science-based research.

Instead of making the Peek-a-Boo Baby Doctrine into law, the Trump administration — and all of us, in fact — would do better to accept the complexity of the world, with its contradictions, and its joys, and its mystery. Because the best part of that game is not the part where you’re hiding and asking, “Where’s the baby?” It’s the moment of revelation, when you take your hands away from your face. “There he is!” you say. And your child recognizes that the two of you, and the vulnerable world we share, are all still here.

Jennifer Finney Boylan (@JennyBoylan), a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.”

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