What a Terrifying Time to be Trans

It’s a scary time to be a trans person in the U.S. Like, more so than usual.

In the wake of the public murder of Charlie Kirk, commentators and political figures on the right have been all-too eager to train the eye of outrage on “transgenders.” Despite Kirk’s shooter being a cisgender, the Trump administration is reportedly already making moves to designate trans people as “violent extremists” while the Heritage Foundation froths at the mouth at the chance to label us domestic terrorists.

This wild-goose chase kicked off in earnest last week when the Wall Street Journal recklessly ran with an inaccurate and incomplete report that the etchings on the retrieved bullet casings included transgender “ideology.”

When the actual information emerged and painted a murkier picture of the shooter’s motives, the WSJ quietly inserted an editor’s note walking back the claim, but the damage was already done. Political figures and influencers on the right, as if reading from the same hymn book, quickly escalated their rhetoric:

“Seems like per capita the radical transgender movement has to be the most violent movement anywhere in the world,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son said on a Thursday livestream.

Laura Loomer, another person known to have the president’s ear, called trans people a “national security threat,” and said their “movement needs to be classified as a terrorist organization IMMEDIATELY.” The world’s richest man and former adviser to the president echoed the sentiment to his millions of followers.

More than a week later, we now know that Kirk’s shooter was not trans. Tyler Robinson lived with and was potentially romantically involved with someone transitioning. And that individual, according to all public reporting, was horrified by the news of Kirk’s assassination and is completely complying with authorities.

Did trans people get an apology in light of this new information? A promise from the upper levels of government to turn down the temperature? Can you infer the answer from my tone??

Trans people did not ask for any of this, but it doesn’t matter to these demagogues that Kirk’s murderer isn’t trans. It doesn’t matter that the only trans person actually associated with this crime is essentially a victim, too.

Because it was always going to come back to demonizing trans people. As the 2024 election proved, trans people are a useful scapegoat for the right. Ginning up hate around a misunderstood, vulnerable community that most Americans think they have no real-life interaction with is doing numbers with Republicans’ base. Why else would ridiculous posts claiming that “6 transgenders had advanced knowledge of Charlie Kirk’s assassination” be going viral if people weren’t already primed to see us as an other-worldly threat?

Trump gave away the whole playbook when he declared, “Everything is transgender” this March. Though an objectively hilarious line, it’s clear that conflating trans identity with violence and societal decay is the aim. Trump’s shorthand describes a threat that is insidious, omnipresent, maliciously embedded in our lives. They’re pathologizing our identities to scare people into fearing and hating us – and, I’d argue, pre-justifying the force they’re going to use against us.

There have already been countless attempts by this administration and its allies to make our lives harder. From denying us passports, purging our existence from government websites, to making it impossible for teachers to affirm and support their trans students, their agenda is obvious – to create a world where it is impossible for trans people to live openly and safely.

I found myself hopelessly glued to my phone in the hours and days after Charlie Kirk’s murder. Not out of some perverse enjoyment, but fear. Fear that the right would capitalize on Kirk’s death in the exact way I expected they would. Fear that the hate and bigotry that had mostly been an abstraction for me to this point would come for the people I love.

It was in the middle of a response to a question on trans mass shooters that Kirk was shot – which in part fueled the fever-dream consensus that emerged from the depths of Twitter before any evidence was recovered: this shooting was retaliation for Kirk’s rhetoric on trans people.

And what exactly did Charlie Kirk have to say about trans people during his lifetime? Nothing good. He called us slurs. He said we were “freaks,” “perverted,” that gender-affirming care was an “unimaginable evil,” and the acceptance of trans identity was “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history.”

Kirk spent his career demonizing trans people and inciting violence against us. And his supporters are carrying that mantle forward in full force despite trans people doing absolutely nothing to pull the trigger.

When I first saw the news, I sincerely hoped that Charlie Kirk would survive. Please don’t make a martyr out of this hateful man. Killing a public figure in such a horrifying way would inevitably lead to the valorization and amplification of the man’s legacy and rhetoric (Kirk’s widow has promised as much in her thinly-veiled threats to the “evildoers” who killed her husband). I felt nauseous awaiting what was ahead.

On Wednesday evening Trump declared he would be designating “ANTIFA” as a terrorist organization and hinted at investigations of groups on the left. Legal experts don’t seem to know what this threat means as far as implementation, as there is no way for Trump to legally designate a domestic organization as a terrorist group, much less a decentralized, leader-less movement like antifascism.

But that doesn’t mean trans people won’t be treated with extra suspicion by law enforcement. And we can guess what the Trump administration is attempting to accomplish by designating U.S. citizens as terrorists. The Patriot Act vastly expanded law enforcement’s ability to spy on its citizens and detain noncitizens in the name of fighting terrorism. They want more tools with which to oppress dissent.

When Trump floated designating Antifa as a terrorist group last time, nothing ultimately happened beyond the increased federal law enforcement presence at the 2020 protests. And that is ultimately how trans people will most likely experience this fallout: more suspicion, more targeting, more dehumanization from a government that thinks society would be better if we didn’t exist.

It ultimately won’t matter if Trump’s threats have no teeth. The well of public discourse has already been poisoned. Multiple members of Congress are calling for the institutionalization of trans people. Elon Musk is suggesting a proclivity for violence is an intrinsic part of trans identity.

And that’s just what the most powerful people in our country think.