For a group that makes up less than 1% of the U.S. population, it’s remarkable how often transgender people are the subject of public fear and political attacks. Despite their small population size, 998 bills attacking transgender identities have been introduced in 2025 alone — 122 bills passed and over 200 currently active — blocking access to education, healthcare and legal recognition. With only one transgender elected official in the federal government and a small enough voter base to be deemed safely negligible by both parties, they have no political capital, donor bases or powerful political action committees. It’s that vulnerability that makes them the perfect candidate for relentless and baseless scapegoating that results in minimal consequences.
Provocative anti-trans panic has scaled since the shooting of right-wing debater Charlie Kirk, where the Trump administration and its loyalists have been grasping at straws to connect the shooter to a so-called trans “ideology.” The identity of the shooter, a straight white male raised in a Republican household, inconveniently threatens to expose their inability to address gun violence and right-wing extremism. Whether it’s exaggerating his connection with a potentially transitioning roommate or speculation about the messages on bullet casings, the right has done all it can to deflect blame and cast trans people as violent extremists.
This panic quickly poured into federal policy. President Donald Trump’s new executive order for federal law enforcement to target loosely-defined domestic terrorist threats gave The Heritage Foundation an opening to call on the FBI to name “Transgender Ideology Inspired Violent Extremism,” or TIVE, as a new category of domestic terrorism. The Foundation also touted unsubstantiated statistics, such as how “Experts estimate that 50% of all major, non-gang related school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology” — a sentiment also endorsed by Republican lawmakers calling for trans people to be institutionalized. The Foundation defines this “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable,” and has relentlessly used it to justify hostility toward trans people.
Reports from national security officials claim that the FBI is considering classifying trans people as “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” a category created this year that refers to people who commit crimes “in furtherance of political, social or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos.”
Asserting in any capacity that transgender people are or have ever been militant or a public threat is an unfounded and pathetic claim. In reality, trans people are overtly the targets of hate-driven violence and extremism, and as anti-trans rhetoric and legislation grows, crimes against trans people are growing with them. From May 2024 to May 2025, there were over 932 anti-LGBTQ incidents in 49 states, averaging out to 2.5 a day — 52% of which were targeting trans and gender non-conforming people.
Uniformly labeling trans people as threatening or extremist based solely on their gender expression is not just absurd, but a dangerous precedent that opens the door for any minority, be it religious or ethnic, to be targeted. When one’s identity alone becomes the basis of criminalization, the government has the ability to punish, surveil or detain anyone for who they are, rather than what they have done. This attack on civil liberties should serve as a warning bell for creeping authoritarianism.
This absurd labeling only fuels Republicans’ bizarre and multifaceted fixation on this tiny minority, spanning from Republican counties leading in trans porn searches to obsessive “trans-vestigating” intended to out public figures suspected of being trans. After relentless claims she is male by right-wing podcaster Candace Owens, First Lady Brigitte Macron of France, is being forced to show proof of her biological sex in a courtroom. Conservatives insist on the looming threat of trans women in sports, despite there being less than ten trans athletes among 500,000 athletes across all collegiate sports — just .002% — and even fewer in professional sports. Yet they continue to spread panic over this oversensationalized non-issue, such as subjecting boxer Imane Kelif to an online smear campaign with people from J.K. Rowling to Trump falsely claiming she’s trans and making her take a gender test to remain in the Olympics.
This harassment extends beyond high profile figures and permeates into public spaces. Despite claims that trans people using public restrooms according to their chosen gender poses danger to others, the reality is once again reversed, with trans people themselves facing harassment, assault and invasions of privacy. Those spreading false narratives of predatory trans people using public restrooms only undermine the very safety they claim to protect. This widespread panic has led to cis and trans women both being subject to policing and humiliation, with many forced to “prove” their sex — sometimes by lifting their tops or showing their IDs — in bathrooms across the United States.
While conservatives drive criminalization and public fear around trans identities, Democrats are the ones letting it go uncontested. The most visible leaders in the Democratic party have treated the defense and wellbeing of trans people as expendable in their misguided bid to try and pick up Republican votes, a task that has time and time again proven to be a fool’s errand.
One might remember former Vice President Kamala Harris refusing to endorse gender-affirming care and voicing concerns over trans student athletes. California Governor Gavin Newsom went on a podcast with Kirk and discussed his support for restrictions of trans women in sports, and Pete Buttigieg, a notable progressive, even commented on the supposed unfairness rather than acknowledging that this is a manufactured controversy. These feckless concessions to Trump’s hatred campaign only lend legitimacy to its hysterically inaccurate and hateful claims.
History should remind us how dangerous systemic scapegoating can be. The most marginalized groups are always the first picked off in an authoritarian regime. Consider the Jewish population in pre-World War II Germany: It only made up 1% of the national population and possessed little political capital, yet was framed as an existential threat to the country, paving the way for their persecution.
Trans people are not threats to public safety — they are our friends, family and neighbors who deserve respect and protection, yet remain the most overlooked, victimized and vulnerable members of our society. The only threat their existence poses is to narrow, pathologizing and rigid mindsets which seek to limit an infinitely complex human experience and are dependent on gender binaries for social policing. The real threat to our way of life comes from those who erode democratic norms under the pretense of public safety.
WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Mehr Kotval at [email protected].
