Anti-Transgender Rhetoric Fuels Violence (original) (raw)

Here is an ugly truth with which we all must reckon: In what began as the right wing’s manufactured culture wars, the lives of transgender Americans—and transgender youth in particular—have been rhetorically fashioned into political fodder to court media attention. The transgender community has been so recognizably positioned as the nation’s political punching bag that all politicians, across the ideological spectrum, must reconcile with their own career survival instincts in moments when they are called upon to stand between trans folks and those taking the hardest swings and landing the cheapest shots at their expense. Without enough people in positions of power willing to brave the stigma attached to standing with transgender people right now, their existence is framed as the central controversy, rather than their victimization.

In the course of these social shifts to the right on trans issues, expectations of even superficial civility have gone by the wayside when it comes to public conversations about trans and nonbinary people. Whether defaming specific individuals or the entire community as a whole, politicians, pundits, celebrities, and influencers have seemingly joined the fray in piling hyperbolic and caricaturistic generalizations onto those who don’t fit the gender binary. For such a small community, there is a strikingly outsized degree of vitriol focused on transgender and nonbinary folks in contemporary public discourse.

In our current sociohistorical moment, transgender people are subject to widely normalized—and wildly sensationalized—villification. Whether being cast as sexually deviant, uncontrollably predatory, or even innately inclined toward “domestic terrorism,” extreme rhetorical devices have been repeatedly deployed to stoke widespread, irrational fears of trans and nonbinary people within the broader population. Those now recognizable tropes have in turn been invoked as “reasonable” justifications for preemptive surveillance, exclusion, criminalization, denial of civil rights and civil liberties, and violence toward transgender and nonbinary people—if only for the supposed “protection” of those that they allegedly stand to “harm.”

This template is not new. What we see happening with trans people now has always been how the United States treats minoritized populations. The widespread perception that a group is inherently dangerous to the majority is exactly what positions that group at the greatest risk of violence by the majority. The cultivation of disinformation about trans and nonbinary people has led to the spread of unsubstantiated fear. This fear is more than a misguided ideology. It puts transgender people directly and increasingly in harm’s way, providing cover for those who would harm them by enabling the claim that their violence is a necessary measure of self-defense against whatever threat they believe trans people pose to them. Such has ever been the playbook deployed against racially and religiously minoritized groups, immigrants, political dissidents, feminists, the working class, and other LGBTQ+ folks whose expressions of dissent—or very existence—posed a threat to hegemonic power relations throughout U.S. history.

When widely disseminated disinformation about—and dehumanization of—a group causes fearmongering, the implementation of laws and policies enacting structural and state violence against that group is never far behind. President Donald Trump’s political scapegoating of transgender Americans has ramped up in tenor and frequency over the past several years, as he has used the bully pulpit of the presidency to target the community with blatant falsehoods and sensationalized narratives of villainization. These dynamics have been exacerbated since his re-election in November 2024. His second term as President has ushered in an unprecedented number of policy initiatives and Executive Orders aimed at restricting or eliminating the rights, freedoms, and protections of transgender people in ways that have endangered their health, safety, and futures. A political climate that normalizes the treatment of a minoritized group as ineligible for legal protections and citizenship rights sets the stage for vigilante violence against that group. It speaks volumes that the LGBTQ+ “panic defense”—the legal argument that perpetrators of hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community cannot be held criminally responsible for violent actions supposedly motivated by fear of their victim’s sexuality or gender identity—has not yet been banned federally, or even in the majority of U.S. states.

Groups reduced to an outsider status become seemingly fair game to those who see themselves as defending the majority group’s values and interests. Trump’s leadership has emboldened militia groups who frame their anti-transgender violence as patriotic. Whenever a disinformation campaign about a minoritized, “othered” group is deployed systematically enough that the majority begins to believe it, the terms of public discourse about that population eventually begin to mirror the most recognizable narrative, irrespective of its factuality—or lack thereof. As problematic and rife with falsehoods those terms may be, they act as the lens through which relevant topics associated with that group are broadly conceptualized. Within this power dynamic, the burden of proof does not fall upon those perpetuating disinformation to demonstrate credibility, but rather on the maligned group. They must disprove falsehoods and prove their worthiness of inclusion, dignity, and protection under the law, as well as within social conventions.

Trans people are routinely subjected to invasive questions and crude public discussions about their bodies, and specifically about their genitalia, in ways that would never be considered acceptable if directed toward their cisgender counterparts. Such a conversation would be classified as sexual harassment in most contexts. Trans and nonbinary people are typically afforded no such protections when it comes to the intimate details of their anatomical composition. Since Trump took office, the limited protections from sexual harassment and sexual violence they could have been afforded through sex- and gender-based antidiscrimination civil rights legislation and policies have been systematically dismantled for the express purpose of excluding them. The tenor of the dehumanization discourse aimed at trans folks has led to the development of policy initiatives that propose required genital inspections for children as a preventive measure to ensure that transgender athletes cannot participate in girls’ sports.

The irony in all of this is that each of the most damaging disinformation tropes projected onto the trans and nonbinary population represent directly inverted deflections of factual information. Put simply: Every supposed “danger” falsely presented as a threat posed by transgender people is, in reality, indicative of a real danger that the transgender community is disproportionately threatened by. However, as long as dominant narratives convince the public that trans and nonbinary people must be viewed at all times as potential perpetrators, it is unlikely that significant attention will be turned toward their disproportionate victimization.

For example, at the behest of far-right organizations like the Heritage Foundation, FBI Director Kash Patel has recently discussed classifying transgender people and their supporters as “nihilistic violent extremist” and “domestic terrorism” threats, implying a clear and present danger to innocent civilians that must be contained by the force and power of the federal government. In reality, transgender Americans are victims of violent crime at rates four times higher than their cisgender counterparts, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. Despite being vilified with unsubstantiated accusations of innately violent, sexually aggressive tendencies, it is rates of sexual assault against transgender and gender diverse individuals that are shockingly high. Half of the trans and nonbinary population experiences sexual assault.

Transgender Americans are also disproportionately likely to experience homelessness. In fact, LGBTQ+ youth are 120 percent more likely to experience homelessness than are their heterosexual, cisgender peers. While LGBTQ+ youth comprise only 7 percent of the overall youth population in the United States, they make up 40 percent of homeless youth. Cycles of homelessness (as well as increased risks of suicidality) are particularly likely to begin at a young age, if their families are unsupportive or abusive in response to their gender identities. In these circumstances, trans youth are even more susceptible to sexual violence and trafficking because it’s difficult for them to establish financial independence, and the relative safety that it confers, prior to adulthood. Yet, transgender youth have been scrubbed from the missing and exploited children’s database, and the Trump Administration is trying to bar them from accessing federally funded homeless shelters.

At the same time, in July 2025, the federal government shut down the LGBTQ+ youth suicide crisis line, even as the risk of LGBTQ+ youth suicide increases in the context of the kind of anti-LGBTQ+ political rhetoric, laws, and policies that have proliferated in recent years. When transgender children are adultified by the far right as dangerous would-be predators lying in wait, they are perceived as not needing the same degree of support and protection from adults as other children are assumed to be entitled. Meanwhile, one in ten anti-transgender hate crime murder and manslaughter victims since 2013 has been under the age of twenty-one. Eighty percent of anti-transgender murder victims have been transgender women of color—the smallest demographic of trans and nonbinary Americans, whose lives are positioned at the dangerous intersections of racism, sexism, and anti-trans bigotry.

Restrictive bathroom bans prohibiting trans and nonbinary youth and adults from utilizing gender congruent public facilities is often justified with language of safety and protection for women and girls. Yet, empirical research shows no increase in incidents of violence toward anyone in gender-neutral bathrooms, but demonstrably increased risks of sexual violence and harassment toward transgender and nonbinary individuals who are forced to utilize bathrooms that correspond to their sex assigned at birth.

The same flawed arguments are invoked by those who advocate for locker room and athletics bans for trans students and adults. The disinformation campaign against transgender girls and women in sports has amplified the disparagement of an incredibly small fraction of competitive athletes who do not fit the gender binary—despite the notable lack of actual evidence supporting claims of unfair advantages for transgender competitors. A recent study demonstrated no inherent athletic advantages for transgender athletes over cisgender athletes in women’s sports.

In the early weeks of Trump’s second term, he performatively “protected” women and girls in sports by banning transgender athletes while quietly restructuring college sports funding regulations under Title IX such that they would deny equal funding for women and girls participating in the collegiate athletic events he claimed to be defending.

Women and girls in sports are already underfunded, disrespected, and often disproportionately likely to experience systematic vulnerability to physical and sexual violence at the hands of the cisgender men in power. Pitting cisgender women against the tiny number of transgender women and girls who share their passion for athletics by constructing a narrative that paints the latter as the “real” threat constitutes a laughable bait and switch. Despite empirical and historical realities to the contrary, this repeated narrative has taken hold to the extent that, as of this writing, twenty-seven states have passed bills to ban transgender women and girls from having the opportunity to participate in sports.

Why haven’t the ongoing assaults on the humanity, dignity, and safety of transgender Americans—not to mention the cumulative deluge of attacks on their civil rights and protections as citizens—been resoundingly countered by those on the left with collective moral outrage and unequivocal condemnation, on the basis of fundamental democratic principles?

Instead, some of the most well-known liberal politicians continue to capitulate to the right’s terms of engagement on trans issues, cordially framing the disinformation as a difference of opinion. In doing so, they fuel the persecution of a vulnerable, minoritized group that the current framing has dangerously trapped in the crosshairs of public opinion and public policy. Treating dangerous rhetoric about trans people as a respectful disagreement obscures the accountability of those that actually perpetrate the most sexual violence and violent extremism in the form of hate crimes and domestic terrorism. Like those primarily responsible for anti-transgender disinformation, these perpetrators have been overwhelmingly white, cisgender, male, and often radicalized by far-right ideologies—and have most often violently victimized trans people, as well as everyone else.