Trump’s transphobia must be stopped
Transgender rights are firmly in the crosshairs of US President Donald Trump’s second administration. Among the 26 executive actions signed on Trump’s first day back in office was a sweeping order aimed at eliminating the idea of a “gender identity” separate from sex in the federal government. Among other measures, “gender” will be changed to “sex” on all government forms, and funding for anything pertaining to “gender ideology” will be cut.
Three subsequent executive orders encourage the US military to disqualify “individuals with gender dysphoria”, direct the Department of Health to de-fund “chemical and surgical mutilation of children” and compel athletic and educational institutions to “keep men out of women’s sports”. Trump’s language is deliberately brutish. His aim is to vilify and intimidate an already highly stigmatised community, and to send a message to all those who dare not conform to society’s institutions and expectations: be afraid.
The initial order claims that so-called gender ideologues have used “socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces”. The not-so-veiled implication is that transgender women pose an insidious and potentially violent threat to the rest of the female population. The order on gender-affirming care singles out “impressionable children” as especially vulnerable to “radical and false ... gender ideology”.
Fearmongering around the safety of women and children is a longstanding tactic of the American political right. Jim Crow-era panics about “race mixing” have morphed into modern narratives that link migrant communities to child-trafficking and violent crime. Trump’s anti-trans crusade fits squarely into this playbook, reinforcing and reinforced by simultaneous racist uproars around border control and law enforcement.
Such frenzies create a sense of escalating crisis and imminent danger. The far right presents these as problems that only harsher policing and authoritarianism can resolve. Other executive orders signed upon Trump’s inauguration include, predictably, “Securing Our Borders”, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety”.
Republicans have also incorporated transphobia into economic appeals to voters. The New York Times estimates the party spent $37 million on election adverts condemning federal funding for gender-affirming care in 2024. The broadcasts focused on trans prison inmates in particular as undeserving of medical support. In a country where 15 million people are saddled with medical debt according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Republicans see an opportunity to tap into existing anger about government spending priorities and direct it against the marginalised and oppressed.
In their recent book Who’s Afraid of Gender?, gender theorist Judith Butler outlines how the global far right have incorporated transphobic hysteria into their broader political framework over the past decade. “Intimate fears and anxieties” about personal identity, safety and the traditional nuclear family “become socially organized to incite political passions”, Butler writes.
US legislative records bear this out. In 2015, according to researchers at Trans Legislation Tracker, 21 bills targeting trans rights were brought before US state legislatures. Those proposals mostly sought to restrict trans women’s access to public bathrooms. The number of bills snowballed over subsequent years as a coalition of Christian fundamentalists, conservative think tanks and Republican lawmakers worked together to extend their scope into health and education.
In 2024, some 674 anti-trans bills were considered in 43 states. This avalanche of persecution now targets trans people and their supporters in almost every sphere of life, from inclusive schooling to workplace rights and gender-affirming medical care.
Anti-trans agitation in public schools is particularly important for Republican politicians because it connects them to a reactionary “parental rights movement”. According to the New York Times, that movement gained momentum in 2022 by opposing coronavirus health measures, but it also opposes teachers’ unions, LGBTI-related literature, history curricula relating to slavery and evolutionary theory. US social conservatism weaves together racism and gender oppression with anti-abortion religious sensibilities in reaction against progress on multiple fronts.
Trump clearly places transgender rights under the shadow of a broader “woke” agenda. A White House memo from 27 January directs federal agencies to cease spending on any social programs that “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering”. In a Fox News interview last October, Trump warned, “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics”. He then suggested that the National Guard or military should be deployed against this “enemy from within”. In a campaign speech last October, he declared “I will take historic action to defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, male and female”.
Transgender people are being targeted not only as a specific minority group, but as part of a multifaceted “enemy” that’s been constructed to advance Trump’s reactionary agenda. The notion that “gender ideology” permeates institutions at various levels helps to justify and fuel the new administration’s broader agenda of reorganising government and its priorities. Trump has repeatedly promised to dismantle the Department of Education specifically, which he says is infiltrated by “radicals, zealots and Marxists”.
Any organisation receiving federal funding can become a target for conservative campaigns if it does not follow strict norms around gender identification and segregation. Any federal employee who supports trans people as part of their job now risks being fired. This is not only a direct attack on trans people, but a way of normalising an atmosphere of heightened repression and surveillance in an increasingly authoritarian United States.
Around the world, the far right are looking to the US as a model for the sort of society they want to create. A fight back is urgently needed both to defend trans people from Trump’s vicious attacks and to take on the reactionary agenda that motivates them and threatens us all.
