Do Trans People Have A Right to Exist?

Or, My Life As An Ideology

The most important thing we’ve learned about Tyler Robinson is, by all accounts and despite the best efforts of the federal government to prove otherwise, that he appears to have acted alone. Ten days after he was arrested, federal authorities have reportedly found “no link” between Robinson and any of the organizations the Trump administration immediately blamed for Charlie Kirk’s tragic murder. Reading through news coverage and the charging documents against Robinson, there is no evidence of funding streams, co-conspirators, or even accessories after the fact. And while conspiracy theorists and amateur criminologists across the political spectrum are spreading their own speculations about Robinson’s motive and inner psyche, that strikes me as much less significant than the apparent fact that Robinson acted alone and there are few blank spaces in the details of Kirk’s murder where a conspiracy may live. There is no “magic bullet,” no second shooter, no getaway driver, no money changing hands, no sleeper cell of comrades and accomplices. Robinson is charged with killing Kirk with his grandfather’s hunting rifle—gifted to him by his parents—and escaped the scene of the murder on foot.

Within hours of Kirk’s murder, it became clear the tragedy was viewed as largely an opportunity by the Trump administration and the right wing more broadly to crush their political enemies. This has ranged from broad and as-yet unrealized threats of retribution against liberal organizations and donors to witchhunts targeting the careers of teachers, professors, Starbucks baristas, newspaper columnists, and Jimmy Kimmel, all charged with being insufficiently mournful or disrespectful of the memory of Kirk (a man who built a career on racism and sexism).

For transgender people and our families, Kirk’s murder has unleashed an onslaught of escalating threats to police, surveil, and restrict our lives and freedom, ranging from members of Congress like Nancy Mace calling “trannies” the “most egregious, most vile, violent people on earth” to Elon Musk speculating transgender women should be injected with testosterone, a literal Nazi medical experiment carried out to “cure” homosexuals detained in concentration camps. Despite the fact Robinson is himself not transgender and the evidence he was motivated by anything to do with transgender people is remarkably thin, Vice President JD Vance agreed with Jesse Watters that the “militant transgender movement” is a “domestic terror threat,” and the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 fame) has begun distributing a petition to the FBI to investigate “transgender ideology violent extremism.”

Transgender people are not new to accusations of violence or monstrosity. Stoked panic over our access to public bathrooms is founded on manufactured fears of sexual violence, and the history of Hollywood—from Psycho to Silence of the Lambs—is littered with transgender murderers and serial killers. The association between androgyny and fear is ancient, running alongside religious fears of poor morals leading to “monstrous births” of intersex infants. Even the FBI surveillance of queer people and activism would not be particularly new—the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover routinely spied on early gay rights activists like Frank Kameny and radical lesbian movements in the 1970s. But the past ten days represent a push for a terrifying new escalation of state surveillance and policing of transgender people on the thinnest of bases when the political project for our rights is more isolated and endangered than its been in decades.

In its fact sheet, Heritage defines “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable.” Its authors go to great lengths to suggest its concern is merely an ideology and not transgender people ourselves, claiming “individuals are free to identify as transgender or support LGBT causes and transgenderism in a nonviolent way.” However, it’s evidence that such an ideology exists as a form of organized “violent extremism” is a list of eleven isolated acts of violence carried out over the course of eight years, some by transgender people and others by those Heritage identifies as associated with transgender people, including Robinson (who some reports suggest had a transgender roommate that police have described as “extremely cooperative”) and a “lipstick wearing suspect” accused of firebombing a GOP campaign office in 2024. The acts they cite that were reportedly carried out by a transgender person—a workplace shooting in 2018, a school shooting in 2023, and last month’s shooting at a Catholic school in Minnesota—apparently share no motive or ideology and bear a much closer resemblance to the tragically quotidian gun violence that we’ve allowed to become the backdrop of our national character.

The suggestion that transgender people represent an “ideology” serves two functions. As Heritage’s fact sheet attempts to emphasize, it helps those leading the witchhunt elide any accusation they are acting on animus towards any specific group. As the petition being shared by Heritage and the right-wing Oversight Project states about their desired FBI designation, it “does not mean that all transgender individuals are domestic terror threats, but instead narrowly focuses on those who adopt the worldview that violence is justified against those who disagree with transgender ideology.” Given this is being led by the same right-wing political movement and presidential administration that has censored our speech, criminalized our health care, and purged us from the federal government and the military on the basis that we are essentially less trustworthy than others, this is, of course, laughable.

But given the eleven acts cited by their fact sheet are disconnected acts of violence and vandalism carried out by a handful of the nearly 3 million transgender people in the United States with a wide variety of motives (from interpersonal domestic violence to vandalism of a Tesla dealership)—and some weren’t even carried out by transgender people ourselves—it is the (real or imagined) involvement of transgender people that seems to constitute this “ideology.”

The second goal is transforming a subset of the population into an abstraction, an amorphous toxin being spread into a culture that would otherwise be pure and good. This reduces state actions taken against our lives, bodies, and rights as mere chapters in another “culture war,” frivolous concerns of symbolism and rhetoric. But it also poses transgender people and, really, any gender nonconformity as a threat by virtue of our existence. Like its much older cousin, “gender ideology,” “transgender ideology” operates as what Judith Butler calls a “phantasm,” which once “firmly established as an existential threat, becomes the target of destruction.”

It’s simply absurd to suggest the FBI designation (particularly in this FBI helmed by Kash Patel who is quite transparently hunting for scapegoats that might save his job) would lead to anything but the surveillance, policing, and criminalization of transgender people on the basis of our identity as much as the “war on terror” was used to justify the same towards Muslim communities and “gang violence” is used to police Black and immigrant communities. Even the existence of this hypothetical, organized “transgender terrorism” movement would not justify the suspension of an entire population’s civil liberties or rights to due process, and the imposition our existence represents an “ideology” intentionally blurs the boundaries of who is being targeted and what acts, words, or ideas constitute material support for violence.

"How politicians treat trans people is indicative of how they will eventually treat everyone,” says the British model and activist Munroe Bergdorf. “People still aren't grasping that because they see being trans as something so different from their experience, and it's easier to create an image of somebody as an embodied ideology than a human being. That's how racism thrives, classism, ableism. That's how any system of oppression thrives."

Heritage’s fact sheet ends with a list of “terminology used by TIVEs [transgender ideology violent extremists]” including mundane in-group jargon like “cisgender,” “misgendering,” and “deadnaming.” The suggestion this is language used by “TIVEs” and not transgender people as a subculture is the critical bridge Heritage ties between transgender people, the community we create amongst one another, and the violence Heritage wants to define us by. The effect of associating terminology used by transgender people with this violent “ideology” of Heritage’s own invention is thus enabling the kind of censorship and witchhunts that have silenced critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza by broadly associating all activism and community among Palestinians with “antisemitism.”

Somewhat quixotically, this list of terms Heritage would like the FBI to associate with violence includes “the right to exist,” referring to claims transgender people’s “existence” is being “erased.” According to Heritage, this rhetoric fuels violence because it suggests “the denied ‘right to exist’ or ‘erasure’ is equivalent to killing them or genocide as opposed to merely acknowledging there are two sexes or disagreeing with transgender ideology.” I have long been critical of knee-jerk claims that transgender people in the US are enduring a genocide, largely because the word invokes the kind of militarized mass slaughter being carried out in Gaza as we speak and I find it disrespectful to suggest our subjugation—though clearly sweeping, painful, and unjustified—is on the same plane as that atrocity. I also find it exceptionalizes transgender people’s suffering as transgender when many of the worst fears about a “transgender genocide” are already being carried out through our carceral and immigration system, primarily based on other identities shared by transgender people. The problem with fears (largely, it should be said, among my fellow white trans people) that we’ll be put in “camps” or targeted with “forced detransition” is that we are already in the camps that are part of our immigration enforcement system, and we are already forced to detransition in our country’s prisons.

I understand the claim Heritage is making—that misgendering a trans person, for example, is not the same as denying their existence as a human. Banning a transgender girl from playing sports as a girl is not the same thing as murder. But taken as trans people live it—not as isolated scenarios and an “ideology” but as our safety, our bodies, and our material needs—it’s absurd to suggest the campaign against our health care, our speech, and our rights is anything but an attack on our existence as transgender people. The goal is to force us to exist as something other than what we are by suppressing what our freedom and our will bring into existence.

It is true that a person denied autonomy over their own body, privacy over their own anatomy and medical records, silenced by government censorship, banished from public service, endangered by government segregation, and forced to carry a document that potentially outs them as transgender still “exists",” but as what? What kind of existence is it to have these foundational rights not just withheld from you by capitalism or ignored by social stigma but actively suppressed by the state as hundreds of new state laws, sweeping actions by the Trump administration, and the Heritage Foundation’s own policy playbooks clearly demand?

The imposition pointing that out somehow endorses violence is absurd from the jump, basically akin to claims that “reverse racism” is as bad as institutional racism or that a victim of abuse is abusing their abuser by calling it abuse. And even if this specter of “transgender ideology” terrorism were a real organized force, naming the existential stakes in the political fight for our rights would hardly be an endorsement of it. And if it were, what to make of the claims that “transgenderism” must be “eradicated from public life entirely” or the demands “there can be no mercy for that species any longer”—do these likewise call for violence? On Friday, a man in Arizona was arrested on charges of terrorism for reportedly threatening an LGBTQ bar, claiming he would become a “martyr for Charlie Kirk” and “transgenderism should be eradicated from public society.” One imagines Heritage would push back if someone claimed their speech fueled that act of terror.

Kirk’s murder is a travesty committed by one man, but it is clearly seen as an opportunity by an entire movement. The imposition, made without evidence, that Robinson acted as an agent of any organization is fueling an effort by Heritage and the Trump administration to exploit this tragedy, cement their own power, and turn their base’s understandable grief into a bloodlust for vengeance. Transgender people have been wholly dehumanized in the eyes of much of that base and, given our tenuous position in the liberal coalition, make for a uniquely vulnerable scapegoat. That vulnerability is worsened by and enables the discrimination, subjugation, and, yes, erasure we experience but are being told not to name.