This post is part of a series on the law and political economy of trans healthcare. Read the rest of the posts here.
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From his campaign ad, “Kamala is for they/them,” to his executive orders defining sex as fixed and binary, decommissioning trans troops, and defunding hospitals that offer gender-affirming healthcare for minors, Trump has made attacks on trans people a prominent feature of his second term as president. Despite what some have suggested, these anti-trans attacks are not merely a “distraction” and are ignored at our peril. They are, as I explain in this brief post, at the heart of Project 2025’s strategy for dismantling the twentieth-century redistributive state while amplifying its executive powers to criminalize, arrest, and deport.
To grasp the unprecedented nature of the recent wave of anti-trans attacks, and how these attacks fit into a broader right-wing assault on the state, we must begin with an obvious yet frequently overlooked fact: the situation of trans people in today’s society has no historical precedent in the United States. When the state previously took action against trans people, it targeted a specific subset of trans people — overwhelmingly transfeminine, of color, and poor — who survived through street and sex work economies. This subset of trans people was swept up, along with other street people, in quality of life policing, the removal of encampments for unhoused people, and crackdowns on the sex industry and on illegal drugs.
By contrast, the avatar of the contemporary trans panic is the school-age trans child. This trans child could not be more distant from the adultified working-class trans youth (paradigmatically, a trans girl) of yesteryear. The trans youth of yesteryear quit school and ran away from an unsupportive home to transition through black-market hormones while engaging in underage sex work. No one considered this youth a “child” or worried about the potential future health effects of her early black-market hormone use. Aside from her street “family,” only a handful of activists worried about her at all. Paternalistic concern has been saved for precisely the trans children who don’t need it. These are the trans children featured in the news today, who transition with the full support of their parents and doctors without any break in their education and enter the workforce as fully transitioned adults.
This shift in focus is due, in part, to a set of policies adopted in recent years — some long fought for by trans activists and some granted by fiat by the Obama administration — that have made it easier for trans people to access transition-related health care, change our identification documents, and enter appropriate sex-segregated spaces. As a result, trans people can now be found (albeit in tiny numbers) in every “good citizen” social institution, from elementary schools, to high school sports teams, to the Senate. It is primarily against the social integration achieved by these “good citizen” trans people that most anti-trans rhetoric and policy now takes aim – an unprecedented attack on an unprecedented achievement. To date, for instance, the bulk of the Trump’s anti-trans executive orders explicitly target trans people who go to school, get passports, serve in the military, conduct business in federal buildings, and visit federal parks and museums; that is, ordinary trans people who participate fully in public life. (One particularly cruel outlier, which has been blocked in courts, mandates that trans women in federal prisons be housed with men and denied transition-related medical treatment.)
On the face of it, this is a full-frontal attack on trans people as a minority. Nevertheless, a minority rights approach would be a short-sighted and likely ineffective response to this attack. For the MAGA right’s focus on trans people is not driven by anti-trans animus alone. These anti-trans policies should be seen as central, rather than peripheral, to the Trump administration’s implementation of Project 2025’s right-wing revolution. The end game is the creation of what Melinda Cooper has called “an anti-social state” — a state that would abandon every duty to serve its citizens and residents, a state whose sole purpose would be to amplify presidential power. “Just as surely as it wants to incapacitate the redistributive and social protective arms of the state,” writes Cooper, “Project 2025 wants to exploit its vast bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport. And it intends to consolidate these powers under the personal authority of the president.”
Shockingly, Project 2025’s radically reconfigured state would abandon even its basic neoliberal functions of stabilizing the market and further enriching the wealthy. Together, Trump’s trade wars, mass deportations, restrictions on visas, and cuts to NIH research funding amount to something like anti-neoliberal economic suicide. These policies would harm businesses that rely on the labor of undocumented immigrants and those that depend on the technical expertise of elite migrants. They would throw the NIH’s estimated 250% return on research investment into the metaphorical trash bin, cause inflation to skyrocket, and quite possibly trigger an economic recession and tank the global economy. Not even the wealthy would be protected. The only winners would be Trump’s inner circle and the cadre of billionaires that succeed in currying favor with him, whose looting of the state would offset the calamities even they would endure.
Recent anti-trans executive orders and legislation lay the foundation for this anti-social state in three ways. First, these attacks concentrate executive power by making the President the sole organ of a state ideology. Trump’s executive order against “gender ideology” is one of the clearest examples of this new state ideology. By dictating that sex is binary, fixed, and untraversable, this order disregards not only the reality of transsexual and intersex bodies but also the findings of medical science since Galen in the 2nd century. In so doing, it casts the president himself as the infallible organ of Truth with the power to redefine biology itself, authorizing a new state (pseudo)science. Federal institutions, along with any program or institution that receives federal funding, are being made to march in lockstep with this state ideology. For instance, after directing the NIH to cancel all research on trans health, the administration has directed it to instead study post-transition “regret.”
Second, anti-trans attacks feed a culture war that powers the broader right-wing movement. As Daniel Lubin argues, “the basic lesson that the right took from Trump’s record is that successful populist politics doesn’t actually require economic follow-through, so long as you kick up enough culture-war dust.” Trump ran on a campaign driven by economic populism and anger at inflation, but his economic policy is about to make nearly every American poorer. “Culture-war dust” is all the MAGA base will get as a consolation prize.
And third, Trump’s anti-trans attacks serve as a basis for defunding social programs. Overnight, trans people’s newly-won integration into “good citizen” social institutions has been converted into a liability that the Trump administration can exploit to coerce institutions by threatening to reappropriate federal funding. Trump’s strategy for enforcing compliance with his executive orders has been to force institutions to choose between a rock and a hard place. The rock: a principled refusal to comply. This could lead to a massive loss of federal funds that, at minimum, would result in mass layoffs, and at worst, might threaten their ability to operate at all. The hard place: the cowardly sacrifice of a tiny proportion of those served. Since the end game for Project 2025 is the withdrawal of federal funds from social provisioning and redistribution, for Trump, either outcome would be a win.
Trans people — however small in numbers and insignificant to the broader society — are thus situated at the heart of a three-pronged strategy for the creation of an anti-social authoritarian state. In this way, trans people have much in common with immigrants, Palestine activists, and the wide swath of underserved minorities targeted under the moniker of “DEI.” Insofar as trans people as a class are disproportionately poor and the financial and social costs of transition can be immiserating, trans people also have much in common with all low-income people — including the working-class MAGA voters — who rely on entitlements and government assistance to get by. This is why the question confronting those who hope to resist the current authoritarian assault is not whether to sacrifice trans people or to help us fight for our civil rights; for the fact is that trans people cannot be sacrificed without dire consequences for everyone else. Only through solidarity can we come to a new, Left-populist consensus about our shared desire for a redistributive state that provisions without hierarchies of deservingness, rather than an anti-social state that serves Trump and his cronies alone.
