The persecution of transgender people, though often treated as a niche concern, is central to today’s political and economic realignments. These attacks are not ancillary but entangled with broader efforts to reassert control over race, gender, and migration.

The Trump Administration’s anti-trans policies should be seen as central, rather than peripheral, to 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, whose sole purpose would be to amplify presidential executive power.

Much as Reagan invoked the welfare queen as a diversion to absorb public outcry against devastating cuts to the social safety net, Trump today offers trans people – with their supposedly abundant, easily accessible healthcare – as scapegoats to justify a broader conservative health policy agenda.