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.