In the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, MAGA fascists, including sitting congressional representatives like Nancy Mace, have engaged in an all-out assault on transgender people, trying to pin responsibility for this act on the trans community.
This past week, Mace, along with other fascist figures, have openly called the trans movement “terrorism,” with Donald Trump Jr. comparing trans people to al-Qaeda and Laura Loomer saying trans people should be “socially ostracized” and medical transitioning made illegal.
On the evening of Sept. 18, the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing authors of Project 2025—went even further. They made a proposal to the FBI that it formally designate all forms of transgender activism as “Trans Ideology-inspired Violent Extremism,” a new legal category of domestic terrorism.
These tactics are not an anomaly but part of a broader pattern and structure of violence from these ascendant fascist forces which emphasize anti-trans hysteria as a central organizing force for their base.
From the outset of Trump’s second presidential campaign, transgender people and the broader LGBTQ+ community have been scapegoats for the far right. The billionaire-backed MAGA movement has attempted to shift the blame for the everyday crisis of living from its root cause in monopoly capital and its crises onto the backs of trans people, among other targeted groups.
MAGA has attempted to alleviate its own responsibility for the violent vigilantism they have engendered through the creation of a fictitious “transgender menace.” These dangerous lies, which encourage violence against the transgender community, must be combatted in all their manifestations.
The attack on trans people is a major part of the wider anti-democratic attack, which includes violence against Black people, Latinos, Asians, and all people of color, as well as immigrants, Spanish speakers, and other language minorities, and women. It aims at undermining the unity of all people, including those targeted by racism, nationalism, and sexism.
At the same time, the scapegoating of transgender people is more than ideological warfare. It is a real-life campaign of terror taking shape by means of legislative policy, administrative measures, and vigilante violence.
And it is not only designed to deepen division. It aims to actually eradicate the transgender population. Fascist forces across the board are seeking to accomplish this by making life-saving trans healthcare and transition services inaccessible and even illegal—to the point of being considered fraud in places like Texas.
It is clear that MAGA fascists are mobilizing a particular gender politics which recalls the Nazi ideal of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche,” or Children, Kitchen, Church. Coinciding with attacks on reproductive rights, women’s autonomy, and DEI, it should be evident that these anti-trans attacks are part of a campaign to infringe upon working-class rights to self-expression, bodily self-determination, and the diversity of families and cultures.
The MAGA movement is attempting to force us back to the 1950s, to force women back in the home under the authority of a patriarch, to define the family as exclusively white, heterosexual, and reproductive. These objectives serve a politics that seeks to exert direct billionaire control over the reproductive sphere and which attacks any way of life that does not align with their for-profit goals.
It is incumbent upon all progressive forces to see the importance of the struggle to defend trans rights and LGBTQ+ rights more broadly. Attacks on these communities are not peripheral by any means for the far right, who spend a significant portion of their air time and policy directives repeating the old Lavender Scare lies that transgender people are some kind of communist plot to destroy the American family, just like the McCarthyites did with homosexuality.
MAGA’s attack on LGBTQ+ people directly mirrors the Nazi playbook. When the latter came to power in Germany, one of their first acts of terror was to try to erase the history and existence of transgender people and all they saw as sexual or gender deviants. They burned the world-renowned Hirschfield Institute and its research records to the ground.
If this campaign is a primary concern for the far-right, our organizing and our movements must also understand the fight to defend the trans community as a major piece of the battle to preserve the democratic rights of our multigender working class. We must oppose all attacks on the transgender community and make every effort to prioritize the safety of transgender people, who are overwhelmingly working class, in all our organizing.
We must repudiate the attempts by MAGA fascists to shift the blame for the crises facing the working class away from their billionaire backers and onto transgender people. We must combat these ideas whenever and wherever they arise. We cannot allow transgender people to be used as a scapegoat to incite hysteria among MAGA’s base.
The trans community is a part of our working class, a part we cannot allow to be sacrificed on the altar of MAGA’s campaign of lies. We must not let the Hirschfield Institute burn again.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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