It did not take long, after Charlie Kirk was killed on September 10, for Kirk’s defenders to pin his death on trans people. It didn’t matter that there was no evidence that Kirk’s killer was trans, just as it hadn’t mattered in prior shootings over the last several years, when right-wing influencers and elected officials accused mass shooters of being motivated by their trans identities—even if they were motivated by something else, or weren’t trans. Before a legitimate suspect was arrested in the Kirk case, a trans person who had nothing to do with the events was briefly blamed. So it goes: Trans people are now the go-to political scapegoats for high-profile shootings, reliable characters in a reckless narrative fueled by long-standing tropes about trans people as vengeful predators and dangers to society. When court filings confirmed that the man charged with Kirk’s murder was not trans, the right barely missed a beat, claiming that the killer had “probably” been motivated, as the vice president said last week, by “trans-related stuff” that had “radicalized” him.
The vice president did not pull this fiction out of the ether; it was, unsurprisingly, pre-packaged for the federal government by the same top right-wing think tank behind Project 2025. The search was already on, not for answers about Kirk’s killer, but for ways to associate being trans—or even showing care and support for trans people—with “radicalization” that would inevitably lead to “violent extremism.”
Following Kirk’s murder, the Heritage Foundation began pushing for the FBI to create the new designation of “transgender ideology–inspired violence and extremism,” or “TIVE.” The campaign for the designation appears to be led by a Heritage fellow who once briefly worked for the Department of Homeland Security and now directs the Oversight Project, a Heritage spin-off for investigations into the “weaponization” of the federal government and law enforcement, which has alleged that, “TIVE adherents have carried out horrific acts of political violence through assassination and targeted mass shootings of Christians in furtherance of their ideology,” and argued that the federal government should use “the full weight of federal law enforcement to crush this threat.” On his podcast last week, the Oversight Project’s director, Mike Howell, said, “To understand transgender ideology is to understand that at its core it’s wrapped in violence.”
While the FBI has not indicated that it will adopt any such designation, the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein recently set off fears that it might, reporting, as he put it, that “the FBI would treat transgender suspects as a subset of the Bureau’s new threat category, ‘Nihilistic Violent Extremists.’” The news of such a plan was attributed to two unnamed “national security officials,” and so far remains unconfirmed by other reporters. (“The FBI has no comment,” the bureau responded when The New Republic questioned it about its plans.)
At this point it feels important to clarify, if only to avoid giving such designations too much power, that what Heritage and the Oversight Project are pushing for, and what the FBI might be contemplating, is not a new kind of crime with which to charge trans people, as one expert told me. Neither would it designate trans people as a domestic terrorist organization. “We do not, currently, have a domestic terrorism designation akin to a foreign terrorist organization designation,” J.M. Berger, the author of Extremism, a book about how extremist ideologies can lead to violence, told me. Berger clarified that “the internal classifications have more to do with who gets investigated and why,” unlike the “foreign terrorist organization” designation, which “criminalizes a range of activities that would not otherwise be crimes.” While the designation alone does not criminalize people, it can inform how the bureau investigates potential acts of what they consider to be domestic violent extremism.
However, it is clear that the Oversight Project and others pushing this new designation do not only mean to influence law enforcement. The campaign to create a category called “transgender ideology–inspired violence and extremism” is also a political project, meant to conflate the fact of trans people’s existence with extremism. They may fail at reshaping FBI policy, but they will likely succeed at reinforcing existing beliefs that by virtue of being engaged in political work, trans people are potential perpetrators of violence (when in fact trans people are more likely to be targets of violence than non-trans people). In its new brief with the Heritage Foundation, the Oversight Project cites as an example of a “common TIVE slogan” the phrase “protect their right to exist”—an idea so basic and unexceptional in trans rights discourse that to use it as some kind of “violent extremism” indicator is to cast suspicion on almost any trans person.
What these groups are attempting now, then, is to draft law enforcement to their own ends: investigating and prosecuting their political enemies, and building political support for the further marginalization and scapegoating of trans people. The Oversight Project has a track record of weaponizing the law while protesting that the law is being weaponized against conservatives. Over the last 12 months, it has also contributed to right-wing disinformation operations about immigrant voter fraud and played into conspiracy theories about the man who shot at Trump.
With Kirk’s death, the group’s push for the FBI to take on “TIVE” escalated on social media. The following morning, Heritage Foundation visiting fellow and president of the Oversight Project Mike Howell lamented on X, “USA bowing down to transgender and left wing domestic terrorism would be pitiful,” and lashed out at “government and propaganda media, both on the right and left, trying to frame this as a lone wolf deal.” Howell was seizing on the opportunity to link trans people and violent extremism, but he also took aim at the FBI, claiming that it is “broken,” and must declare Kirk’s killing to be “domestic terrorism” and identify “far-left and transgender inspired violent extremism as such.”
Howell is using trans people as a political cudgel, complaining on September 14 that Utah Governor Spencer Cox was “incapable of leading” because he “corrected himself to use preferred pronouns of assassin’s trans lover.” (Cox referred to the roommate as “male transitioning to female,” said “he has been very cooperative,” and then said, “this partner has been incredibly cooperative.”) Howell further claimed, “The odds that the transgender roommate did not trade in transgender violent ideology are probably close to zero. The whole movement is built around violence, first harm to self then to others.” It goes without saying, of course, that there is no such thing as “transgender violent ideology,” and to state that a whole political movement is “built around violence” is absolutely baseless. But that’s no obstacle for those attempting to link a “movement” with “violence.”
Like many anti-trans campaigns, the TIVE project positions itself not as a political actor, but as a defender of science. In its longer brief released this week, the Oversight Project defines “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable”—that is, anyone who backs science on sex and gender that is contrary to what these groups believe to be “real” science. It’s the same framing used to justify everything from outlawing abortion to opposing Covid vaccines. The brief goes on to define TIVE as “the belief that opposing TI [transgender ideology], declining to support or affirm TI, or remaining silent or indifferent regarding TI (a) itself constitutes a form of violence towards people who identify as any variant of transgender or gender nonconforming; (b) is a true threat to the existence of such persons; or, (c) poses an imminent threat to such persons’ emotional, psychological, or physical safety, including through self-harm or suicide.” To state the obvious: These are beliefs, not acts. They are protected by law and they are nonviolent. They are also very broad beliefs, and not uncommon, and to regard them as indicators of “violent extremism” is to risk sweeping even the most anodyne analysis of public policy or of an argument made in a Supreme Court brief into this invented category of “violent extremism.”
We have a self-destructive history in this country of seizing on terrorism to justify political repression. The rush after the attacks on September 11, 2001, to turn the full power of American law enforcement against Muslims and Muslim communities in the United States was enabled by conflating religious and political activity with “ideology,” “violence,” and “terrorism.” Howell himself drew the sick historical parallel a week and a half ago, posting, “If these recent transgender ideology inspired domestic terrorists had Islamic last names we’d be invading another middle eastern country by now.” He is openly fantasizing about the kind of retaliation and collective punishment that followed 9/11. Should the FBI create an investigative category specific to trans identity, J.M. Berger told me, it will allow them “to group together, prioritize, and probably fund investigations into trans people.” Even if it will mainly be an administrative tool, it is “almost certain to be abused by this administration.”
Such attempts to link identity and extremism are ripe for abuse. As Berger noted, “the government has often found itself on the wrong side of such practices even before such abuses became a stated policy objective.” Howell, echoed by prominent right-wing voices, has demonstrated that the right’s objective is to reduce support for trans people. When they suggest that defending trans people from those who harm them could constitute extremism, they are using the threat of law enforcement to further isolate trans people.
Indeed, Berger’s research on what he has termed “lawful extremism” and anti-trans laws has demonstrated how the process of advocating for new laws can be an instrument of expressing extremist ideologies, and how that has been used against trans people. A recent paper Berger co-authored with Beth Daviess, published by the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, argued that Florida’s anti-trans laws can help us understand how ideas typically ascribed to “extremists” are now seen in the lawmaking process. “Extremist ideologies typically contain a system of meaning, a narrative stating that an out-group is the cause of a crisis that affects the in-group, and the in-group must solve the crisis by taking hostile action against the out-group,” they write. That narrative can disguise itself in any number of ways; in this wave of anti-trans laws in Florida, it involved allusions to trans people being a threat to children, redefining a marginalized out-group as the perpetrators, and thus justifying hostile action by the in-group. Such “efforts to obfuscate extremist intent are often a feature of dominant lawful extremism movements,” the authors conclude. “Despite the obfuscation, these measures work by design to deny transgender people their civil rights and the benefits of full and free participation in civil society.”
In a sense, then, the very act of inventing TIVE is an extremist project seeking cover under the law. Should FBI Director Kash Patel decide “TIVE,” or whatever he might call it, is a priority for the FBI, the potential fallout may follow a familiar pattern, from the law enforcement abuses following 9/11 to Trump’s pardons of law enforcement officers engaged in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. “Terrorism has always been defined according to the prerogatives of those wielding power, and this is about to be a prime example,” observed Spencer Ackerman in his Forever Wars newsletter last week. With this move to target trans “violent extremism,” Berger told me, “exactly how it would play out is anyone’s guess in the short term. But the arc is not going to be bending toward justice.”
The post The Right’s Baseless Project to Link Trans People With Extremism appeared first on New Republic.
