When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood before hundreds of military leaders last week and declared, “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals,” he was sending a message about who belongs in America — and who doesn’t. Days later, President Donald Trump used the same anti-trans slur to attack South Carolina Senate candidate Annie Andrews, who isn’t even transgender.
As a Black transgender woman who has spent years investigating America’s anti-trans movement, I am deeply alarmed. I fear these remarks are a warning of something much worse to come. Because escalating rhetoric is almost always followed by real world action.
As a Black transgender woman who has spent years investigating America’s anti-trans movement, I am deeply alarmed.
Black Americans know something about the relationship between slurs and violence. The N-word has a long history in this country. The dehumanization that it encapsulated was essential to enslavement and the persecution which followed. In just six letters it provided an entire worldview that Black people were inferior, undeserving of equal rights and fundamentally less than other people. That word helped animate generations of citizen-led terror.
Oppression relies on the participation of everyday people. The Ku Klux Klan and other groups didn’t need a president to personally order every lynching nor do the paramilitary groups in our midst right now. White mobs operated in a society where politicians defended white supremacy and authorities routinely allowed murderers to go unpunished. The Equal Justice Initiative documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950.
Dehumanizing language is how permission for violence takes hold. When people in power treat a group as not equal, it can send the signal that abusing or even killing members of that group is acceptable. For transgender Americans, this historic precedent is already a reality. The Human Rights Campaign has documented at least 399 transgender and gender-nonconforming people killed since 2013. Nearly 60% were Black transgender women.
And slurs are essential to this violence. A UCLA study of reported gender-identity hate crimes in California found that 93% involved personal violence, including assault. In 53% of incidents, verbal slurs were evidence of the attacker’s bias.
Now, the president and his defense secretary are using this same language themselves.
After its first round of unprecedented anti-trans policies in the first term, since 2024 the Trump administration has systematically targeted trans people. It has banned trans people from military service, restricted our ability to obtain accurate passports and moved to deny transgender youth access to medical care. It argued before the Supreme Court in support of bans on trans girls playing school sports, which the court upheld in June. It has even deported LGBTQ immigrants to African countries where they face persecution, including a trans woman sent to the Central African Republic, where she now hides her identity out of fear. On Oct. 13, another federal rule restricting Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program funding for gender-affirming care for minors is scheduled to take effect.
History has shown us that authoritarian leaders facing political trouble don’t moderate their attacks on marginalized communities. They double down. In 2022, as Russia suffered major setbacks in its war against Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin expanded the country’s ban on so-called “LGBT propaganda,” effectively restricting positive portrayals of LGBTQ people in books, films, television and other media. Scapegoating becomes a way to redirect public anger and justify increasingly extreme repression.
With the midterm elections approaching and Republicans facing mounting political pressure, I fear we are watching that process unfold.
Hegseth’s language is especially disturbing because of the institution he commands. When the person overseeing America’s military openly uses slurs against a group of Americans, it can send a powerful message to people trained to exercise lethal force. His announcement this week that the military intends to livestream an execution in an unrelated murder case only deepens my concern about the culture he is cultivating.
And the danger is already moving beyond rhetoric. In May, the White House released a national counterterrorism strategy that identified violent political groups described as “radically pro-transgender” among its priorities. It called for mapping their membership and using law enforcement to disrupt their operations. A December Justice Department memorandum had already identified “radical gender ideology” among the ideological characteristics associated with domestic terrorism.
Think about what that means. The federal government is now writing support for trans people into the language of domestic terrorism.
The White House released a national counterterrorism strategy that identified violent political groups described as “radically pro-transgender” among its priorities.
I worry that the next step could be investigations of transgender advocacy organizations, surveillance of activists or the use of federal law enforcement against people peacefully defending their rights. These are possibilities, rather than announced policies. But the administration has already laid troubling groundwork.
Trump has also laid out how he intends to use transgender people politically. Last year, discussing trans participation in sports, he said, “I don’t like talking about it because I want to save it for just before the next election.”
Right on time, with the midterms weeks away, his administration is escalating.
We cannot predict exactly what comes next. But having spent years documenting how anti-trans hatred spreads, I recognize the danger of dismissing these warnings.
My greatest fear is that Trump and Hegseth are helping create a country where violence against trans people becomes increasingly acceptable, whether it comes from the government itself or from ordinary Americans who believe they have its permission.
A president doesn’t have to order violence for someone else to hear his words as a green light.
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