The Trump administration has labeled transgender people a national security threat on par with drug cartels and Islamic militant groups.
A new “counterterrorism strategy” published by the White House states: “Our national (counter terrorism) activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
The document also links the alleged murderer of Charlie Kirk to “extreme transgender ideologies.”
It says: “This administration will continue to prohibit the (intelligence community) from being used politically against innocent Americans. As real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”
According to PBS News, Tyler Robinson “was involved in a romantic relationship with his roommate, who investigators say is transgender.” However, there is no public concrete evidence his roommate’s gender identity motivated Robinson to allegedly shoot Kirk.
Nevertheless, Trump and his evangelical base have made sweeping claims linking Kirk’s murder to “extreme transgender ideologies.”
The Trans Journalists Association has published an entire website page to debunking the claims of Trump and his new counter terrorism strategy.
That resource explains: “’Transgender ideology’ remains a term coined for and used in anti-trans political messaging to falsely equate identity with politics, which is a way to frame transgender identity as a political choice rather than an innate identity. The phrase itself is unclear — similar to how ‘the homosexual agenda’ is an amorphous term with no real definition — and used exclusively to attack a minority group for political gain.”
The TJA says this anti-trans language is “rooted in Project 2025’s goal of narrowing interpretations of gender, sexuality and race in federal policy and rolling back the rights of diverse communities.”
This group documents that in the first 16 months of the second Trump administration, Trump has brought about health care restrictions for transgender youth and adults; reversals to policies that protected trans people from discrimination; the erasure of LGBTQ-inclusive data collections and ongoing challenges to trans people having access to public spaces.
“Anti-trans actors have persistently falsely claimed that mass shooters are disproportionately transgender.”
Trump earlier falsely claimed there had been an “incredible rise” in the number of transgender shooters.
“This was untrue then, and it remains untrue now,” TJA noted. “Anti-trans actors have persistently [and] falsely claimed that mass shooters are disproportionately transgender or that transgender people are more likely to commit crimes. These claims now reliably resurface online when shootings occur.”
Meanwhile, an international advocacy group has warned the Trump administration is plotting genocide against transgender people.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security issued a “Red Flag Alert” for the United States based on the Trump administration’s anti-trans initiatives.
“The Republican Party’s anti-trans agenda has radicalized and continued to intensify,” the warning states. “2025 was the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for the number of anti-trans bills considered across the country. There was a 45% increase in bills between 2024 and 2025. Between 2021 and 2025, the number of bills in consideration has increased by 668%.
“The administration has moved from identifying transgender people as a threat to the family and to the nation’s military prowess to claiming that transgender people constitute a cosmic threat to the spiritual health of the nation and the greatest direct threat to U.S. national security in the world. Given these ideological developments, especially coupled with the increasingly hostile and draconian legislation against trans identities, the Lemkin Institute believes that the United States is squarely within the early to middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the U.S. and globally.”