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Just before Charlie Kirk, the influential head of right-wing youth organization Turning Point USA, was shot dead on Wednesday afternoon at an event at Utah Valley University, he was in the midst of answering a question about one of his movement’s favorite targets of disinformation and hate. Hunter Kozak, a liberal TikTok personality, had asked Kirk if he knew how many trans mass shooters there have been in the past 10 years, apparently preparing to challenge him on that number relative to all mass shootings. In what would become some of his last words, Kirk—channeling his and the right wing’s recent campaign to paint the trans community as especially mentally ill and violent—offered a smug “too many,” eliciting cheers from the audience.
Almost immediately, numerous right-wing commentators and news outlets were very willing to speculate that, given the timing, the shooter must have been trans. Within the hour, former congressman and Fox commentator Jason Chaffetz, giving an “eyewitness account” of the scene, said: “I don’t think it was a coincidence that the shot rang out when you have a question about transgender mass shootings. Hopefully I am wrong. I will probably get criticized for jumping to conclusions. … I don’t think that is a coincidence, but we will see.” Then, on Thursday morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to a leaked internal memo from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, ammunition found after the shooting was “engraved with expressions of ‘transgender and anti-fascist ideology,’ ” without indicating what those expressions (aside from some random arrow symbols) might be. Despite a lack of evidence, this assertion only served to fuel right-wing anti-trans vitriol in the day or so it remained in circulation.
On Friday, the suspected shooter—identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson—was turned in by family after allegedly confessing to the killing. At a press conference following the arrest, the engravings on the bullets were finally revealed to include an arcane homophobic meme, some lyrics to an Italian folk song dedicated to those who fought against Nazi occupation, and an apparent reference to the video game Helldivers 2. The overall tone of the messages was nominally anti-fascist, though distorted through the lens of a very online ironic trolling culture that can be hard to decipher. What was crystal clear, however, is that no “transgender ideology” was involved.
Despite this seeming resolution and regardless of what else we may learn of Robinson’s motivations, there’s no doubt that, in the bigoted and conspiracy-prone minds of the right, the event will be used to further the dangerous campaign to brand trans people as a threat to American society. Recall that just last week, CNN reported that, according to anonymous officials, the Department of Justice was discussing the possibility of banning guns for transgender Americans, under the reasoning that gender dysphoria makes transgender people inherently mentally unstable and violent. (In fact, gender dysphoria is not considered by psychiatric professionals to be a pathology; rather, it simply describes a person’s experience of themselves relative to their assigned gender at birth.) The proposal is said to have gained steam in the wake of the Aug. 27 mass shooting at Minneapolis’ Annunciation Catholic Church, which police say was perpetrated by a person who seems to have identified as transgender—a fact that that the right has used to push the false narrative of a pattern of violence in the trans community.
It’s hard to know how serious the DOJ is about this proposal, but what’s immediately apparent is just how dangerously unconstitutional it is. The value of a Constitution, it should go without saying, is that it applies to all citizens of the nation (at least in theory). The very idea that a minority group could lose access to the Second Amendment based on the violent actions of a single member raises a number of alarms. What other groups might the Trump administration like to deprive of firearms by such logic? And why would it stop at gun ownership? Could voting rights be applied subjectively as well? The abolition of slavery? Free speech? To follow through on this proposal would set a catastrophic precedent and open the doors wide for the removal of the rights of any group the government decides isn’t fit to have them.
It’s important to note that, as of now, this proposal has been met with significant backlash, even among gun lobbyists, traditionally some of the right wing’s strongest supporters. As it stands, the likelihood of such a policy being enacted (not to mention surviving legal scrutiny) does not seem strong.
That said, the real thing to worry about here is the intent. This represents a clear and overt discussion of a willingness by the DOJ to remove the right of a minority group to defend itself—a group that has been long villainized by the people in power and one that is far more likely than the average person to experience actual physical violence and murder. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A month ago, I wrote about a Trump executive order that called for states to, among other horrific things, forcibly institutionalize people experiencing mental illness while homeless or in public, and I laid out the long history of the far-right rhetoric of characterizing transness (or any flavor of queerness, really) as a mental illness. I ended that piece by saying that if the order were enforced and wielded with anti-trans intent, all it would take for the forcible rounding up of trans people is just one more step.
This proposal could be the beginning of that step.
Think about it: If put in place, this gun ban would legally enshrine the idea that trans people are mentally ill and inherently dangerous. And that’s where things get truly insidious. To enforce this type of ban, the Department of Justice would presumably be able to compel medical providers to turn over any diagnoses of gender dysphoria (which trans people need in order to access gender-affirming care), effectively putting in their possession a nationwide list of transgender Americans.
Here’s where that would leave us: a) There is a vague, purposefully capacious call for the institutionalization of “individuals with mental illness who pose a danger to others”; b) individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria are categorized as mentally ill and dangerous; and c) the government has a list of everybody who has received this diagnosis.
If states—or worse, the federal government itself—began to officially act on this set of orders and policy, it is not difficult at all to imagine seeing the mass roundups of transgender Americans across the nation. After all, we already know that this regime is more than willing to engage in illegal mass roundups of other minorities and place them in concentration camps.
It’s not hyperbolic to point out that what the DOJ is batting around here is a very literal page out of the Nazi playbook. After the 1933 election wherein the Nazis took power and Adolf Hitler secured his position as chancellor of Germany, one of the very first acts of the party was to enforce the disarmament of German Jews, justifying the action by saying that Jews “cannot be regarded as trustworthy.” Ultimately, the selective disarmament of the German people led to a state where only members of Nazi-approved organizations could legally own firearms, and the Jewish people specifically were disallowed from owning even “weapons for hitting or stabbing.” The historical parallels are hard to ignore, especially when you consider that some of the earliest victims of the Holocaust were Romani (persecuted for largely the same reasons as with undocumented immigrants now) and queer Germans.
While it’s fair to argue that the firearm ban may not go anywhere, there’s no question that the situation for transgender Americans is becoming dire. On Monday, the House Appropriations Committee proposed a new spending bill that would bar federal funding from being used for any form of gender-affirming care, something they already tried to do with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this year.
Regardless of the ultimate fate of all of these executive orders, proposals, and policy changes, it is crystal clear that what the Trump administration wants is to fully eliminate transgender people from public life, whether by denying us lifesaving care, driving us back into the closet, or, in their darkest of fantasies, rounding us up for imprisonment.
And after we’re gone, who’s next? Don’t be fooled, the weaponizing of mental illness in this way isn’t limited just to queer people. In March, Minnesota Republicans, in a transparent attempt to silence any criticism of Trump, introduced a bill that would define “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness. While that bill may seem absurd on its face and hasn’t yet left committee, it shows a clear willingness by the far right to pathologize their political opponents, closely echoing the use of Nazi race science to silence dissent.
The blanket classification of any minority group as mentally ill is something that has always resulted in atrocities being committed against them, and there is no reason to think that our moment would play out any differently. We need to oppose laws like these any way we can, and we need to work to remove any legislator who would support them from office. Failing that, we need to be willing to stand up and defend our fellow Americans from what is to come, because I assure you, things will get worse from here.
