The Trump administration's ”demonization” of transgender people as mass shooters is inciting anti-trans violence and appears calculated to justify crackdowns on the whole community, civil rights activists have warned.
In an "emergency" briefing on Wednesday, a group of pro-LGBT+ groups, including the Human Rights Campaign and the Southern Policy Law Center, said they were "sounding the alarm" about reports that Trump might "weaponize" the FBI against trans people in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination.
GLAAD chief Sarah Kate Ellis also revealed that her group had logged an "uptick" in anti-trans harassment and violence, including death threats, physical assaults, and bullets left outside a Missouri LGBT+ center engraved with the words "DIE F***S".
"Violence committed against trans Americans is an epidemic. Undue violence committed by trans Americans is a lie — a lie that only begets more violence," said HRC president Kelley Robinson.
"We need every elected official to also sound the alarm with us... to speak out against this President's violent actions, to confront the lies that put trans Americans in danger."
She said that using the FBI to target the trans community would be "an abuse of power that no president, Republican or Democrat, should be able to exercise."
Last week, the Heritage Foundation, the influential ultra-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, called on the FBI to treat "violent transgender ideology" as a new domestic terror threat.
The White House has carefully avoided either embracing or rejecting this idea, and it may never happen. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that officials are eager to target trans people, but this has not yet been corroborated elsewhere.
Nevertheless, Trump and his allies have repeatedly painted trans people as especially violent and prone to mass shootings — which flies in the face of most available evidence — while blaming Kirk's assassination on a "vast domestic terror movement".
"We're raising the alarm now because we don't know exactly what is to come, but we are getting continued signals and rhetoric from the administration that their attacks on trans people are not going to stop," said Robinson.
She condemned Kirk’s assassination, calling it “an abomination”.
Immediately after Kirk’s death, an internal law enforcement bulletin falsely claimed that bullets found at the scene were engraved with messages of "transgender" ideology.
"[Journalists] should be questioning the facts pushed out by this government," said GLAAD's Sarah Kate Ellis. "Especially the FBI: we see it as a compromised organization under this leadership...
"The truth is, the real trans terrorism is the terror experienced by trans people in this country."
The Heritage Foundation insisted that it was not accusing all trans people of being terrorists, saying all Americans are "free to identify as transgender, or support... transgenderism in a non-violent way".
But SPLC attorney Beth Littrell argued that any such effort could easily spiral into "widespread surveillance" and "abuses" against the whole trans community, akin to the FBI's treatment of Black civil rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s.
"The objective of these [reported efforts] is to vilify, criminalize, and create a boogeyman... it lays the groundwork for for the abuses we've seen from the government in the past,” she said.
The other groups involved in the briefing were Advocates for Trans Equality, PFLAG, and the Transgender Law Center.
The FBI declined to comment, while the White House referred a comment request to the FBI.
