The Right’s Baseless Project to Link Trans People With Extremism
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.”
