Red Flag Alert - Anti-Trans Genocide in the USA - #3

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security is releasing this third Red Flag Alert for the USA related to the Trump Administration’s anti-trans initiatives, which have continued to expand nationwide since our last Red Flag Alert (RFA) on this subject. Over the eight months since the second RFA’s publication, the Republican Party’s anti-trans agenda has radicalized and continued to intensify. 2025 was the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for the number of anti-trans bills considered across the country. There was a 45 percent increase in bills between 2024 and 2025. Between 2021 and 2025, the number of bills in consideration has increased by 668 percent.

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.

Genocide against trans people takes on patterns that set it apart from the mass murder genocides that people commonly associate with the crime, such as the Holocaust. Currently, the genocide against trans people follows a pattern – denial of identity (pattern #9 in the Lemkin Institute’s Ten Patterns of Genocide) – that makes it more familiar to the colonial genocides against indigenous populations, including the residential/boarding school systems in North America and Australia, where indigenous children were “allowed” to go on living if they gave up their identities, including their languages. Denial of identity involves two main steps: preventing people from openly expressing an identity and destroying institutions that reproduce the identity. Given that the denial of identity is the consequence of a well-defined hostility, even hatred, for the identity, the pattern is often characterized by incitement against the group. Alongside suppression and incitement, perpetrators of this pattern of genocide will simultaneously criminalize the identity, so that expressions of it or institutions that reproduce it become characterized as threatening and corrosive to the body politic and warranting state violence and coercion. People who assert or support the denied identity then become criminal elements that must be eliminated. In the case of the boarding schools, children who used their mother tongue or otherwise showed signs of their independent identity were severely punished.

Currently the United States government is pursuing a strategy to impose an alien identity on trans people through hostile laws. When that fails, we can expect the government, if not stopped by internal and external pressures, to move towards strategies of containment involving the criminalization of the entire community based solely on its existence. Each process is coercive and violent, but the location and character of the violence is different. Importantly, the current state strategy of legal prohibition provides trans people with far more opportunities for escape to a more friendly state domestically and, when that fails, to foreign countries. Once the containment process begins, flight becomes much more difficult. The process leading to containment strategies is also a radicalizing factor for state institutions and agents, which will create a greater tolerance for gross human rights abuses.

Almost all genocides involve aspects of identity denial and erasure, especially in settler colonial contexts. Russian President Vladimir Putin subscribes to a genocidal form of Russian nationalism that denies and criminalizes the Ukrainian identity. His most genocidal policy in Ukraine, the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, has involved intense processes of identity erasure and denial. Similarly, Israel denies the Palestinian identity and uses that denial as the basis for genocidal expansionism. Myanmar has denied and erased the Rohingya identity, Azerbaijan the Artsakh Armenian identity, and Somalia the Somaliland identity. In this way, the denial of identity is part and parcel of a more fundamental characteristic of genocide, which is the assumption by a state, party, or armed group of the proprietary right to define identity.

Since June of last year, there has been a sharp escalation in genocidal language and actions against trans people in the U.S. The Trump Administration is engaged in a concerted disinformation campaign to scapegoat trans people for all the ills of American society and has been working to make life as difficult as possible for trans people. In 2025 alone, lawmakers across the United States passed 125 bills that negatively impact the rights and wellbeing of trans people. These bills cover a variety of issues, including bathroom bans, bills denying trans youth autonomy and identity in educational spaces, efforts to remove the presence of trans youth in sports, and laws banning or restricting gender-affirming care.

Near the close of 2025, bills passed the House banning any gender-affirming care for minors and banning the use of Medicaid to fund such care. These federal level bills follow a number of similar bans at the state level that have passed throughout 2025. Bans on medical care for trans youth are presented as necessary to protect children from the invisible spectre of gender radicalism.

Over the first two months of 2026, we have already witnessed terrifying developments in Kansas and Indiana. In late January of 2026, the Kansas State Legislature passed a bathroom ban that includes a bounty for Americans who hunt and find trans people using the appropriate bathroom for their gender; anyone who encounters a suspected trans person in a bathroom can launch a civil suit against that person. Although this is the first statute of its kind, the Lemkin Institute would not be surprised if other states take inspiration. Such legislation encourages the harassment of trans people daring to exist in public by monetarily rewarding those who take part in the harassment. It also ensures the harassment of non-trans people who, for whatever reason, are suspected of being trans by the self-appointed gender police. Moreover, the bill serves to widen the genocidal criminal conspiracy against trans people by encouraging participation from ordinary Americans, who then will also become legally and morally responsible for the state’s crimes. Importantly, the law does not mandate that Americans target trans people in bathrooms. Everyone is still legally entitled to treat trans people in the same manner as cis people; that is, to mostly ignore their presence in the bathroom. Nevertheless, while nothing in this law requires anyone to “snitch” on trans people for existing in public, history has shown that similar laws encourage popular participation in persecution. We remind Americans that the argument that you were just following the law is not an excuse for participation in mass atrocity.

As part of the same bill targeting the trans community, Kansas also invalidated the driver’s licences of anyone for whom the gender marker on their licence does not match their sex assigned at birth. This cannot be read as anything other than an attempt to force trans people to out themselves, as those who want to continue driving will have to obtain a new driver’s licence with a gender marker that does not correspond to their lived reality. Such legislation also falls squarely within the pattern of denial of identity, as it forces trans people to choose between losing their ability to move around easily and identifying as a gender other than their own. The Lemkin Institute will not be surprised if the Trump Administration follows Kansas’s lead and invalidates passports where the gender marker does not correspond with one’s assigned sex at birth. In 2025, President Trump issued an executive order requiring new passports to correspond with sex assigned at birth, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in November of 2025. Any trans people who obtain new passports while this executive order is in effect will be forced to out themselves if they attempt to leave or re-enter the country, putting them at risk of harassment or violence.

Forcible identification is a common tactic of genocidal projects and often precedes containment; it enables the genocidaires to easily track the targeted group. What is presented as a simple identifying marker on one’s ID or a badge worn on one’s clothes becomes a tool of control. The most well-known example of this is the yellow star badge Jews were forced to wear under the Third Reich. In Rwanda, identity documents specified whether the person was “Hutu” or “Tutsi”; during the genocide, these identity documents determined who lived and who died. Today, under Israeli apartheid, colour-coded IDs are used to control where Palestinians from different areas are allowed to travel or live.

A recent anti-trans bill that failed in Indiana is indicative of the comprehensive nature of the attack on trans life in the U.S. The Indiana bill, known as SB-182, would have imposed a binary definition of biological sex dependent on sex assigned at birth on the state government. It would further have prevented any change to the sex marker on birth certificates unless a person can prove a “medically verifiable disorder of sex development.” An amendment to the bill would have required public and charter schools, as well as public colleges and universities, to define multiple occupancy bathrooms, locker rooms, and dorms according only to the two biological sexes recognized by the state – making no provision for intersex students and excluding trans students. Students who felt this part of the law was violated could sue their schools. Finally SB-182 would have mandated that incarcerated people be assigned to facilities based only on their sex assigned at birth. Although the Indiana bill did not pass, it is likely to be reintroduced or resurface as an amendment to another state bill. Indiana has already banned gender transition procedures for minors, required parental notification of any minor requesting the use of a new name or pronouns at school, banned the teaching of “human sexuality” to students from prekindergarten to third grade, and prohibited the use of state resources for sexual reassignment surgery in state prisons. SB-182 was an attempt to deepen the erasure of transgender people in the state.

Simultaneously with these horrific developments at the state level, actions towards the erasure of trans existence – and LGBTQ+ existence more broadly – from literature have moved to the federal level. These efforts should be seen as part of a coordinated attack on institutions that reproduce LGBTQ+ identities. In late February 2026, Republicans in the House of Representatives introduced legislation which would amend education legislation to prohibit the use of funds provided under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act “to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material.” The bill, entitled the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” defines “sexually oriented material” as material that either “includes any depiction, description, or simulation of sexually explicit conduct” or “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism,” which makes no sense as gender identities have nothing to do with sexuality. Such a broad definition means that this bill could be used to remove any book from schools that even mentions the existence of transgender people. This would do irreparable harm to children questioning their identity in a society unaccepting of them and searching for representation in literature. Such measures are especially harmful for those whose parents are not supportive and who have to seek out answers about themselves outside of their homes.

The prohibition of books mentioning the existence of the LGBTQ+ community fits neatly into the wider pattern of the denial of trans identity under the Trump administration. As Kelly Jensen from Book Riot rightfully observed, “[t]hese bills aren’t about removing books; books are just one of the tools. These bills are about the complete and total erasure and removal of queer people from American life.”

As is to be expected in identity denial genocides, the Trump Administration has been working towards the criminalization of trans identity and the criminalization of the recognition of that identity by public and private entities, medical professionals, and family members. On 17 February, Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing organization responsible for Project 2025, told the right-wing PBD Podcast that the Foundation’s plan for the transgender community was to "outlaw it” through a strategy of “radical incrementalism,” including the withdrawal of access to gender-affirming medications for trans adults. Such criminalization of an identity – especially its outright banning (or “outlawing”) – is a frequent precursor to stepped up persecution in genocidal processes, as it serves to marginalize a population from the rest of society and offers onlookers a ready justification for the state’s increasingly cruel and violent treatment of targeted groups.

Roberts’ very clear exposure of the Heritage Foundation’s genocidal agenda with respect to trans people is an indication of the Trump Administration’s growing sense of impunity in openly curtailing the rights of trans people in the USA. His remarks follow on the heels of the Trump Administration’s ramping up of persecution against many of its other targeted populations, especially immigrants of color and the pro-democracy movement, in late 2025 and early 2026. In September 2025, President Trump issued an executive order describing supporters of the trans community as gender “extremists” and “domestic terrorists.” Building on this executive order, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a memorandum out in early December 2025 to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies ordering them to investigate domestic terrorist groups, and explicitly including “radical gender ideology” as a form of domestic terrorism.

The Lemkin Institute has been unable to locate the Trump Administration’s working definitions of “radical gender ideology” and “gender extremism.” The vagueness of the terms is clearly intentional, as it allows the state to apply the terms in a broad variety of circumstances. In fact, the use of overly broad categories is characteristic of genocidal ideology, as the intent is to criminalize the targeted group as such rather than specific actions by members of the group. As the anti-trans genocide ramps up, resistance to anti-trans measures can be easily shut down using this terrorism designation. The message is clear: The Trump Administration can enact whatever policies it wants against trans people and anyone who speaks up against those policies can be treated as a terrorist by state agents. We have seen how this will work already in Minneapolis, where the former Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem justified the murder of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and CBP agents by calling the victims “domestic terrorists.”

The terrorism designation forms part of a larger deluge of rhetoric blaming the entire transgender community for crimes committed by individual people, trans and cis alike. The narrative of a trans terrorism threat was pushed heavily in the wake of the murder of right-wing political operative Charlie Kirk allegedly by a white, cisgender man on 10 September 2025, when multiple elected officials blamed transgender people for Kirk’s murder and called for their criminalization and institutionalization. Using remarkably genocidal language, Representative Ronny Jackson, a Republican from Texas, called trans people “a cancer that is spreading across the country” and demanded that all trans people be shut away, isolated from each other, and denied access to the Internet, as if they collectively form a vast criminal conspiracy. Donald Trump Jr. called the “radical trans movement” more dangerous than al-Qaeda, the group best known for having committed the 9/11 attack. On the right-wing Megyn Kelly Show he displayed the cruel and hateful sarcasm common to genocidaires by remarking, “I’m sure people are totally sane after jacking themselves up on hormones given to them by some rainbow hair freak doctor because they think men can somehow magically become women.”

Reacting to Charlie Kirk’s murder by a cis man, the Heritage Foundation began to push entirely fictitious statistics on social media. In one tweet on September 18, its “Oversight Project” shared a report in which it suggested that a ridiculous 50 percent of school shooters since 2015 were transgender. When Wired magazine requested that the Heritage Foundation share the data behind this claim, the Heritage Foundation directed Wired to a tweet from one of its own vice presidents describing a study based on 8 shootings. According to Wired magazine’s own research, one study found that since 2015, only three school shooting perpetrators have been “credibly identified” as trans or “undergoing gender-affirming care.” Even in a dataset of 8, that is not enough to constitute 50 percent. There have been over 2,000 school shootings since 2015. Another study concluded that sex and gender diverse individuals committed 0.087 percent of mass shootings between 2013 and September of 2025, a figure which is disproportionately small relative to the size of the transgender population. The “50 percent” claim from the Heritage Foundation is entirely unfounded and constitutes blatant disinformation.

According to Michael Jensen, research director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, there is no evidence that transgender people are disproportionately committing acts of mass violence. In fact, they make up a tiny number of the perpetrators of mass violence in the United States. Since 1996, 95 percent of mass shooters in the USA have been cisgender men. And yet, no lawmakers have called for the institutionalization of all cisgender men, their separation from one another, and removal of their internet access.

This disinformation campaign is not new, but has certainly been ramped up and moved into the mainstream over the past six months. Most recently, during his podcast appearance on 17 February, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts claimed that there is a “mounting body of evidence” linking gender-affirming surgery to mental health issues and acts of violence. It will be interesting to see if this podcast appearance is referenced as support for this claim by the Heritage Foundation in the future, as it is obvious that no such body of evidence exists.

The fact is that trans people are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators of it. In fact, proportionately, they are over four times more likely to be the victims of violent crimes than cis people. Scapegoating the group suffering most from violent crime as the most violent group in a society defies basic logic. Such rhetoric serves the sole purpose of providing justification for genocidal policies and violence against the trans community. This is exactly how the current United States administration is utilizing the success of their disinformation campaign: to enact policies stripping trans people of their rights and erasing them from public life.

Punishment of a minority group for the crimes of an individual, especially where the crime or individual is imaginary, is a common pattern in hate ideology and campaigns. We can think of the Dreyfus Affair, where a Jewish man was wrongfully tried, convicted, and imprisoned for treason, which directly contributed to a rise of virulent antisemitism in French society and politics.

Beyond the language characterizing trans people as national security threats and violent domestic terrorists, some Republican politicians are also using religious language to portray their existence as a spiritually corrupting influence. During a mid-December press conference at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neil insinuated that transgender people posed a threat to the nation by “denying fundamental truths,” further stating that “at the root of the evils we face [...] is a hatred for nature as God designed it, and for life as it was meant to be lived.” Such language both encourages societal violence against the group and justifies targeted state violence. It is a common tactic of genocidal campaigns to accuse targets of being against God and thereby to encourage the wider public to voluntarily participate in the genocide as a Godly act.

There is growing evidence that genocidal anti-trans sentiment has penetrated deeply into state security institutions. For example, in September, transgender and queer immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities reported being singled out for increased manual labor duties and increased sexual violence. Such reports are in line with the experience of trans people in U.S. prisons. According to the Marshall Project, trans inmates are much more likely than cis inmates to experience abuse and sexual violence while incarcerated. In one study, 37 percent of trans people in prison reported having been sexually assaulted, compared with 3 percent of cisgender people. Another study – on sexual violence against prison inmates in California – found that 59 percent of transgender inmates reported experiencing sexual assault in comparison with 4.4 percent of a random sample of inmates. While Justice Department rules have stipulated since 2012 that officials should give gender identity “serious consideration” when choosing where to place an inmate, the vast majority of incarcerated transgender people are placed in prisons as determined by their sex assigned at birth, making them very vulnerable to abuse by fellow prisoners and staff.

The abuse of transgender people in prison will only get worse, as on 19 February 2026 the Department of Justice released a new policy barring gender affirming care for transgender inmates, released in compliance with President Trump’s Executive Order from 30 January 2026 on “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” This new policy will replace gender affirming care with therapy and psychiatric medications. Transgender inmates will not even be given access to clothing or toiletry items that conform with their gender identity, enforcing a total erasure of their true selves. According to Chinyere Ezie, an attorney representing transgender inmates in the state of Georgia, “If they implement [the new federal] plan and it's not enjoined, people will die.”

Daily threats to the security of transgender life extend, of course, far beyond prisons. Trans and other LGBTQ+ youth represent a disproportionally high percentage of homeless young people – up to 40 percent, according to one study – due largely to family rejection. Transgender people experiencing homelessness have a hard time finding help from existing service providers, who frequently house them with the wrong gender population and therefore fail to protect them from harm. Transgender people of all ages experience discrimination in employment and housing and lack explicit legal protection. Across the country, trans people continue to suffer disproportionate levels of fatal violence at the hands of strangers and those known to them. In a devastating illustration of what is called transmisogynoir, one of the groups of people in the US most likely to be murdered are black trans women. According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 2017 and 2020 trans people were 2.5 times more likely than cis people to be murdered. Since 2013, about 60 percent of trans people who fell victim to fatal violence have been black trans women, even though they represent about 8 percent of trans people in the U.S.

At the December 2025 HHS press conference, where Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neil insinuated that trans people were against God, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, detailed plans to introduce rules for Medicare and Medicaid banning gender affirming care for minors – even in states where it is legal – and withdrawing federal funding from any hospitals that offer gender affirming care for minors. As justification for these measures, Secretary Kennedy stated, entirely without evidence, that “so-called gender affirming care has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people.”

As we have emphasized in the past, bans on gender-affirming care have been shown to result in the increased incidence of suicidal thoughts and other negative mental health symptoms for trans youth. In the UK, data obtained by the Good Law Project through a freedom of information request shows a surge in suicides following rollbacks in the provision of gender-affirming care to youths, proving what the trans community has been saying for years now. Politicians and anti-trans campaigners who call for an end to gender affirming care for children and youth also ignore the fact that the vast majority (97 percent) of youth receiving gender affirming surgeries are not even trans. The umbrella term of “gender-affirming care” includes care such as chest reductions for cisgender boys with medical conditions. Bans on gender-affirming care prevent youth of all gender identities from receiving impactful care.

Regardless of the Trump administration’s fearmongering on the subject, no child goes from saying “I think I was born in the wrong body” to receiving gender reassignment surgery or puberty blockers within days or months. Such decisions are taken following careful consideration and much discussion with healthcare professionals, including mental health providers. Best practices have been established by all reputable medical associations, leading to positive outcomes for the vast majority of young people who identify as trans and nonbinary. Prior to puberty, no medical intervention ever occurs and transition is entirely social. In the overwhelming majority of cases, gender-affirming surgery for young transgender individuals does not occur until after the age of 18. Between the ages of 15 to 17, in the rare cases where surgery does occur, it usually takes the form of chest surgery. The Trump Administration has purposely distorted the facts on transgender youth to justify harmful legal intervention.

As laid bare in Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ statements on the PBD podcast, the Trump Administration seems clearly to be heading towards federal-level bans on gender-affirming care for all ages, including for trans adults. Bans of gender-affirming care subjects people to mental torture, are immoral, and violate international human rights standards. Bills to restrict funding for adult gender affirming care were introduced in various state legislatures in early 2025, but have not received as much media attention as bans for gender-affirming care for youth. Bans at the federal level would deny life-saving care to millions of Americans and would also constitute an escalation of the suppression or denial of identity.

Targeting gender-affirming care for youth before seeking blanket bans against transgender people is a strategic choice on behalf of right-wing politicians in the U.S. Even where specious, the goal of protecting children is a very palatable mission and popular among people who do not understand what it means to be transgender. The Lemkin Institute believes that the right-wing has been so focused on preventing gender-affirming care for youth in order to prevent the emergence of more transgender people in the future. The smaller the community, the more vulnerable it becomes and the easier it is to eradicate entirely. In genocidal processes against ethnic groups, the genocidaires often try to achieve this goal through the suppression of biological reproduction. In the case of anti-trans genocide, the genocidaire has to adopt different strategies. Through youth gender-affirming care bans, Republican legislators are attempting to restrict the reproduction of trans identity by radically decreasing the number of trans adults in the next generation that comes of age. By criminalizing trans people and making public life impossible for them through bathroom bans and other measures, the Trump Administration and Republican-dominated states are further destroying the ability of the group to reproduce socially as well.

What the anti-trans movement fails to understand is that trans people are not created through gender-affirming care. Their identities are real regardless of whether they have undergone any form of medical or even social transition. Gender-affirming care bans and policies forcing trans people to remain closeted condemn trans people to lives of suffering, but do not make them cis.

Over the past year, trans people as a whole have become more fearful of violent retaliation to their existence and have increasingly begun to hide their true selves. The Lemkin Institute calls on the American people to reject the genocidal language and policies being furthered by the Trump Administration, the Heritage Foundation, and state legislatures. These attacks against a tiny population that poses no harm to anyone constitute a profound violation of the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. Trans people are our family members, our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues, and our fellow human beings. They deserve the protection of the law against social bigotry and state persecution. Because the trans community comprises a tiny 1.4 percent of the U.S. population, many Americans will never have met a trans person and will rely on mis- and disinformation in forming an opinion. We encourage everyone to learn more about transgender people from transgender people and to consider getting involved with organizations promoting trans civil rights. The United States is known worldwide for its “live and let live” culture, which is one of the country’s greatest strengths. Americans would be wise to assert this libertarian value in no uncertain terms now, before the entire country becomes responsible for greater atrocity crimes against the trans community in the future.