By Gillian Branstetter

As I’ve written before, it’s hard to imagine a world in which this onslaught of restrictions and censorship remains exclusively focused on the small minority of people who call themselves transgender. Among Musk, Trump, and all their failsons, anti-transgender animus is a patriarchal desire for control and purity paired with misogynistic and racial dreams of a white and masculine re-ascendancy, the dawning of a walled-in golden age free of alien influences, deviant impulses, or human empathy. Those of us who reject our gender assignment are convenient scapegoats, vulnerable to misrepresentation and public shaming. But ultimately the rules we break are broken by all people to one extent or another, and the tighter those rules are enforced—by Trump or those he can successfully deputize as snitches, informants, and recruits—the more people will captured in their dragnet. 

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The essentialist definitions provided by the Trump administration for “sex,” “man,” and “woman” are an effort to suggest they have no concern or regard for the categories of behavior and aesthetics that might come to mind when you hear the word “gender”—as one White House official unconvincingly told a reporter last week, “I don’t think anyone’s trying to do a dress code or anything like that.” But sex is not simply what’s between your legs and gender is not simply what you wear. The physical characteristics we associate with “male” and “female” are themselves broad, malleable, and overlapping. Particularly in the age of transvestigators—when the gender identity of women of color, in particular, is challenged if they fall outside the thin, European, and white ideal—such a judgment is clearly aimed at nothing as abstract as an “ideology” but against people and their deviant, literally non-binary bodies.

They do so not only out of an individualized hatred against a clearly labeled sexual minority but in defense of a faux-naturalized ideal, a vision of perfect manhood and womanhood born of nature yet clearly nonexistent without a police state enforcing it. This is why, as I wrote when a CPAC speaker called for “eradicating transgenderism from public life entirely,” the gender war is a forever war. They likely know this mythical ideal is beyond their reach. But by demonizing those who fall furthest from it—or, as trans people do, challenge the very notion of its inevitability—they can justify a permanent state of fear and persecution. 

In this instance and this instance only, let’s take Michael Knowles at his word. Shortly after telling a roaring crowd he’d like to “eradicate transgenderism from public life entirely,” he began threatening legal action against media outlets that characterized his demand as aimed at transgender people.

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Trump unveiled last month a sweeping plan to “end left-wing gender insanity,” ranging from bans on gender-affirming care, a Constitutional amendment legally defining “sex” and implicitly defining “transgender” out of existence, and the establishment of an accreditation agency that will require teachers to provide students a “positive education about the nuclear family” and threaten prosecution against any who refuse. Combined with the 2023 state legislative session thus far, defeating this “transgenderism” is no slight project, requiring a lot of persecution, censorship, and punishment aimed at controlling behavior and speech which flouts the anti-gender right’s standards for how good boys and girls are supposed to conduct themselves.

In truth, however, even this totalizing approach to gender nonconformity is still too narrow. As Knowles himself has acknowledged, the focus of conservatism’s construction of cisgender, heterosexual gender identities must be far more ambitious than simply taking the country back to the relatively recent time period when a frequently bipartisan consensus enforced transgender people’s absence from public life; the first mistake was, in his telling, failing to sufficiently oppose second wave feminism. 

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The vagueness and ubiquity of gender norms leaves this project with no certain end point or rubric for victory. While transgender people flout more of these rules than cisgender people—revealing them for the construct they are—most people break them in one way or another, and even our elimination (were such a thing even possible) wouldn’t suffice. We are all gender non-conforming in ways big or small, ranging from our relationship to reproductive labor and capitalism to how we present ourselves to the world. A campaign enforcing gender conformity, then, will expand well past the relatively small fraction of the population that calls themselves “transgender.” Labeling the anti-gender right as genocidal against trans people is, believe it or not, letting them off too easy. 

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The experience of defying gender norms for amusement, convenience, or survival is a universal one even as specific populations are forced to do so more frequently and punished more harshly for it. Thus, a war against gender nonconformity holds all the promise for the authoritarian personality as a “war on terror,” a “war on drugs,” or a “war on crime”—an endless excuse for policing, surveillance, censorship, and violence.