FBI Readies New War on Trans People
“We’re looking at the entire spider web”
The Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, two national security officials tell me.
“We're looking at the entire spider web for any of these attacks,” FBI director Kash Patel told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, when asked about shootings by trans individuals.
“They,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said after the Kirk murder, are “putting this crazy ideology in our schools,” echoing the growing view of many in Trump’s inner circle that a “cult of gender ideology” is behind an explosion of violence by some as yet unidentified “radical left.”
Two days before Kirk was killed, Donald Trump condemned “transgender insanity.” Then in an interview about the shooting, he blamed “the radicals on the left,” saying: “they want transgender for everyone.”
“They are cynically targeting trans people because the shooter’s lover was trans,” one senior intelligence official tells me. “The administration has convinced itself that the Charlie Kirk murder exposes some dark conspiracy.”
The senior official explains that there is no process per se for dealing with trans people as a “threat group,” but feels that trans individuals will be increasingly targeted under the banner of “violent extremism.”
Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender suspects as a subset of the Bureau’s new threat category, “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” (NVEs).
The Trump administration first created the NVE designation earlier this year to replace the Biden-era label “Anti-Authority and Anti-Government Violent Extremists” (AGAAVE), created to categorize January 6 rioters and other right-wing groups.
The new classification, sources say, gives Trump officials political (and media) cover. Rather than directly naming transgender people as some enemy, the White House has preferred euphemisms like “gender ideology extremism.”
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order establishing federal policy as defining sex as an "immutable biological reality" of male and female. He also signed an order to keep transgender individuals out of women's sports. This order directed federal agencies to enforce laws based on the definition and to cease funding for anything that "promote[s] gender ideology."
Additional executive orders have been signed that aim to restrict access to gender-affirming health care for minors, the administration labeling it as "chemical and surgical mutilation." The State Department has since stopped issuing new passports with an "X" gender marker. The Department of Homeland Security says it will ban transgender women from traveling to the United States to compete in professional sports. A ban on transgender people serving openly in the military was reinstated. And earlier this month, CNN reported that the Department of Justice was discussing denying trans people’s right to possess firearms on the rationale that transgenderism is “mental illness.”
But the Kirk killing has broken any hesitance to declare an all-out war on trans people directly, even amongst the anti-trans Trump inner circle. Take, for instance, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, who prior to Kirk’s murder, despite his prodigious output on X, had never tweeted the word “trans” during the second Trump term. The day after Kirk’s assassination, though, Gorka posted three separate Tweets on X about “trans shooters.”
Gorka is the highest level counter-terrorism official in the Trump administration.
Today, Donald Trump Jr. summarized the mood of his father’s circle, saying on X: “What is the greatest domestic terror threat facing America: ANTIFA or TRANTIFA?”
“ANTIFA,” short for anti-fascist, refers to a loosely affiliated anarchist movement that Trump frequently blames for political violence. “TRANTIFA” is a label suggesting transgender activists represent a violent network akin to Antifa. The “Trantifa” term, now ascendent, has percolated for the past several years. It appears in an internal “officer awareness bulletin” circulated by the private Symbol Intelligence Group, which contracts with the FBI and local law enforcement, obtained through a records request by the transparency nonprofit Property of the People.
Prosecutors have already made clear that they are placing transgender identity at the center of their case against Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson. The indictment refers to transgender issues three separate times:
“mass shootings by transgender individuals”;
“trans-rights oriented”;
“biological male who was transitioning genders.”
Yesterday, President Trump announced he was designating Antifa as a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION”’; the White House is reportedly drafting an executive order to that effect.
Mainstream media outlets mocked the move, pointing out that only groups with overseas connections can be formally listed as foreign terrorist organizations. But that criticism overlooks the fact that the FBI has the authority to designate and watchlist domestic “terrorists” secretly (there are some 4,000 Americans so named, with no foreign nexus.)
Kash Patel has said that the FBI is looking at Robinson’s entire network of contacts, well beyond the 20 people in his Discord friend group. (The leaked chat messages from the group that I published earlier this week do not suggest anything close to conspiracy.)
It’s perhaps not too surprising that the Trump administration’s war on “diversity, equity and inclusion” is now encompassing the transgender community. But while the DEI crackdown is likely to be reversed by subsequent administrations given the sheer number of people it affects, a federal designation of trans people — who account for a far smaller number — as violent extremists portends a longer term campaign.
The practice, now deeply embedded as a result of two decades of the global war on terror, includes constructing link-analysis diagrams of friends and friends of friends, monitoring social media, opening more intrusive investigations to collect intelligence on potential extremists, watchlisting people, and even arresting people preemptively — all in the name of public safety.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Good luck finding two trans people who can agree on where to get brunch, much less form an organized terror cell.
As Athens did to its enemies, so Athens did to itself. Thucydides