Trump Falsely Links Trans People to Terrorism. Now, a Target Is on Their Back
Increasing threats by intelligence agencies to investigate trans people as potential domestic terrorists are striking fear and anxiety into the community.
In December, Kathy Brennan was in San Francisco on a video call with her wife and son when she started to feel a burning pain in her chest. While she ignored it at first, it quickly spread to more of her body until it was too much to bear. She called 911 and was brought to the hospital on a stretcher.
“My entire chest was just crushed in pain, I couldn’t even move it was so bad,” Brennan told Uncloseted Media. “I said ‘God, I am not ready to die here. Please don’t let me die.’ I was thinking about Alaina, and we have so much more life together.”
Brennan spent the next few days recovering in the hospital from what doctors determined to be a stress-induced heart attack.
Brennan had spent the past year in a near-constant state of what she called “safety monitoring” her wife, Alaina Kupec.
She obsessively followed the news about the Trump administration’s attacks against the trans community, especially as officials began openly labeling trans people as terrorists. Everywhere she went, she mentally patrolled for how to keep her wife safe.
“Is our home safe? Is my wife safe? Are we safe? What do we have to do? … Can we protect ourselves if people come to our door? What do we have to worry about when we go to the grocery store? Are we gonna get doxxed?” Brennan remembers thinking.
Kupec, a trans naval intelligence veteran, is an outspoken advocate for trans rights and is the founder president of Gender Research Advisory Council + Education (GRACE).
“I think the big worry is that she will be taken away from me and we won’t be able to find her. … Then, just for the sheer sake of cruelty, my beautiful, feminine woman of a wife, they would put her in a men’s prison.”
Brennan’s fear reflects that of many trans Americans and their loved ones. In the aftermath of the assassination of anti-trans conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration and its allies began taking actions to target socially progressive people and organizations as terrorists, with a focus on trans people. In September, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa, a decentralized movement focused on militant opposition to fascism, as the first ever “domestic terrorist organization.” At the same time, the closely allied Heritage Foundation—who penned Project 2025—began pushing for the creation of a new national security designation called “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism.”
Shortly after, Trump released National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM)-7, which directs intelligence agencies to investigate left-wing political organizations for involvement in domestic terrorism, singling out “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The unfounded trans terrorism panic has swept right-wing spaces, and experts say that it’s putting trans people in danger.
“If people are told, day after day, especially from … people with that veneer of legitimacy, that this entire group of people … is implicitly a dangerous terrorist, that sends that message that these people are able to be targeted for violence,” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Uncloseted Media.
The What and the Why
While Trump relied on anti-trans messaging since he began campaigning in the 2024 presidential election, his portrayal of trans people as a national security threat emerged in response to an August 2025 mass shooting in Minneapolis, where a trans person killed two children. While the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are cisgender men, right-wing figureheads blamed the shooting on the perpetrator’s transness.
While Kirk’s assassin is cisgender, early reports falsely claimed that he had engraved pro-trans messages onto his bullets, which conservative figures like Megyn Kelly and Laura Loomer used to blame trans people for the killing. “It’s time to designate the transgender movement as a terrorist movement,” Loomer said the following weekend on X. And Vice President JD Vance suggested that he considers trans people to be part of a “terrorist movement.”
The Trump administration picked up on this rhetoric to justify its actions: The Antifa executive order and NSPM-7 both reference Kirk’s assassination as well as either trans people or “extremism on gender.”
As these policies began rolling out, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that the FBI was preparing to designate trans people as “nihilistic violent extremists.” A leaked intelligence brief showed that Customs and Border Protection had centered the focus of one extremist group on their trans membership, referring to them as a “radical leftist trans militant cult.”
How these actions will be enforced remains to be seen. At least two trans women are currently jailed and awaiting trial over an anti-ICE protest where a local police officer was shot by a cis man, which the Department of Justice claims was connected to an “Antifa Cell.” It is not known whether the government will attempt to use the defendants’ transness to implicate them in terrorism charges.
And leaked documents indicate that the FBI is compiling a list of groups and individuals involved in extremism based on a number of beliefs including “radical gender ideology.” Their ability to compile such lists may be enhanced by a policy change from the Department of Homeland Security last February that allows the government to surveil people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
While some have questioned to what extent the administration intends to actually enforce all of these policies, experts say that the fact they’re being discussed poses a serious risk.
“From 9/11 onward, the United States has been leading a ‘global war on terror,’ so to label somebody as a terrorist is a rallying cry for violence and discrimination,” says Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. “This term of terrorism calls people to action. … Once you label somebody as a terrorist, then clearly they present a mortal danger to society, and they need to be fought against.”
‘Tremendously Damaging’
Lewis says that being exposed to these attacks can be “tremendously damaging.”
“It’s not even that there are [always] explicitly these immediate legal repercussions that some person will face, but it’s that othering, it’s that sense of fear every day,” he says.
That fear has caused Jewels Jones to withdraw from public life. Jones, a trans man from the South, says that the anti-trans vitriol online after Kirk’s death became too much to handle, and he had to leave social media almost entirely.
“I’m 23, I should be on social media, but I can’t because if I even go onto my timeline, something can trigger me,” Jones told Uncloseted Media. “[I miss] the feeling of freedom.”
With community often hard to find, Jones says he and several other trans people he knows have been struggling with substance use.
“Everyone here has their own reasons for turning to things such as drinking and smoking and partying and just finding [a way] to feel numb or ignore what’s going on,” Jones says. “Just being trans and having to see how everybody views you, how you’re perceived, how you’re feeling, all these different emotions that you feel is more than enough of a reason [to] turn to those things.”
PJ, a trans man from a small town in Arizona, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not out, says that after Trump’s inauguration, he’s started to hide his transness. And he’s not alone: Since the 2024 election, 55% of trans people have taken steps to be less visible in their communities.
“It is torture,” PJ says. “I do not like having to lower my voice when I speak to prevent sounding androgynous. I do not like having to hide away my wardrobe for ‘being too gay.’ There is no comfort in overcompensation.”
Individuals aren’t the only ones stepping into the shadows. Kupec has been withdrawing herself and her nonprofit from the internet as much as possible. She says GRACE used to host monthly calls, where as many as 100 people would join to hear from experts on issues facing the trans community. But now, they no longer have public meetings, and internal communications have moved to Signal, an encrypted messaging app.
“We have backed off of doing those things because of the fear of how this could be leveraged against us,” Kupec told Uncloseted Media. “It’s had a chilling effect on our ability to exercise our freedom of speech as individuals and as a nonprofit organization.”
Trying to Leave
Because of this fear, many trans Americans are trying to leave. A survey by the Movement Advancement Project found that 43% of trans Americans had considered moving to a different state since the 2024 election, with 9% having already moved. And the Williams Institute found that 45% of trans people wanted to move out of the country.
Kupec has watched noteworthy friends disperse across the globe: Rachel See, the former chair for National Center for Transgender Equality, moved to Portugal; and author and advocate Brynn Tannehill moved to Canada.
“That’s part of what [the administration’s] desired outcome is, to get people to self-deport,” Kupec says.
For many, relocating isn’t easy: For 64% of trans people who want to move out of state, cost of living was cited as a barrier. PJ has been trying to move for years. But within the U.S., relatively LGBTQ-friendly states like California and Massachusetts have much higher costs of living, making moving there financially challenging.
Moving internationally is no small feat either—every country has its own laws to navigate around immigration.
PJ says he kept running into barriers while trying to leave. The Netherlands initially seemed promising, but he discovered that the path to residency required him to start a business, which he couldn’t afford to do. Other countries fell through because he didn’t have the money to cover application fees. The closest he got to making it out was when a friend on the east coast of Canada offered to let him stay with them for a while. But it fell through when the friend’s septic tank collapsed, ruining the house and forcing PJ back to the U.S.
“It seems like every plan that you make to try to get out of here, it just gets squashed,” he says.
Those barriers have gotten scarier for PJ as the clock may be ticking for him to be able to leave. In November, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to enforce a ban on passports with gender markers that do not align with an individual’s birth certificate, with the Department of State’s website suggesting that passports which have already been updated may be invalidated.
Given all of these threats, PJ believes that trans Americans should be able to seek asylum in other countries. Applications for asylum by trans Americans have been rejected in countries including the Netherlands and Canada, and most European countries don’t view the U.S. as dangerous enough to grant refugee status despite many having issued travel advisories for trans residents visiting the country.
“We can’t really claim asylum right now so there’s not really many other options but sink or swim,” PJ says.
There have been some efforts to push for asylum status for trans Americans. Politicians, advocates and lawyers in Canada and Norway have called for their respective governments to accept trans Americans as refugees. And in July, a Canadian judge blocked the deportation of a non-binary American who overstayed their visa, with one of the factors considered in the decision being “current conditions for LGBTQ, non-binary and transgender persons” in the U.S.
Finding Hope and Respite
In the face of all this, finding a support network can be crucial to survival. While community has been especially hard to find in the South, Jones says that he’s been able to connect with other transmasc people via reddit communities like r/TMPOC (Trans Masculine People of Color) or r/testosteronekickoff.
Kupec and Brennan find solace through their 12-year relationship. Brennan says, “I love her more now … than I did when I first fell mad smack in love with her.”
“Having love where there’s respect and kindness and joy and excitement and it goes both ways, that is really unique, not a lot of people have that,” she says. “But when you do have it, it’s like, ‘I wanna preserve this and protect this with every ounce of my energy and soul because it’s the center of my life,’ and I know that she feels that way too.”
As Brennan recovers from her heart attack, she’s been watching less news and joined a book club to connect with other people. Kupec, a Catholic, has been putting her faith in God to get through.
“I know who I am, I know my maker knows who I am, and I have strong faith that by doing the right thing, at the end of the day, that’s what’s going to win out.”
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I came upon your article on Substack. just heartbreaking. I greatly respect the transgender community and feels like they are living in Naz1 Germany. breaks my heart. we should have respect and love for all