After decades of political inaction after mass shootings, the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting appears to finally have spurred conservatives into action. That’s because this horrific slaying was the grotesque gift the right had been waiting for: The shooter – whose diary entries show a troubled young person immersed in extremist, racist online culture – happened to also be trans.
The Department of Justice is now considering options to ban trans people from owning guns, with senior department officials reportedly dedicating numerous meetings to determining precisely how to strip constitutional rights from an entire category of Americans.
The effort is as cynical as it is transparent: in response to one incident of mass violence linked to a trans perpetrator, the government will further vilify trans people as an a priori public threat, while finding new ways to exclude trans people from the class of rights-bearing individuals.
Anti-trans zealots have for some time attempted to conjure a link between violent crime and trans people. These efforts, however, tend to fizzle because mass shootings in the U.S. are overwhelmingly a cis problem. Across 5,700 mass shootings in the U.S. since 2013, only five shooters have been trans. The vast majority shootings are carried out by cis men; the vast majority of politically motivated attacks are carried out by far-right extremists. Yet the Trump administration is scaling back law enforcement efforts focused on the very real problem of white supremacist extremism to pour resources into kidnapping immigrants – as well as apparently hollowing out of Constitutional protections for trans people.
One need not be a fan of the U.S.’s twisted devotion to guns to appreciate the danger of an anti-trans gun ban and its stakes for trans people’s standing in this country. Like Trump’s ban on trans people serving in the military, any efforts to ban trans people from gun ownership will rely on a dangerous logic with stakes for all trans and gender nonconforming people, gun owners or not.
The military ban rests on the sick premise that there is something inherently untrustworthy or dishonest about being trans that “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” Meanwhile, discussions around a gun ownership ban, according to reports, frame trans identity as a mental illness. (It shouldn’t need repeating, but being trans is not a mental illness; suffering from gender dysphoria without access to gender affirming care, however, can be debilitating if not deadly.)
Justice Department officials told reporters that discussions were only in “early stages,” and any ban proposal would no doubt face legal pushback. The discussions alone serve a purpose, however, in signalling the administration’s commitment to demonizing trans people, and promoting the connection in the public imaginary between trans people and violence.
One need not be a fan of the U.S.’s twisted devotion to guns to appreciate the danger of an anti-trans gun ban.
According to Alejandra Caraballo, a trans rights activist and clinical instructor at Harvard Law School, in order to skirt the Second Amendment, the government would have to declare that “anyone with gender dysphoria has a ‘mental illness’ that makes them a ‘danger to [themselves] or to others.’”
“Such a sweeping determination would not only have repercussions for gun ownership but also employment, benefits, access to bank accounts, professional licenses etc,” Caraballo noted on Bluesky. “Determinations of mental incompetence can lead to the loss of professional licenses such as law, teaching, and medical licenses.”
Caraballo added that such a designation “would be a means of effectively purging trans people from society writ large and starting the process of mass institutionalization.”
Indeed, if there is any group in the US for whom the right to armed self-defense should be protected, it is trans people — particularly trans women of color. Trans people make up around two percent of the US population but are at least four times more likely to face violent victimization than cis people; trans people are also far more likely to be harassed by law enforcement.
Heavily armed far-right militias have also for years made a habit of turning up to LBGTQ+ events, including family-friendly brunches and library readings, to harass gender nonconforming people. Under Trump’s eliminationist assault on trans lives, anti-trans vigilantism is de facto state-sanctioned. At times, it is only the presence of armed antifascist groups at these events that has kept armed fascists at bay.
Most every exception to the otherwise unassailable Second Amendment has been dedicated to further disempowering communities already made vulnerable to premature death by state and vigilante violence. While Ronald Reagan was governor, California passed the 1967 Mulford Act to prohibit the open carrying of loaded firearms in public as a direct response to the Black Panther Party’s patrols against police brutality.
“The American people in general and the Black people in particular,” BPP co-founder Bobby Seale said at the time, must “take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the Black people disarmed and powerless.”
Fighting for trans people’s Second Amendment rights today has a different valence, least of all because tactics around armed self-defense are not remotely widespread in the urgent struggle for trans rights. Beyond a small number of queer and leftist anti-fascist militant collectives and actions, like Bash Back! in the late 2000s and a number of leftist gun clubs, guns don’t play a significant role in the defensive arsenal. That’s for understandable reasons — many on the left want no part in the scourge that is America’s relationship to guns, and even those who do support armed self-defense in principle recognize that the left is radically out armed by far-right forces (including in the government and law enforcement).
The government’s logic here is the same as racist gun control efforts: an assertion of whom the country and its protections are for. The Trump administration wants trans people excluded from the right to gun ownership insofar as that right stands for membership in the American body politic. They want to control who gets to be a full self, worthy of self-defense, and who does not.
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