Experts are now warning the United States is in the early stages of committing genocide against transgender Americans.
“I think what they’re doing here is they’re trying to destroy a gender group,” said Dr. Gregory Stanton, founder of Genocide Watch. “I do think it’s genocidal. I think that the objective here is literally, physically to destroy this group.”
WHAT’S GOING ON: Genocide scholars are sounding the alarm as the Trump administration and Republican state legislatures systematically strip rights from transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans.
Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, president of the Lemkin Institute, said she believes the U.S. is now in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process.”
Dr. Henry Theriault, who served as IAGS president from 2017 to 2021, put it bluntly: “It’s not so much ‘will genocide happen?’ as ‘we got to stop it from happening.'”
THE DETAILS: The Trump administration has issued executive orders eroding nondiscrimination protections and healthcare access. The NIH defunded LGBTQIA+-related research. More than half of all states now restrict youth access to gender-affirming care. Twenty states regulate transgender bathroom use.
Stanton noted that the Nazis also held a binary view of gender and killed many LGBTQIA+ individuals. He called the current “hardening of the categories” in America “totalitarian” and driven by “Nazi ideology.”
Researcher Haley Brown pointed out that the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory—claiming leftists and LGBTQIA+ people are destroying western civilization—was borrowed directly from Nazi antisemitic claims of “Cultural Bolshevism.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Transgender Americans make up roughly one percent of the U.S. population—roughly the same proportion as Jews in 1933 Germany. Violence against them has been rising for years, with murders doubling between 2017 and 2021.
Theriault warned we might see policies aimed at making life “intolerable” for transgender Americans to live authentically, driving up suicide rates. “There could be all sorts of things that we would do that are not like what’s happened in the past, but would still be destructive of trans people as a group.”
Von Joeden-Forgey noted that historically, states “use certain communities as testing grounds” to desensitize populations to violence. “The genocidal process is really about destroying identities, destroying groups through all sorts of means,” she said, explaining that even genocides resulting in mass deaths “started out with other techniques that are less violent—at the beginning.”
BOTTOM LINE: “You don’t have a democracy that’s committing genocide against one group,” von Joeden-Forgey warned. “That is not a democracy anymore, once genocide is in the mix. The state in question will commit other mass atrocities.”