The GOP's campaign against trans rights is rooted in eliminationism

This story is part of a series on the origins and implications of the conservative campaign against transgender rights.

On July 1, as a new law restricting the rights of transgender people took effect in Kansas, nearly a thousand people showed up in 16 cities across the state in protest. 

Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the bill in April, but the Republican-controlled Legislature forced S.B. 180 through in a supermajority vote. The law, the Kansas Women’s Bill of Rights, defines “sex” as one’s sex assigned at birth and bans transgender people from using the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity.

The Kansas law mirrors efforts by Republicans across the country who say anti-trans policies such as banning gender-affirming care for minors, restricting sex education in schools, and preventing trans women and girls from playing on women’s school sports teams and using women’s bathrooms are about protecting women and children from abuse.

But a closer look at the rhetoric used by vocal anti-trans media figures and activists and the policies of Republican politicians shows that many on the right have a more sinister goal: the elimination of transgender people from public life.

Experts told the American Independent Foundation that the right’s campaign against transgender rights is motivated by a moral panic similar to past crusades against LGBTQ people, such as the Lavender Scare of the mid-20th century, the “Save Our Children” campaign during the 1970s, and the opposition to same-sex marriage throughout the 2000s.

“That’s the thing to remember — this is just kind of the starting block for everything,” Taryn Jones, a lobbyist for Equality Kansas, which helped organize the protests in Kansas, told The 19th. “They came after gay marriage and they lost, and now they’re coming after the trans community because they feel like that’s an easy target. But I think we shouldn’t mistake that for them dropping everything else.”

The goal of the GOP’s legislative campaign against trans rights, LGBTQ advocates say, is to drive transgender people out of public life and to enforce a restrictive, patriarchal vision of the family on a changing America that many conservatives say has strayed into immorality and decadence.

That perspective, sometimes called “eliminationism,” burst into the broader public sphere earlier this year when Michael Knowles, a talk show host for the conservative media outlet the Daily Wire, declared that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” at the ​​Conservative Political Action Conference.

Criticism erupted after clips from Knowles’ speech went viral, including claims that he was calling for the extermination of trans people. Knowles rejected the criticism, accusing liberals of taking his words out of context. All he had done, Knowles said on his show the next day, was suggest that society “ought not to indulge the transgender false anthropology.”

Other anti-trans figures jumped to his defense, backing Knowles’ call for the elimination of “transgenderism.”

“I too believe gender ideology should be eradicated from public life,” Jay Richards, a conservative theologian and fellow at the Heritage Foundation wrote on Twitter. “Indeed, I look forward to seeing this ideology suffer the same scorn and opprobrium as does the racist eugenics of the last century.”

In an interview with the American Independent Foundation, Lillian Faderman, a professor emerita at California State University, Fresno, and a leading historian of the LGBTQ movement, stressed the religious element in the opposition to LGBTQ rights.

“It’s a fundamentalist reading of the Bible,” Faderman said. “It’s a literal reading of the Bible. It goes back to Leviticus, as fundamentalists have kept pointing out, and it’s been impossible to separate their notion of equality from, in the case of gay people or transgender people, sin.”

Faderman referred to the “Save Our Children” campaign launched by Florida singer Anita Bryant in the late 1970s. Like those pushing today’s anti-LGBTQ efforts, Bryant and her conservative allies claimed that LGBTQ teachers in schools endangered children. Just as today’s anti-LGBTQ figures accuse their opponents of grooming children, Bryant’s campaign alleged that new anti-discrimination laws, which prevented schools from firing gay teachers because of their sexual orientation, opened the door to LGBTQ “recruitment” in schools. 

“It’s parents’ fear of losing control, of their children not being raised in their own image, of these external forces brainwashing their kids,” Faderman added. “And that was certainly the case with Anita Bryant, and it’s been the case today, beginning in Florida in the United States.” 

Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire commentator and conservative activist, states his eliminationist views plainly. “Is it actually possible for a person to be transgender?” he asked on his show last year. “Transgender, trans – it means beyond gender. You’re beyond it or something. You’re something past it, beyond it. Is it possible to be that? The answer is no. No one is beyond it because we’re human beings and there are two options, male and female, and nobody exists beyond that.”

Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who has written extensively on transgender history, told the American Independent Foundation that the arguments conservatives make are not supported by the historical record.

Far from a fabricated modern identity, Gill-Peterson said, trans people have existed throughout history.

“Even just trans and even just gender, those are very Euro-American concepts for something, trans usually meaning crossing a boundary of a gender binary or movement away from what was assigned at birth,” she said. “It’s a very particular cultural mode. It’s a very ethnocentric definition. So of course, there are variations of human cultures everywhere around the world, different gender systems.” 

“There are a fascinating, long string of trans characters in U.S. history,” she added.

Gill-Peterson said contemporary understandings of transness were largely defined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the emergence of medical interventions and the broader visibility of trans people:

This sort of swooping in of medical authority, claiming to be the arbiter of who is and who is not trans, which privately all these clinicians admit they have no way of knowing, but publicly claim that the purpose of what we call the ‘gatekeeping model’ of trans health care established in the mid-century, which is precisely designed to, by giving the clinician the sort of petty little tyranny of the clinic to determine who and who isn’t trans, thereby gets to determine who gets to transition and who does not.

“It was deeply unethically researched, deeply unethically practiced, and didn’t benefit trans people,” she added.

The consequences of the medical model are still present today, Gill-Peterson argued.

“Seventy years of medical gatekeepers dominating the conversation around trans people, hoarding all of the authority around trans people, has had a deep radiating effect outward, in the fact that it’s very easy to delegitimize the expertise and speech of trans people, because in fact that has been done now for so many decades,” she noted.

Abigail Shrier, a conservative journalist who promoted the substanceless social contagion theory that increased visibility is pressuring young people to identify as transgender, says she supports allowing trans adults to access gender-affirming care. However, in a 2021 talk at Hillsdale College, a Christian college in Michigan, Shrier accused LGBTQ advocates of attempting to create a new transgender “victim class.”

“You’ll often see gender-confused people among the ranks of Antifa or at Black Lives Matter rallies. Having turned against their families of origin, they are easy prey for those who recruit revolutionaries,” said Shrier, who did not return multiple requests for comment. “Just as the point of critical race theory is to turn the American people against one another, so the point of gender ideology is to stop the formation of stable families — the building blocks of American life.”

Anti-trans policies are often justified in terms similar to Shrier’s, as a fight against so-called “gender ideology” — a term used by authoritarians around the world.

“‘Gender ideology’ [is] not a phrase that has meaning for a lot of people,” ACLU communications strategist Gillian Branstetter told the American Independent Foundation. “Because they aren’t quite familiar with how it’s been used. It very much can be weaponized against anything that you suspect your audience doesn’t like. And that could be queer people, that could be trans people, that could be feminists, that could be abortion. And it has the effect of turning entire groups of people into eidolons of an ideology. So therefore, you can disguise a war on people as a war on this ideology,” 

As a consequence of this rhetoric, the legislative environment faced by LGBTQ people is dire, Branstetter said. “We’ve seen a tidal wave of bills that has more than doubled every year since 2020. The bills have become more extreme, not just in their number, but in their scope and the broad array of rights that they’re targeting.” 

Branstetter pointed to Florida’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, which makes providing such care a risk factor in evaluating child custody cases.

“This is deeply authoritarian, greatly reshaping lives for thousands, if not millions, of people around the country,” Branstetter said. “It’s in protection of a narrow vision of the family.”

In June, a federal judge prevented the Florida law from taking effect after the ACLU, along with affected parents and advocacy groups, filed suit. U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle eviscerated the state in his opinion, writing, “Nothing could have motivated this remarkable intrusion into parental prerogatives other than opposition to transgender status itself.”

“Gender identity is real. The record makes this clear,” Hinkle wrote. 

Part of the reason for the focus on trans people, Branstetter argued, is that opposition to other rights, namely abortion and same-sex marriage, is politically toxic. She said that attacking transgender people is a way of retaining conservative voters in the face of widespread opposition to restrictions on abortion and strong support for marriage equality.

Despite the sheer volume of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, Branstetter is skeptical of the political efficacy of anti-trans politics.

“Transphobia is more popular than I’d like it to be,” she said. “I’m a trans woman who lives in the world, I’m aware of it — we’ve met! But I think there’s a big difference between what people will tell a pollster in an up-down vote and what actually moves their vote on Election Day.”

In Kansas, pro-LGBTQ groups will continue to fight the Republican Legislature’s attempts to restrict transgender peoples’ civil rights.

The newest front is the ability of trans residents to obtain legal changes to their sex on government documents, a right guaranteed to Kansans after a 2019 ruling in a federal court.

According to the state’s Republican attorney general, Kris Kobach, S.B. 180 requires that the state annul all previously granted legal sex changes. Gov. Kelly rejected Kobach’s interpretation.

Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, an attorney with the LGBTQ law firm Lambda Legal, which was involved in the lawsuit, said in a press release that Kobach’s move “represents yet another unnecessary and cruel move to target the transgender community with animus and discrimination for political gain. We will vigorously oppose this gimmick by Attorney General Kobach. Let us be clear, Lambda Legal will not allow the attorney general to nullify a binding, years-old federal judgment.”

In a statement issued days before the law took effect, the ACLU of Kansas said it was prepared to oppose Kobach’s efforts.

“Even as attorney general, Mr. Kobach’s opinion is just that — his opinion,” said Micah W. Kubic, the group’s executive director. “As he has done so many times in the past, Mr. Kobach was more than willing to rush in and impose his own stamp of extremism in an attempt to allow the state to deny Kansans their basic constitutional rights.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.