The Anti-trans Witch Hunt

While much of this work takes place in the home, a significant portion of it is subsidized by the state. Elderly housing, public schools, and public hospitals are examples, but these sites of social reproduction are also sites of contestation. The employer class maintains a vested interest in how social reproduction is managed, favoring a weakened welfare state that increasingly offloads the work of social reproduction onto the family, thus increasing profitability while also creating a more compliant workforce.

Over forty years of neoliberal policies have led to increased precarity for working people and a decline in some of the most vital social institutions in the US. Education is perhaps the most dramatic site where this has happened. The gutting of the public sector in the aftermath of the 2008 recession placed enormous pressure on public schools and universities, which are key institutions of social reproduction.

Disciplining Public Education

Schools have traditionally been relied upon to train or retrain the workforce, but this function has become increasingly important in a labor market that is becoming more stratified, with a divide between low wage service sector jobs and specialized technical positions.¹⁴Eduardo Porter, “Tech Is Splitting the US Work Force in Two,” New York Times, February 4, 2019. In the post-recession political climate, efforts to restore profitability led to cuts in social spending and attacks on public sector unions, resulting in a loss of autonomy and curricular control for teachers. The 2011 Wisconsin state anti-union law, Act–10, which prohibited public sector bargaining, would become a forerunner to the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, delivering a significant setback to unionized sectors.

Despite these challenges, the education sector has seen a resurgence in worker activism. A wave of illegal strikes in 2018 mobilized tens of thousands of teachers to the picket lines across traditionally conservative states such as West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma, revitalizing the labor movement.¹⁵Eric Blanc, Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (New York: Verso Books, 2019). This renewed combativeness, in response to post-recession austerity measures, also set the stage for educators’ involvement throughout the Black Lives Matter movement and for advocating protections and community investments during the Covid–19 shutdowns.

Additionally, this worker confidence foreshadowed the mass resignations of teachers during and immediately after the Covid–19 pandemic. The resulting teacher shortage granted educators a relative, though temporary, increase in bargaining power.¹⁶Hilary Wething, “Today’s Teacher Shortage is Just the Tip of the Iceberg: Part I,” Economic Policy Institute, October 9, 2024. Consequently, education has become a significant area of concern for the ruling class, which is intent on reducing state subsidies for public goods.

For right-wing political leaders and their wealthy foundation backers, several anti-trans appeals converge at this site and are closely linked with a desire to discipline teachers’ unions and curtail student activism. Trans students are simultaneously portrayed as victims of “woke” educators pushing gender ideology in classrooms and as villains who undermine educational access for cis women and girls by competing in scholastic sports and entering protected spaces.

As a result, the Trump administration has promised to withhold federal funding from public schools that allow transgender athletes to access sex segregated facilities, such as bathrooms and sports. His administration has likewise targeted educators who are accused of “imprinting anti-American…and false ideologies on our nation’s children” and “steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation without parental consent or involvement,” as stated in a recent executive order.¹⁷“Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling,” The White House, January 29, 2025,gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/.

This order and Trump’s general policies aim to sow distrust and division between educators and their queer students, using the threat of further funding cuts to reinforce this divide. Similarly, anti-trans appeals resonate with a segment of working-class families who feel abandoned by public education institutions.

Exploiting the Crises of Public Education

The closure of public schools throughout the 2010s, often managed by Democratic mayors in urban areas, along with the mass resignations of K–12 educators during and after the Covid–19 lockdowns, and the rising costs of tuition at public colleges and universities, highlight the decline of these essential public services. In response, the Right argues that US education is failing not due to insufficient funding or an excessive focus on testing, but because “radical leftist” teachers are allegedly encouraging students to “hate America” and question gender.¹⁸“US Department of Education Issues Statement on the Nation’s Report Card,” US Department of Education (Press Release), January 29, 2025, tinyurl.com/yy335d3y.

The success of these appeals is partly tied to a general distrust of authority and a reaction to the ineffectiveness of liberal leadership inside state institutions. In the last twenty-five years, leaders from both the Democratic and Republican parties have instituted public austerity measures aimed at restructuring public education. However, Democrats have become associated with some of the most damaging aspects of the reform movement.

President Obama’s Race to the Top and Common Core Standards are examples of this. Resistance from parents, educators, and their unions has helped to push back against many of these unpopular policies, which have been criticized for their lack of clarity, overreliance on standardized testing, and perceived federal overreach. These factors have contributed to a growing distrust of public education officials, creating space for anti-trans appeals to gain traction.

The increasing resonance of these appeals can also be traced to the frustration many parents experienced during the Covid–19 school closures. As schools transitioned to remote learning, families faced numerous challenges, including the need to manage increased workloads while balancing caregiving responsibilities. For working parents, especially those in essential roles, the closures created significant childcare crises.

Educators, who were able to work from home, were often perceived as privileged and disconnected from the challenges that working families faced. Inconsistent policies regarding school reopenings and conflicting information about safety protocols and social distancing created conflict between educators and families. This situation led to heightened tensions between parents, school board members, and policymakers, raising concerns about parental rights and the role of schools during social and political crises.

This general sense of dissatisfaction has fueled distrust among some conservative leaning parents, which may be misdirected toward their children’s teachers. Instead of collaborating on issues such as increased mental health services and local democratic control over curricula, parents and teachers may find themselves in conflict, opening further space for the mobilization of anti-trans appeals.

The War on Colleges and Universities

Higher education is similarly a key site of anti-trans appeals. From a right-wing perspective, colleges and universities are institutions vital to sustaining US economic and imperial dominance, yet they are also viewed as sites of waste, corrupted by Marxist sympathizers and critical race theorists. In this narrative, trans college and university students are depicted as both confused adolescents who are misled into pursuing worthless area studies degrees and also violent activists aiming to fracture American unity and undermine a narrow version of women’s rights.

The Trump administration has positioned itself to capitalize on these perceived threats to reshape higher education. Its approach includes efforts to reduce federal funding while increasing control over what and how students are taught. Historically, under neoliberalism, universities have been structured to produce an educated workforce that benefits capital.

However, for a segment of the employer class, the rise of artificial intelligence replaces knowledge work, which, at least ideologically, if not practically, alters its workforce needs.¹⁹Holly Lewis, “Toward AI Realism: Opening Notes on Machine Learning and Our Collective Future,” Spectre (online), June 7, 2024. This shift implies that AI can replace some degree of knowledge work, thus reducing the need for investments in developing employees’ critical thinking, computing, and writing skills.

Simultaneously, the Right’s opposition to multicultural and culturally relevant education may also be influenced by this perceived shift in workplace needs. Unlike human workers, AI does not possess a socially located identity, which allows the Right to downplay the importance of cultural sensitivity and inclusivity training both in universities and workplaces.

Trump’s recent directives to freeze the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants will significantly impact the size and direction of higher education institutions, particularly public universities that generally lack substantial endowments and rely on both state and federal grants to supplement tuition dollars. Trump’s NIH and NSF directives not only forbid the appearance of trans subjects in scientific research but also ban the use of terms such as “race,” “women,” “disability,” “equality,” “diversity,” “historically,” and “systemic” from NIH- or NSF-funded research revealing that the Right’s all-out war on “woke” will spare no one.²⁰Amita Sharma, “Federal List of Forbidden Words May Jeopardize Research at UCSD.” KPBS, February 7, 2025.

Ultimately, the combined policies and executive orders will radically reshape higher education, aligning it with the administration’s authoritarian and imperial ambitions. The institutional rewriting of US history, along with federal surveillance over scientific inquiry, provide a pretext for clamping down on student activism and civil liberties, which have already been undermined by the state’s aggressive response to the Palestine solidarity and Black Lives Matter movements.

Further, the Trump administration’s decision to ban gender-affirming care for individuals under the age of twenty effectively extends the definition of childhood. This limits the protections and autonomy of young adults and sets a precedent for further restrictions on gender-affirming care for adults. Additionally, this move erodes civic personhood and could lead to more attacks on civil liberties and free speech on campuses.

Policing Healthcare

Like education, healthcare is also a site of social reproduction that has been destabilized, defunded, and deregulated through neoliberal reform. Consequently, healthcare also serves as a location where anti-trans appeals find support. From the perspective of the political right, trans subjects are viewed as victims exploited by big pharmaceutical companies and the medical industrial complex on the one hand, and as privileged elites with access to specialized healthcare on the other.

These concerns have been leveraged by Trump, who has tapped into distrust of the insurance industry and dissatisfaction with healthcare institutions to promote anti-trans politics. His repeated claims that hormone replacement therapies are experimental treatments leading to chemical castration resonate with a segment of working people who may have experienced medical neglect or harm or who struggle with inadequate healthcare.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2024, approximately 8.2 percent—or about 27.1 million people—were uninsured.²¹“National Uninsured Rate at 8.2 Percent in the First Quarter of 2024,” Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (HP-2024-17), August 2024, tinyurl.com/4y5azwsx. For those with insurance, rising deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses have led many to forgo necessary care. A 2022 study by the Commonwealth Fund found that “forty-six percent of respondents skipped or delayed care due to cost, and forty-two percent reported problems paying medical bills or were in medical debt.”²²Sara R. Collins, Lauren A. Haynes, Relebohile Masitha, “The State of US Health Insurance in 2022,” The Commonwealth Fund, September 29, 2022.

In the post-pandemic landscape, these figures are even more alarming. As of 2023, 8 percent of US residents remain uninsured, and the number of uninsured children increased from 3.8 million in 2022 to 4.0 million in 2023.²³Jennifer Tolbert et al., “Key Facts about the Uninsured Population,” KFF, December 18, 2024. The perception that a small group of “woke coastal elites” has access to specialized, gender affirming healthcare while 15 million Americans struggle with medical debt, is central to the Right’s anti-establishment narrative.²⁴“CFPB Finds 15 Million Americans Have Medical Bills on Their Credit Reports,” Consumer Financial Protection Agency, April 29, 2024,com/muszy655. That LGBTQ people, trans people in particular, are more likely to be uninsured and carry medical debt is a fact eclipsed by the Right’s framing.²⁵Michael Matson, “Curbing Medical Debt to Ensure Health and Economic Justice for LGPTQ+ People,” Community Catalyst, June 2022. Even among trans individuals with insurance, coverage for transition-related procedures is often inconsistent and, until recently, frequently not covered at all.

This disparity has historically created economic stratification within the transgender community. Wealthy, often white, transgender individuals can afford to finance transition-related surgeries, while low income trans people face significant financial barriers to obtaining even basic gender-affirming care. Trans scholars and activists, including Toby Beauchamp, Dean Spade, and travesti poet Sussy Shock, have long criticized the relationship between the medicalization of trans identities and the establishment of neoliberal subjectivity.²⁶Toby Beauchamp, Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Liz Rose, “Trans Poetics in Translation: Desire and Feminist Capacity in the Work of Susy Shock,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 10, no. 1 (2023): 59–70.

Despite this, the right-wing narrative portrays all trans individuals as privileged beneficiaries of Cadillac healthcare. From the Right’s perspective, these undeserving beneficiaries are misusing valuable healthcare resources for what is perceived as a fabricated medical need. This narrative both appeals to those who have been underserved by the US health system but also enables right-wing leaders to justify further disinvestment in that system. Uncoincidentally, Republicans are now advocating for legislation that will reduce $880 billion in federal funding from the Medicare program, which, if passed, will likely result in a significant increase in the number of uninsured individuals.

Among those on the Right, dissatisfaction with the health insurance industry is accompanied by an increasing distrust of public health officials. Anti-trans activists believe that medical officials are harming children by enabling the “transgender industrial complex” to profit from a growing “transgender contagion.”²⁷Pedro L. Gonzalez, “Gender Ideology Is a Boon to Big Pharma and Threat to Parental Rights,” New York Post, August 20, 2021. To prevent the spread of this social contagion, trans children must be restricted from any form of gender-affirming care, and trans adults must be kept from public view.

Exploiting the Pandemic

While distrust of the medical establishment has a long history, some of which is rooted in legitimate factual concerns, this mistrust grew significantly during the Covid–19 pandemic when the Right effectively addressed the economic grievances of workers and small business owners who struggled to adapt to remote work and other Covid-era restrictions. The current of anti-trans politics within many of the protests against masks, vaccines, and lockdowns indicates a link between the rejection of pandemic health authorities and skepticism toward trans medical experts.²⁸Brody Levesque, “Covid–19 Protests in Canadian Capital Turn Violent and Anti-LGBTQ,” Washington Blade, February 8, 2022. In a political climate where common sense often overshadows scientific evidence, the Right’s skepticism towards former US chief medical advisor Dr. Fauci parallels its dismissal of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). While there are valid criticisms of both the Biden administration’s Covid–19 response and WPATH practices, discussing these issues becomes challenging in a political landscape narratively dominated by the Right.

Further, Covid–19 shutdowns revealed the inadequacy of an already weakened public care infrastructure, the effects of which were disproportionately experienced along gendered lines, a reality that proved fertile ground for growing anti-trans appeals. During the shutdowns, women, who traditionally bear more of the burden of social reproductive work, experienced higher levels of job loss. In the first ten months of the pandemic, women lost one million more jobs than men, with Black, Latina, and Asian women being the most affected.²⁹Diana Boesch and Shilpa Phadke, “When Women Lose All the Jobs: Essential Actions for a Gender-Equitable Recovery,” Center for American Progress, February 1, 2021.

This situation, referred to as a “she-cession,” saw many women leave the workforce to take on caregiving roles at home, filling the gaps left by insufficient support from public institutions. While cisgender women have since returned to the workplace at pre-pandemic levels, ongoing disparities in caregiving continue to undermine their employment and earnings.³⁰Beth Almeida and Isabela Salas-Betsch, “Fact Sheet: The State of Women in the Labor Market in 2023,” Center for American Progress, February 6, 2023. In this context, difficulties balancing work and caregiving can reinforce notions of biological essentialism, hardening distinctions between who is recognized as a woman and who is not.

Similarly, Trump’s success in pairing anti-trans politics with right-wing criticisms of social spending reflects voters’ economic anxieties and frustration with inflation, which under the Biden administration peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022.³¹“Consumer Prices up 9.1 Percent over the Year Ended June 2022: Largest Increase in 40 Years,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 18, 2022,com/5sc29zwk. While consumer prices have reduced some, many families still struggle to cover basic expenses—a key determinant in the outcome of the 2024 election.³²Megan Brenan, “Economy Most Important Issue to 2024 Presidential Vote,” Gallup, 9 Oct. 2024.