“Counterterrorism” now officially means targeting trans people

On Wednesday, the White House released a new “United States Counterterrorism Strategy,” the first such directive since a 2021 Biden-era memo emphasizing the need to combat white supremacist violence, which has now been scrubbed from the White House website.

Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

In a bizarre but familiar turn, the document also blames transgender people for the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

Gorka told reporters at a press conference Wednesday that the administration would “crush” any threat, “whether it is the cartels, the jihadists or violent left-wing extremists like antifa—and like the transgender killers, the nonbinary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend, Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head on.”

In 2023, Trump claimed falsely that there had been an “incredible rise” in the number of transgender shooters, claims that now resurface whenever shootings occur. 

But the document reads less like a plan than a list of targets. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the House Committee on Homeland Security’s ranking Democrat, noted in a press release that the document left out the far right—the group most likely to commit violent acts against civilians on US soil—“despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades.”

Instead, Thompson said, the White House had produced “a document full of fake administration counterterrorism ‘achievements,’ including mass deportations and more than 40 unauthorized and deadly military strikes on vessels in the Western Hemisphere. There are zero strategic objectives, lines of effort, or agency assignments.”

Counterterrorism itself is a politicized term that came into common use following the September 11 attacks and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It formed part of the language of the policing apparatus that targeted Muslim and Arab Americans and legitimized surveillance of those communities as “terrorist threats.” That same language is now being applied to transgender people. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called Kirk’s death a “domestic 9/11.” The Heritage Foundation, too, has done its best to connect being transgender with the idea of terrorism, campaigning last year for the FBI to designate trans advocacy as violent extremism. 

“We will…identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally,” the document says.