In May, Trump’s ATF proposed a new rule that would require people fill out forms for gun ownership using their sex assigned at birth rather than the gender marked on their ID. This rule would force trans gun owners to either lie on their forms, a potential felony, or to allow their documents to differ from each other, opening them up to potential tracking by the US government.
The proposed rule, which was open for comment until August 4th, was initially met with intense backlash from trans gun owners and their supporters. However, on July 21st, the backlash was suddenly drowned out by a sea of apparent bots posting variations of nearly identical comments.
This proposal isn’t the first time the Trump regime has looked into restricting gun ownership for trans people. Eleven months ago the DoJ began investigating options for banning trans people from owning firearms in the wake of a mass shooting in Minneapolis.
Even without these rule changes, gun ownership for trans people occupies a precarious position. Last September, a trans woman pulled a gun on three men who had surrounded and assaulted her. Despite being a legal gun owner and Wyoming being a “stand your ground” state, she was charged with aggravated assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent, while the men who assaulted her faced no consequences.
With all of these infringements on trans peoples’ second amendment rights, there runs an undercurrent of anti-trans rhetoric that has shifted more and more to paint trans people as inherently violent and ideological extremists as a way of justifying the restricting of rights for trans people.
This rhetoric has been amplified by some mainstream media outlets. For example, in the New York Times article about the incident in Wyoming above. While on its face sympathetic to trans people, it largely handwaves the current real fears of violence for trans people, and invokes the twenty year old murder of Matthew Shephard as a reason LGBTQ people fear violence fear, without making any reference to any of the many more recent incidents of violence towards trans women specifically.
Conversely, the piece invokes the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting and Charlie Kirk assassination as reasons tensions may have been high around a trans woman carrying a gun, implying guilt by association for all trans women. The piece also repeatedly calls attention to the likely left wing beliefs of the woman by describing the BLM and pride flags at her workplace.
A trans woman alone confronting a group of men has as much or more reason to fear as a cisgender woman, with statistics showing that trans women are nearly four times as likely to be victims of violent crime. Despite this evidence that trans people have as much need for self defense than anyone, like other stigmatized minorities they have less reason to trust the Second Amendment will protect them in the way it protects other Americans.
Valorie Van-Dieman (they/she) is an Associate Editor at Assigned Media. @valorievandieman.bsky.social
