Experts Warn U.S. in Early Stages of Genocide Against Trans Americans

Genocide scholars say policies targeting transgender Americans match early warning signs of mass atrocity.

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

Genocide scholars are sounding the alarm over what they describe as escalating attacks targeting transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans in the United States.

Experts, including two former presidents of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), warn that the nation may already be in the early stages of committing genocide.

“I am concerned about genocide against trans people in the United States in the near future,” said Dr. Henry Theriault, who served as IAGS president from 2017 to 2021.

Under international law, genocide refers to acts aimed at destroying, in whole or in part, religious, national, ethnic, or racial groups. But experts Important Context spoke with argued that these legal categories may be too narrow—or too narrowly interpreted—today.

Theriault said that increasingly, attacks are aimed at groups that are socially defined rather than those explicitly covered by the UN Convention. Haley Brown, a former genocide researcher focused on attacks on transgender people, said “there’s very little scholarship on this topic at all.”

Dr. Gregory Stanton, a former IAGS president who serves now as founder and president of the group Genocide Watch, said the attacks on transgender and nonbinary people in the U.S. represent a “genocidal” attempt “to destroy a gender group.”

Stanton noted that Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in the 1940s, also understood it to have a broader definition beyond religious, national, ethnic, and racial contexts.

“His view was that political groups, cultural groups, social groups, economic groups…should all be included in the definition of genocide,” Stanton said, adding, “I think he also would have included gender groups.”

“I think what they’re doing here is they’re trying to destroy a gender group,” he added. “And so I do think it’s genocidal. I think that the objective here is literally, physically to destroy this group.”

For years, the political right has been ratcheting up eliminationist rhetoric against transgender Americans and dismissing their identities as ideology. At the 2023 CPAC, conservative commentator Michael Knowles called to “eradicate” so-called “transgenderism” from public life.

In its first year, the second Trump administration has quickly moved to marginalize gender-nonconforming Americans. The president issued a number of executive orders aimed at eroding nondiscrimination protections and access to healthcare. The NIH defunded LGBTQIA+-related research amid a larger rollback of so-called “DEI” initiatives.

Republican lawmakers have been on a similar crusade. More than half of all states now restrict youth access to gender-affirming care and transgender participation in youth sports. Twenty states now have explicit regulations on transgender bathroom use.

Transgender existence and gender-affirming care are evidence-based and supported by virtually every major medical organization in the country.

Haley Brown also told Important Context that the bathroom bills effectively give non-state actors tacit approval to commit violence.

“It’s always been about policing,” she said, explaining: “It’s this idea that I am going to create and reinforce my ideal values of society and the state, down to the very physiological characteristics and features of the humans that exist within that state.”

Theriault said he is concerned about “the kinds of legal shifts that are happening and the kind of blatant hatred being expressed by [Trump] and his followers and government leaders—and at the way they’re acting on it.”

“I think we’re already at the point for trans folks, for immigrants, where the damage is being done,” Theriault said. “So it’s not so much ‘will genocide happen?’ as ‘we got to stop it from happening.’”

Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, founder and executive director of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, said she believes the U.S. is now in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.”

She said Republicans are using trans people to generate fear—particularly surrounding children, family, and their ideal concept of masculinity—which is priming their base for genocide.

Stanton said the U.S. was undergoing “a hardening of the categories” with people being either male or female—a binary, he noted, that does not exist in nature nor within many other cultures. He called it “totalitarian” and driven by “Nazi ideology,” explaining that the Nazis also held a binary view of men and women and killed many LGBTQIA+ individuals.

Brown pointed out that the conspiracy theory of so-called “cultural Marxism”—that leftists, feminists, Marxists, and LGBTQIA+ people are trying to destroy western civilization—was borrowed directly from the Nazis and their antisemitic claims of “Cultural Bolshevism.”

“The Trump administration and its bases…have identified a set of ‘enemies’ or ‘objectionable people’” and have fomented public prejudice against them “in a way that is escalating toward violence,” Theriault said.

He cautioned that transgender Americans are more vulnerable than other groups due to their population size. Today, they make up roughly one percent of the total U.S. population—a rough equivalent to Jews in 1933 Germany.

Anti-trans incidents and violence have risen over the years, with 2021 the worst year on record for homicides. Reported gender identity hate crimes show an increase from 2020 through 2024, according to FBI data. Transgender Americans are also at an elevated risk for suicide, and a 2024 study from The Trevor Project suggests that anti-trans laws may be worsening the trend.

Von Joeden-Forgey said that the LGBTQIA+ community, “as other very small minority groups, tends to be a kind of canary in the coal mine,” noting that states throughout history “use certain communities as testing grounds” to desensitize their populations to violence.

“The genocidal process is really about destroying identities, destroying groups through all sorts of means,” she said, explaining that even those that result in mass deaths have “started out with other techniques that are less violent—at the beginning.”

Brown discussed possible coming measures that would accord with such historical patterns like rolling back “laws that prevent people from using certain legal defenses,” like the “Trans panic defense” in murder cases. “The right has always hated hate crime laws,” she said.

Theriault said the U.S. might see policies aimed at making life “intolerable” for transgender Americans to live authentically such that the suicide rate dramatically goes up. “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,” he said.

Whatever lies ahead, von Joegen-Forgey said the situation was “terrifying,” adding, “no one goes to war…on behalf of the victims of genocide.”

“You don’t have a democracy that’s committing genocide against one group,” she warned. “That is not a democracy anymore, once genocide is in the mix. The state in question will commit other mass atrocities.”

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This article is the first in a multi-part series examining genocidal patterns and historical parallels during the second Trump administration.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article said Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey was the president of the Lemkin Institute. Her title has been corrected to executive director and founder.

UPDATE 1/7/26: The paragraph on anti-trans violence has been updated and expanded for clarity.