Two organizations largely responsible for Project 2025, the well-known conservative anti-LGBTQ+ Heritage Foundation and.a spin-off group known as The Oversight Project are calling on Transgender advocates and their allies to be designated as terrorists.
The initial effort was announced shortly after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and refers to Trans advocates and allies as TIVE (Transgender Ideology Inspired Violent Extremism).
The LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD offered some exacting insight into the misinformation campaign in their Guide to Anti-LGBTQ Online Hate and Disinformation.
“Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism” (TIVE) is a common anti-trans trope used by right-wing political figures and media to fearmonger and fuel false narratives about transgender people. As inflammatory rhetoric and hate tropes targeting transgender people are on the rise, it’s critical to recognize that such terms are being deliberately deployed to fearmonger and dehumanize.
This fearmongering trope was manufactured by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project as part of a specious campaign suggesting the FBI should categorize trans people as “domestic terrorists” or “nihilistic violent extremists.” Directly drawing on related false tropes (“trans terrorism” and “gender ideology”), this malicious narrative is entirely unfounded.
Research consistently shows that transgender people are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Perpetuating the false and inflammatory idea that transgender people are violent extremists is part of a broader right-wing strategy enlisting such narratives as a pretense for crackdowns, retracting rights, and creating an atmosphere of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ animus.
On the website outrightinternational.org, writer Alberto de Belaunde offered the following insight:
“The campaign claims that ‘TIVE’ has played a role in the majority of mass shootings at schools, in flagrant disregard for statistics, [which] demonstrate that the common thread underlying most school shootings and other mass shootings is that they are committed by cisgender men. By framing trans advocacy as a potential source of domestic terrorism, the proposal risks turning constitutionally protected speech into grounds for surveillance and criminalization.”
If Heritage and Oversight are successful with their false campaign to convince the FBI and Trump supporters that ‘TIVE’ is an actual organized national group of violent transgender terrorists, the anti-Trans and non-binary actions in the United States will continue to escalate.
