Hours after an army helicopter and an American Airlines jet collided near Reagan National Airport last week, killing all on board both craft, social media erupted with the claim that the pilot manning the Black Hawk was a transgender service member. But it wasn't true. Jo Ellis, a transgender, Black Hawk pilot with the Virginia National Guard, took to Facebook to post proof of life and rebut the false accusation about her.
"It is insulting to the families to try to tie this to some sort of political agenda," Ellis said in the online post. "They don't deserve that. I don't deserve this."
Ellis did not respond to an interview request from NPR.
But her experience is just the latest in a pattern where Republican leaders and high-reach social media accounts scapegoat transgender people in the wake of high-profile tragedies. Similar false claims were made about perpetrators of mass shootings in Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin and Iowa. For extremism experts and some within the trans community, the accusations speak to a highly dangerous political strategy to sow division and expand authoritarian control.
The emergence of a political strategy
On Wednesday afternoon, President Trump signed the latest in a series of executive orders concerning transgender Americans, which aims to ban transgender women from participating in women's sports. In his comments before signing the order, Trump repeatedly referred to these athletes as men "posing" as women. He declared that the measure would "effectively end the attack on female athletes at public K-12 schools and virtually all U.S. colleges and universities."
Other initiatives of the current administration aim to curtail, among other things, trans people's access to bathrooms, medical care and legal documents that reflect their gender identity. In his comments before signing the order on sports participation, Trump repeated the lie that 2024 Olympics gold medal women's boxer, Imane Khelif, is a man, and asserted that transgender women "beat and batter female athletes."
"There's a ton of terrible claims saying that things like puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy is somehow causing aggression or violence in transgender and gender nonconforming people," said Sarah Moore, senior manager of news and research at GLAAD, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, "which we know to be completely contrary to the medical science behind these treatments."
Moore said that the mischaracterization of transgender people as dangerous to society also lies behind a now-predictable response to national tragedies. Incorrect claims surfaced quickly after mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas; Apalachee, Ga.; Houston, Texas; Philadelphia, Pa.; Lakewood, Texas; and Madison, Wis., asserting that the perpetrators were transgender.
Among those amplifying these incorrect narratives were Republican members of Congress. "Another trans shooter," tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia after the 2023 Philadelphia rampage, which left five people dead. In the aftermath of a mass shooting at a church in Lakewood, Texas, in 2024, Sen. Joshua Hawley of Missouri tweeted, "So the Lakewood church shooter was a transgender, pro-Palestine radical…" And in a tweet that was later deleted, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona lay the blame for the 2022 killing of 19 students and two teachers at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school on "a transsexual leftist illegal alien." In all of these cases, the claims were false.
While there have been a few instances where mass shootings were committed by transgender or nonbinary people, analyses have found these cases to be rare; most mass shootings are carried out by cisgender men.
In fact, Moore said that data collected by GLAAD show that transgender people in the U.S. are four times more likely to be the victims of crimes than the perpetrators.
Nonetheless, unfounded characterizations of transgender people as terrorists, groomers or mentally unwell have accelerated in recent years, as have state and federal policies aimed at restricting trans rights.
"What is happening here is that people are demonizing trans people in order to gain power and privilege," said Loren Cannon, a teacher of philosophy at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Cannon explored the past decade's growing anti-trans campaign for his book, The Politicization of Trans Identity: An Analysis of Backlash, Scapegoating, and Dog-Whistling From Obergefell to Bostock. Cannon, who is trans, said that it rarely matters whether anti-trans bills succeed or fail. Either way, he said, they appear to benefit the politicians who promote them.
"Where … fear of trans people and demonization of trans people has been stoked, if a politician were to simply introduce anti-transgender legislation, and it doesn't pass, they still have the 'bragging rights' to say, 'Listen, radical gender ideology is harming our nation in a variety of different ways, I'm your politician. I'm your person to fight back about that,' " Cannon said.
In 2020, 85 trans-related bills were considered across the U.S., according to data collected by the Trans Legislation Tracker, an organization that monitors measures affecting the trans community. By 2024, that had grown to more than 670. According to Andrew Bales, founder of Trans Legislation Tracker, 15 of those had Democratic sponsors; the rest were brought by Republican legislators, often under the auspices of protecting women, children or female athletes.
"This is part, ultimately, of a scapegoating effort that is really an authoritarian strategy to sow disinformation, to sow dissent and to expand power," said Elizabeth Yates, program director of the Momentum Team at Western States Center, a civil rights organization based in the Pacific Northwest. "This is a part of a larger project."
Echoes in history
The intensity of the Trump administration's focus on one marginalized group is raising alarm among extremism experts, who note that trans people make up less than 1 percent of adults in the U.S.
"It's ushering in a new era of efforts toward segregation in our society," said Hanah Stiverson, associate director of Democracy Protection at Human Rights First, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. "It's incredibly dangerous."
Stiverson said the politicization of trans people has troubling historical precedent.
"One of the first trans health clinics in the world was in pre-World War II Germany. It was the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin," she said. "And it was one of the very first targets of the rising Nazi party."
Nazi youth ransacked the institute in May, 1933, and burned tens of thousands of books from its library.
"It was used as an easy target to rally support to their political ideology and to escalate the forms of violence that society found acceptable," said Stiverson. "What I see currently happening in the United States is the same strategy."
Already, Yates said that corralling popular opinion against trans identities in the U.S. has opened the door to other forms of bigotry. She pointed at efforts to ban books dealing with gender and sexuality from schools and public libraries. Over time, a much larger proportion of banned books were ones written by authors of color or featured characters of color.
"And a lot of the times … they're sort of justified using a lot of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ propaganda and bigotry," she said. "But it also just is an attempt to completely wrest or to change the narrative of school curricula about the history in our country, so that they're used to recast the civil rights movement, to recast the history of inequalities in our country."
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