LAVENDER SCARE 2.0

The Trump Administration's Silly But Dangerous Obsession With Trans-Americans.

May 19, 2026

Dear Reader,

In my last newsletter I examined the art of the distraction, how many struggling, desperate, and unscrupulous political leaders attempt to deflect the public’s attention from real problems by scapegoating some of society’s most vulnerable. For much of history, various national minorities, such as religious minorities, indigenous peoples, and immigrants, have been blamed by their governments for the ills that beset society. The result has often been violence against these minorities, sometimes in a manner and on a scale that can only be described as genocidal.

Today, many in the transgender community in the United States are using the term genocide to describe Donald Trump’s assault on trans rights. They describe federal policy under the Trump administration as intended to erase trans people by denying their very existence. They point to the many Executive Orders that have been issued by Trump since his first day back in office and that have targeted Trans-Americans. Many Trans-Americans have responded to these anti-transgender policies of the past year by either leaving the country or refusing to come out of the closet or going back into it.

Drag Commander-In-Chief. (AI generated photo, Libby Petrella)

I suspect that the scapegoating of trans people by so many on the far-right in the U.S. is more akin to the Lavender Scare of the 1940s and 1950s when the U.S. government viciously cracked down on gay men and women, especially those employed in public service. The reason for the crackdown was because the emerging Cold War led to anti-communist hysteria in the U.S. What became known as the Second Red Scare caught gay Americans in its web, in part because most Americans assumed gay people were “godless communists”. That’s why gay men and and women were mocked by other Americans as “pinko-commies”.

Similar to today’s anti-trans rhetoric of America’s far-right, whose transphobia is rooted in their ignorance of the emerging science of gender and perpetuated because they do not personally know any people who identify as being on the gender spectrum, the Lavender Scare arose in the aftermath of the Second World War when a moral panic about homosexuality bubbled up from the depths of centuries of social prejudice against homosexuals. Then, like now, most Americans either espoused or accepted the rhetoric of social conservatives because they were ignorant of the emerging science of sexuality and did not personally know any people who were gay.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was perhaps a legitimate national security concern about having gay people in the government. It was believed that closeted gay federal employees, and almost every gay person was closeted due to the era’s social climate, could be blackmailed by Soviet spies into becoming a turncoat. It turns out that no gay federal employee ever was successfully blackmailed by the Soviets, mainly because these gay men and women were patriotic Americans who were willing to rebuff Soviet pressure.

Yet still, rather than try to support its gay employees, the government embarked on a witch hunt for suspected gay federal employees, mainly in the State and Defense Departments, and the Intelligence agencies. Before the purge ended, thousands of highly qualified individuals, most of them dedicated public servants, were dismissed from their jobs. Many were publicly exposed as gay and then had their careers ruined. In some cases, they were cast adrift by their families and friends. A few of them committed suicide.

Over the past year, the Trump administration has fired thousands of trans people from the U.S. military and made work almost impossible for thousands of transgender federal employees who work in other departments. The administration has not accused these targeted of being security risks. Instead, it has argued that these soldiers’ “false” gender identity means they “cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service”.

This is hogwash. Not only are Transgender troops highly skilled and perfectly capable of what Defense Secretary Hegseth terms “lethality”, but they are poor targets for blackmail precisely because they are out of the closet. Trans troops who are still in the closet would be more likely security risks, but identifying them is problematic. The fact is that the U.S. government’s worst traitors in history have been cis-gender men who cheated on their spouses, accumulated large gambling debts, or engaged in other behaviors that made them susceptible to blackmail or simply untrustworthy. Few, if any, of them were gay or trans.

The trans community has been heartened by the outpouring of public support for them and by recent electoral victories by democratic politicians who refused to denounce Trans-Americans or to distance themselves from trans rights. Yet despite this, as well as polls that suggest that most Americans favor equal rights for Trans-Americans, the Trump administration continues to double down on its war against this vulnerable minority.

Two weeks ago the administration announced, “Today, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division launched investigations into 36 Illinois public school districts to determine whether they have included sexual orientation and gender ideology (SOGI) content in any class for grades pre-K-12…If they are teaching any SOGI-related context, the investigators will examine whether the schools have notified the parents of their right to opt their children out of such instruction. The investigation will also assess whether the Illinois School Districts limit access to single-sex intimate spaces (such as bathrooms and locker rooms) and girls’ sports teams based on biological sex.”

Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, added, “This Department of Justice is determined to put an end to local school authorities keeping parents in the dark about how sexuality and gender ideology are being pushed in classrooms.”

At the same time, Sebastian Gorka, Senior Director for Counterterrorism, on a call with reporters, tried to read from his new 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy document, which you can read on the White House website. I say “tried” because apparently Gorka surrendered to self-righteous fury and veered off script, perhaps because he was facing a room full of members of the free press that wanted to ask him tough questions.

The diminutive and bookish-looking Gorka, in his best imitation of a tough guy, warned the reporters, “We see a threat, we will respond to it, and, we will crush it, whether it’s the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend Charlie Kirk. We will take them on, head on… Our national counterterrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent, secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-gender or anarchist, such as antifa. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, [and] map their ties to international organizations.”

This is pretty intense, wild stuff. especially coming from a government official of such high rank. In my book, it borders on being unhinged. But it is also vague and opaque. What does Gorka mean when he promises “neutralization” of the groups or individuals he is targeting? What does it mean to be “pro-gender”? Much, if not most, of what Gorka said sounds like the screed of the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and other right-wing extremist groups. But these groups do not wield the power of the federal government.

The actual document Gorka produced, now part of the record of federal policy, seems almost as half-baked, incoherent, and paranoid as Gorka’s heated remarks. Yet the document itself is worth a read because its vitriol is chilling in its vehemence. It rails against “politically motivated killings of Christians by violent left wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” (This is the first time I have heard the term “transgender ideology” in the plural.)

Gorka and the administration’s focus on domestic left wing terrorism is a 180 degree turn from what the FBI had been warning Americans for the past decade and a half, including during Trump’s first term. And, this attempt to refocus law enforement on threats from the other side of the political spectrum are largely without merit because while there are some left wing extremists who espouse violence, the vast majority of domestic political violence over the past two decades has been carried out by right-wing extremists, including the mass shooting of 23 Hispanics in El Paso, TX, in 2019, of 11 Jewish-American worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg, PA, in 2018, and of 9 African-Americans at an AME church in Charleston, SC, in 2015, and 10 more at a market in Buffalo, NY, in 2022. (Assassinations get headlines too, but crunch the numbers of incidents and resulting fatalities and it’s no contest.)

It’s worth noting that the math-challenged Gorka was run out of the first Trump administration because he was viewed by most of his colleagues as grossly unqualified, if not a dangerous crackpot. The list of Gorka’s numerous but brief jobs in politics and government is too long to list here. So too is the list of outlandishly bigoted statements that he’s made during his career.

Yet the fact that Gorka managed to be welcomed back into the second Trump administration makes it clear that Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 with the gloves off. In a short piece last week, The Economist, a highly respected publication known for its editorial restraint, called Gorka “abrasive” and dismissed his Counterterrorism Strategy report as a political polemic that is light on details and long on overheated, macho rhetoric, much of which parrots terms used by Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth.

The language used by Dhillon and Gorka is hyperbolic. Such rhetoric is usually a hint that the arguments that supposedly udergird the shrill statements are weak and pathetic. And, in this case, it is absolutely true. For example, Dhillon is wrong when she suggests that the federal government has the right to force schools to tell parents that they can opt to keep their children out of certain classes the content of which conflicts with their religious beliefs. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parents have the right to do so, but it did not rule that schools had to alert parents to such rights.

And, Dhillon is wrong when she implies that states may not allow trans youth to use the bathroom of their choice or play on girls’ sports teams. Again, SCOTUS ruled that states may enact laws that limit public schools’ ability to provide trans youth with equal access. But it did not rule that it was necessary for all states to limit such access.

As for Gorka, I know that when he uses the term “transgender killers” he is suggesting that trans people are more likely than the average person to commit violence. In contrast, I interpret the term “transgender killers” as a reference to killers of trans people. After all, the fact is that transgender people are statistically far more likely to be a victim of such violence and less likely than other Americans to physically harm, let alone kill, another human being. So, why do people like Gorka and Dhillon persist in offering such ill-informed opinions?

Two weeks ago, James Boasberg. Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, put it well in a ruling he made that granted a preliminary injunction against the efforts of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate two of America’s leading medical organizations on transgender health, the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the latter which was founded in 1979 and been widely recognized by national medical associations as a leading resource on healthcare for trans people.

While Boesberg argued that the FTC’s approach was unconstitutional because it infringed upon the free speech of the plaintiffs, he added that the FTC had displayed “extensive evidence of animus” towards them. Boesberg wrote, “The Court finds the same systemic targeting of proponents for medical treatment of gender incongruence at work here.., [which] confirms the conclusion that the [FTC’s investigation] was likely issued for a retaliatory purpose.”

And, what is the specific evidence Boesberg pointed to? First, there are Trump’s own Executive orders in which gender health care is described as “mutilation” and gender identity is called “subversive” and a “false ideology”. Then there are comments by FTC staff calling gender health care “malpractice” and denigrating reporters who cover gender care issues as “partisan morons”. Finally, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson pledged to “fight back against the trans agenda” and to target providers of gender health care with investigations, which Boesberg described as “a Sword of Democles suspended over [the] Plaintiff’s head”.

As a historian, I know that I dismiss at my own peril the hateful rhetoric of Trump and his lackeys. During the early 1930s and the first few years of nazi rule in Germany, most Germans viewed the nazi’s anti-Semitic rhetoric and new laws that targeted Germany’s Jews with a mix of indifference and detachment. Many made light of Hitler’s anti-Semitic rants and mocked his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels as a lightweight paper pusher with bizarre ideas.

Even if many of these Germans believed in at least some of the anti-semitic tropes and libels that were ubiquitous among non-Jews in Europe during that time, even those Germans probably found it hard to imagine that the nazis would embark on a genocide unmatched in human history. I hear in Sebastian Gorka’s obsession with Charlie Kirk’s assassination by a supporter of trans rights echoes of Kristallnacht, The Night Of Broken Glass, the infamous pogrom of German Jews in 1938 that was organized and carried out by the nazis. The pretext for the pogrom? The assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jew whose family has recently been expelled ftom Germany because the nazis declared them Polish in origin and thus not entitled to live in Germany.

I hope that some republicans think carefully about the prevalence of transphobia within their party. It would be a shame if once again the GOP ended up on the wrong side of history, like it did during the Second Red Scare, when it allowed it itself to debased by the Second Red Scare’s ignorant and self-serving alcoholic leader, republican senator Joseph McCarthy. I want to believe that it’s not too late for today’s republicans to make amends despite having allowed Trumpism to turn the party of Lincoln into an embarrassing shell of itself.

I’m more certain that the heroes of today’s Lavender Scare will be the courageous trans-Americans who are fighting back against the hatred and ignorance of the current administration and its supporters. Perhaps like America’s gay community, which proudly and loudly re-emerged within two decades after the first Lavender Scare, the Trans-American community will once again rise to reclaim its rights and achieve total equality on a more permanent basis. And, with that victory Lavender Scare 2.0 will go down in history as a just another sad and tragic bump on he road to a better America.

Join me friend, and proudly continue to support Trans-Americans of all ages, and fly the lavender colored trans pride flag high were others can see it.

Thank you, Alison