The vice president did not pull this fiction out of the ether; it was, unsurprisingly, pre-packaged for the federal government by the same top right-wing think tank behind Project 2025. The search was already on, not for answers about Kirk’s killer, but for ways to associate being trans—or even showing care and support for trans people—with “radicalization” that would inevitably lead to “violent extremism.”
While the FBI has not indicated that it will adopt any such designation, the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein recently set off fears that it might, reporting, as he put it, that “the FBI would treat transgender suspects as a subset of the Bureau’s new threat category, ‘Nihilistic Violent Extremists.’” The news of such a plan was attributed to two unnamed “national security officials,” and so far remains unconfirmed by other reporters. (“The FBI has no comment,” the bureau responded when The New Republic questioned it about its plans.)
However, it is clear that the Oversight Project and others pushing this new designation do not only mean to influence law enforcement. The campaign to create a category called “transgender ideology–inspired violence and extremism” is also a political project, meant to conflate the fact of trans people’s existence with extremism. They may fail at reshaping FBI policy, but they will likely succeed at reinforcing existing beliefs that by virtue of being engaged in political work, trans people are potential perpetrators of violence (when in fact trans people are more likely to be targets of violence than non-trans people). In its new brief with the Heritage Foundation, the Oversight Project cites as an example of a “common TIVE slogan” the phrase “protect their right to exist”—an idea so basic and unexceptional in trans rights discourse that to use it as some kind of “violent extremism” indicator is to cast suspicion on almost any trans person.
With Kirk’s death, the group’s push for the FBI to take on “TIVE” escalated on social media. The following morning, Heritage Foundation visiting fellow and president of the Oversight Project Mike Howell lamented on X, “USA bowing down to transgender and left wing domestic terrorism would be pitiful,” and lashed out at “government and propaganda media, both on the right and left, trying to frame this as a lone wolf deal.” Howell was seizing on the opportunity to link trans people and violent extremism, but he also took aim at the FBI, claiming that it is “broken,” and must declare Kirk’s killing to be “domestic terrorism” and identify “far-left and transgender inspired violent extremism as such.”
Like many anti-trans campaigns, the TIVE project positions itself not as a political actor, but as a defender of science. In its longer brief released this week, the Oversight Project defines “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable”—that is, anyone who backs science on sex and gender that is contrary to what these groups believe to be “real” science. It’s the same framing used to justify everything from outlawing abortion to opposing Covid vaccines. The brief goes on to define TIVE as “the belief that opposing TI [transgender ideology], declining to support or affirm TI, or remaining silent or indifferent regarding TI (a) itself constitutes a form of violence towards people who identify as any variant of transgender or gender nonconforming; (b) is a true threat to the existence of such persons; or, (c) poses an imminent threat to such persons’ emotional, psychological, or physical safety, including through self-harm or suicide.” To state the obvious: These are beliefs, not acts. They are protected by law and they are nonviolent. They are also very broad beliefs, and not uncommon, and to regard them as indicators of “violent extremism” is to risk sweeping even the most anodyne analysis of public policy or of an argument made in a Supreme Court brief into this invented category of “violent extremism.”
Such attempts to link identity and extremism are ripe for abuse. As Berger noted, “the government has often found itself on the wrong side of such practices even before such abuses became a stated policy objective.” Howell, echoed by prominent right-wing voices, has demonstrated that the right’s objective is to reduce support for trans people. When they suggest that defending trans people from those who harm them could constitute extremism, they are using the threat of law enforcement to further isolate trans people.
In a sense, then, the very act of inventing TIVE is an extremist project seeking cover under the law. Should FBI Director Kash Patel decide “TIVE,” or whatever he might call it, is a priority for the FBI, the potential fallout may follow a familiar pattern, from the law enforcement abuses following 9/11 to Trump’s pardons of law enforcement officers engaged in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. “Terrorism has always been defined according to the prerogatives of those wielding power, and this is about to be a prime example,” observed Spencer Ackerman in his Forever Wars newsletter last week. With this move to target trans “violent extremism,” Berger told me, “exactly how it would play out is anyone’s guess in the short term. But the arc is not going to be bending toward justice.”
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