Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, is a cis man. But that didn’t stop the right from seizing on early misinformation and the news that he may have been in a relationship with his trans roommate and escalating its war of extermination against trans people.

Saying that the right wants to exterminate trans people is not hyperbole. Republican bigotry has fueled an array of initiatives designed to drive trans people out of public life. But conservatives aren’t content with turning trans people into fourth-class citizens. They want the public to see them as enemies of the state—as mentally ill savages pulling the country into the moral abyss. America’s never-ending gun violence has become a useful tool in this effort. Right-wing commentators are pushing the idea that trans people are “prone to violence” and responsible for a huge proportion of mass shootings. Kirk, who once called trans people “a throbbing middle finger to God,” flirted with this idea himself; at the moment of his murder, he had just finished telling someone that “too many” mass shooters were trans. Neither Robinson’s cis identity nor his roommate’s full cooperation with the government have done anything to curb this narrative.

This fascistic anti-trans movement is, of course, based on lies. The Minnesota Star Tribune, citing statistics from the Gun Violence Archive and the Violence Prevention Project, reported in August that “less than 0.1% of mass-shooting suspects over the past decade identified as transgender” and that 98 percent of shooters were cisgender men.

No matter. In the past week, Laura Loomer, one of the most influential members of the far right, declared, “Trans people are a national security threat. Their movement needs to be classified as a terrorist organization IMMEDIATELY!” Ronny Jackson, the Republican congressman and former White House physician, went on Newsmax to label trans people “domestic terrorists” who have been “bred by the left” to do evil. Donald Trump Jr. ran a Twitter poll asking whether “trantifa” was the “greatest domestic terror threat facing America.” (“No” was not an option.)

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Even more disturbingly, investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that the FBI is discussing whether to treat trans criminal suspects as “nihilistic violent extremists.” The Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 initiative has shaped so much of the second Trump term, went even further, calling on the FBI to create a criminal category called “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism.”

This moment demands solidarity with trans people. But it also demands some reflection about how we got to such a terrifying place. And it’s not just conservatives who need to examine their consciences right now. Centrist politicians, activists, and media institutions helped lay the groundwork for the right’s assault. Unfortunately, signs of such reflection are few and far between.

It’s not that centrists have been engaging in the same Nazi-style rhetoric as conservatives. But the anti-trans hysteria that has swept through the United States over the past few years would never have found so much purchase without the participation of elite liberal political and media institutions. The New York Times and The Atlantic have published story after story about the supposed dangers of gender-affirming care, particularly for minors, and stoked fears about trans people’s participation in sports. These scaremongering campaigns may come dressed in more respectable clothing than a Fox News rant, but they are similarly grounded in myth.

Transphobes exploited this coverage—after all, if “even the liberal New York Times” was concerned, there must be something going on, right? Times coverage has been used by a wide range of politicians, lawyers, and courts to justify anti-trans policies; Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas cited the paper seven times in his opinion in US vs. Skrmetti, one of the most significant attacks on trans rights in recent memory.

The effect of this crusade was predictable: Trans rights, which had looked to be in the ascendancy, became polarized—allowing pundits and politicians, including Democrats, to then point to this polarization as a sign of the supposed extremism of the movement. Many centrists then made trans people scapegoats for Trump’s 2024 presidential victory.

These days, it seems that not a week goes by without some prominent Democrat bashing trans people—despite the Trump administration’s placing a bigger and bigger target on their backs. California Governor Gavin Newsom, seen as a leading potential contender in the 2028 presidential election, infamously declared in a podcast with Kirk that it was “deeply unfair” for trans women and girls to compete with cis women and girls in sports. Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose name is also in the 2028 mix, rejected the idea of trans identity completely in a conversation with Megyn Kelly, saying, “Can a man become a woman? Uh, no.”

The post-Kirk wave of hatred hasn’t stopped this tide. Last week saw the launch of the Searchlight Institute, a new Democratic think tank headed by former John Fetterman chief of staff Adam Jentleson. (Naturally, one of the group’s public introductions took the form of a splashy profile in the Times.) Even as the right ramps up its eliminationist campaign, Jentleson and his Searchlight cofounders have identified trans rights as a key issue for Democrats to run away from. Searchlight vice president for public policy Tré Easton, responding on Twitter to a question about whether Democrats should back anti-abortion candidates, wrote, “Guns, immigration, trans folks in sports would probably have been better for this particular thought experiment.”

Jentleson claimed in an interview with Semafor that he was actually trying to help trans people, saying, “The people who are throwing trans people under the bus are the ones insisting that Democrats take maximalist positions, even if it causes them to lose elections to Republicans who then tear up these rights.”

The implication here seems to be that Democrats can turn a big dial that says “transphobia” on it to some ideal level—that there’s a sweet spot of anti-trans discrimination that everyone can be content with. (Everyone, presumably, except trans people themselves.) But the events of the past year should have put that idea to rest. Democrats and centrists have been distancing themselves from trans people—indeed, top Democratic figures like Chuck Schumer will barely say the word “trans”—and the only forces that have benefited are the forces of anti-trans fascism. You can’t just play these kinds of games with people’s lives.

Hopefully, there will be a reckoning someday about the decision from so many Democrats to assist in the persecution of one of the most marginalized groups in America. But that won’t help trans people right now. The only thing that will is the rest of us refusing to join this elite war of extermination—and demanding that our politicians and media institutions do the same.