Last week, The Heritage Foundation released advice urging the United States government to classify all transgender individuals as domestic terrorists. On September 18th, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein stated that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is considering a proposal to categorize transgender people as under “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism (TIVE).” This comes in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s public assassination, the FCC censoring media outlets like Jimmy Kimmel, and Donald Trump using Kirk to further divide the nation.
The Heritage Foundation and similar groups wrongly believe that transgender people are inherently more likely to commit violence. Conservative conspiracy theorists deny the objective reality that transgender people make up less than one percent of mass shooters. When it was uncovered that Tyler Robinson is not transgender, and simply knows a transgender person, TIVE pivoted to argue that both transgender people and our allies are violent – ignoring the reality that non-allied cisgender men commit the vast majority of violent crime, and Charlie Kirk himself advocated violence against transgender people.
“They are cynically targeting trans people because the shooter’s lover was trans. The administration has convinced itself that the Charlie Kirk murder exposes some dark conspiracy.” – Anonymous US senior intelligence official to Ken Klippenstein
TIVE is proposed to be a subcategory of Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVE), a new domestic terrorism category created by the FBI early this year to replace Biden’s Anti-Authority and Anti-Government Violent Extremists (AGAAVE) – which was created to classify those who participated in the January 6th coup. In support of TIVE, The Heritage Foundation wrote, “TIVE is based on the belief that violence is justified against those who do not share radical views of transgender ideology. It has led to an increasing trend of TIVE domestic terrorist events across the country.”
Transgender advocates and human rights allies have criticized the proposal. Alejandra Caraballo, a Harvard law instructor and trans legal expert, wrote, “Heritage Foundation has released an absolutely insane policy proposal to label all trans people as domestic terrorists. It uses completely made-up instances of terrorism and made-up statistics but facts don’t matter to them.”

People are alarmed because this classification would give broad and overbearing authority for the FBI to target transgender people based on identity alone. Even though transgender identity is factually uncorrelated with violence, the United States government could use TIVE to monitor transgender people without the additional evidence traditionally required for such cases. Additionally, people are opposed to most of what The Heritage Foundation proposes due to their fundamental role in anti-equality proposals like Project 2025.
“The bottom line is that this is another example of escalating attacks targeting trans people,” said Cathy Renna of the National LGBTQ Task Force to The Advocate. “It’s another use of lies and misinformation to justify [the right’s] actions. I think this degree of targeting and surveillance and scapegoating is just continuing to erode our sense of safety in this country. And that’s a tremendous concern; that’s something we all need to be engaged in, speaking out about when what their goal is to silence us. But at the end of the day, those of us who can need to be speaking out as much and as loudly as we can.”
Despite overwhelming evidence that transgender people do not correlate with violent behaviors, the Trump administration seeks to use TIVE to further escalate their war against transgender people – especially in the aftermath of Kirk. Regarding the matter, California state senator Scott Wiener stated, “The obsession with tying trans people to shootings is vile and dangerous. First they try to say the shooter might be trans, and WSJ amplifies that lie. Once that fell apart, they pivot to ‘he lived with a trans person.’ Even if true, who cares? It’s McCarthyism and truly disgusting.”
“If adopted by the FBI, that would brand a wide range of arguments common among progressive activists and writers as “extremist” rhetoric,” wrote The Independent. The Heritage Foundation gave a comprehensive list of terms “used by TIVEs” to help the FBI identify such individuals. These terms include “cisgender,” “deadnaming, and “misgendering,” amongst others. This logic is also entirely hypocritical: the GOP has actively verbalized its intent to “eradicate transgender people from public life,” advocating for government-sanctioned violence against an entire community of people based on identity alone.
On the other hand, this news should be taken with a grain of salt. The Heritage Foundation and related Oversight Project explicitly stated that not all transgender people or their allies should be treated as terrorists and “individuals are free to identify as transgender, or support… transgenderism in a non-violent way.” It’s also *just* a proposal – The Heritage Foundation’s presentation of it does not mean the Trump administration or FBI will approve it, similar to Trump’s previous consideration of removing all firearm access from transgender Americans.