Federal Vilification of the Trans Community
The new face of terrorism is your friends and family members
Carina Dieringer
The eagle’s love guards the Assiniboine river and the Red River as they merge into a single being that breathes life into Turtle Island. This is the heart. Two trees adorned with pink and blue flowers envelop the arms, the spirits reaching their roots to the place where life flows. Two legs carry the fork of the rivers until they make contact with the ground. The body of Sav Jonsa’s “gender monster” rests among bright green blades of grass at the tip of the Red River in Manitoba, Canada.
Jonsa, a Two-Spirit Métis from Winnipeg, didn’t consider themself an artist before they were asked by Penny Kagigebi to participate in the “Queering Indigeneity” exhibit at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in downtown St. Paul. Their piece “Two rivers met to form my home, Two spirits joined to form my soul” features a poem and digital photograph of the clay creation. It decorates the wall beside the works of 15 other artists. Jonsa plans to cross into Minnesota to attend the exhibit’s opening reception—imposter syndrome be damned. Yet where the Red River runs with no knowledge of borders, Jonsa worries about being targeted for a lived experience that their people have welcomed for centuries.
On Sept. 18, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that Trump’s FBI is seeking to designate transgender individuals as Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs), a newly defined form of terrorism marked by a “hatred of society” and “desire to bring about its collapse,” according to court documents.
The Oversight Project released a guide urging the FBI to designate what it termed Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism (TIVE) as domestic terrorism later the same day. The guide was released in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, the project's founder and the organization that created Project 2025. The document cited blatantly false statistics, claiming that 50% of major school shootings were connected to “transgender ideology.” It designated common terms and phrases such as “protect their right to exist,” “cisgender,” and “deadnaming” as TIVE ideology. The FBI has yet to respond to this call as of Oct. 4.
Since 9/11, the terrorism label has been used to further political goals by silencing protesters and targeting specific racial groups. What the NVE label perfects is its ability to apply to nearly anyone. Due to its lack of ideological basis, anybody can be an NVE as long as a case can be made that they want to see the destruction of society. The implications of this are clear: desiring change within our society quickly becomes synonymous with nihilism. Those fighting against systemic injustice, colonialism, and transphobia are all in danger of receiving the label.
“In concocting an incorrect explanation for a societal issue, it is probably easiest to blame immigrants or queers or lazy millennials,” Ada, a local transgender woman, said. “Such scapegoating is the simplest alternative explanation they [conservatives] have to offer for the realities of late stage capitalism: stagnant wages, high costs of living, political violence.”
In this way, NVE becomes both a method of preventing people from fighting for social change and a way of diverting blame for the issues those systems cause.
Although transphobic rhetoric and violence have risen over the past five years, they have only become worse during the second Trump administration, evident by GLAAD’s 2025 research finding that over 932 anti-LGBTQ incidents have occurred since May 2024, of which 52% of targets were transgender individuals. This transphobia is upheld within the government itself.
Press releases from the Department of Homeland Security talk about “gender ideology fanaticism,” and the department’s harassment guidelines have been updated to exclude gender identity from protections. In the beginning of the year the federal government dropped the T in the LGBTQIA+ acronym from multiple informational sites, opting to use LGB or LGBQ instead. Many other websites were removed completely.
“I think most of us are really good at being desensitized to it all,” Ada said. “It is awful, but it has been awful for a while.”
Ada is in a situation where she has not been personally affected by policy changes, but many others are not so lucky.
“I am not worried for myself,” Ada said. “I am worried for my friends who can only afford HRT with their insurance. It is pretty likely insurance could stop covering HRT for them eventually.”
Increased surveillance, violent acts, and barred access from healthcare all threaten the civil rights of trans people. These struggles are shared.
Yet at the end of the day, Jonsa is just one person. Ada is just one person. Trans people cannot be pushed into a label of violence based on their ideology because trans people do not have a singular ideology or set of beliefs—they are simply people who use the same word to describe a vast array of experiences.
These experiences are not new and have existed since long before the beginnings of colonial America. People indigenous to Turtle Island had much more complex relationships with gender identity and expression than the structures pushed upon them recognize. Colonialists tried to end this by forcing Indigenous people into residential schools where they were subjected to strict gender roles and stripped of their culture.
“Indigenous people, we’ve always kind of had to deal with this experience of being told who we are and who we aren’t, and who we can be, and who we should be,” Jonsa said.
Many people are making an effort to restore their historical identities. Two-Spirit is a modern umbrella term used by Indigenous peoples of many different tribes who identify outside the binary constructs of gender and sexuality. Jonsa understands their identity as “reclaiming what gender and sexuality was prior to colonization.”
I recently visited the “Queering Indigeneity” exhibit to learn more about Indigenous perspectives on queer identity.
The room was quiet apart from the voice of Giiwedin, an Anishinaabe Two-Spirit online educator who resides in northern Minnesota, drifting from a secluded area on a softly looping video compilation. Photographs, woven baskets, and paintings decorated the walls. The exhibit featured artworks from queer people indigenous to all parts of Turtle Island.
A forest green wall held photographs of Two-Spirit people from many different tribes and walks of life. The frames somewhat resembled a heart as their formation dipped in the center to surround a mirror with vinyl lettering running across it.
“I live in this body.”
“It has embodied me so far in this lifetime.”
“I am making peace with it.”
Despite insistence that transness is connected to violence, there were two common themes that stuck out to me among the artworks: love and peace.
Outside the exhibit entrance stood a small tree with driftwood branches that reached out to embrace the viewer. Leaves made of quilt and paper decorated the branches with handwritten or threaded notes across them.
“Peace is possible.”
“Spread love like honey.”
“Heal the water. Heal our bodies. Heal our society. All are one.”
Sharon Day’s “Tree of Peace,” 2020, was originally created in the wake of George Floyd's murder as a collage of messages for the generations to come. Day first discovered the tree she would use for the project washed up on the shores of Gichi Gami (The Ojibwe name for Lake Superior).
Acceptance and love were at the forefront of almost all artworks.
“When we’re bringing our real selves to the table, it allows others to do the same,” Jonsa said.
In the Seven Sacred Teachings and Jonsa’s artwork, the eagle represents love. In the American government, the eagle’s image is plastered across documents that deny rights, dehumanize people, and deprive people of basic needs—who is the real violent extremist?