The Scapegoating of Trans People in Trump’s America

In countless ways, both great and small, the right is making life hard for trans people. Meanwhile, many on the left and centre now also openly debate whether we should be sacrificed for some notion of the ‘greater good’. It’s as if everyone wants to wash their hands of us – like Pontius Pilate.

Nobody really knows how many trans people there are, but estimates suggest less than one percent of the US population. A one percent that is mostly powerless and broke, if not outright homeless. Given this statistic, there is no rational explanation for why national political life should give a damn about us at all. The antagonism we experience is rooted in unconscious anxieties and surreal, mythic habits.

Which is why, to make sense of it all, I find myself turning to René Girard’s The Scapegoat (1989). Yes, I know he is also a favourite of evil billionaire and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, but, like any thinker worth reading and re-reading, Girard’s work supports more than one interpretation. Here’s mine.

Permit me a slight detour to set up some concepts. First, Girard’s theory of ‘mimetic desire’ suggests we don’t inherently know what we want: rather, we mimic what others desire. My friend loves her cat, so I get a cat, and love mine. All well and good. But oftentimes, as Rick Springfield lamented in his 1981 hit ‘Jessie’s Girl’ about falling in love with his best friend’s girlfriend, mimetic desire breeds rivalry. I want what Jessie has, and that rivalry escalates into conflict, which could be just the everyday story of jealousy, until it becomes a general condition.

This is an opening for what I call the ‘fascist mediator’ – a model for our desires who encourages us towards punishing someone else: the scapegoat. Social media accelerates this dynamic, fuelling admiration and resentment. Perhaps a contemporary word for Girard’s ‘mediator’ of mimetic desire is ‘influencer’. A world of influencers produces an ever more antagonistic social life. They are both models and rivals, igniting cycles of envy and hostility: I want to be her, but I’d love it even more if I could kick her to the curb.

At the moment, it’s open season on trans people, especially trans women, though all gender nonconforming people – and even cis people who don’t conform to gender norms – are affected. Our ability to get meds, get documents, even use a public toilet are all under attack. The increased visibility of trans people, particularly trans women, has turned out to be a double-edged sword. The idea was that, through visibility, trans people could be recognized as actually human and included in the social contract as having civil rights. Instead, it has triggered feelings of rivalry and resentment. It probably didn’t help that some of the most visible trans women are insanely hot and, at the same time, cool: Jamie Clayton, Laverne Cox, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Angelica Ross, Hunter Schafer. Or ridiculously accomplished and rich: Caitlyn Jenner, the Wachowski sisters. Or an actual self-sacrifice, challenging the crimes of the state: Chelsea Manning.

In the world of mimetic desire, the trans woman is a rival that nobody wants. The sentiment is summed up in the viral meme of the seemingly naïve social-media post which shows the trans flag next to the caption: ‘Why do all the hot women come from this country?’ Success sparks rivalry. To cis women, we are competitors; to straight men, a source of sexual confusion. How dare we take anyone’s place?

Social media is not a harmonious, liberal public sphere of rational negotiation, but a surreal world of myth and rumour where everyone hates everyone. Girard calls this the ‘eclipse’ of culture, a loss of differentiation. Since nobody wants to take responsibility for their own bad feelings, generated by their own mimetic desire, someone else must be the scapegoat. It’s uncanny how much the signs zipping across the surface of the social-media sphere look like the kind Girard thinks accelerate scapegoating.

Here are some of the signs. Firstly, crimes against authority: such as Luigi Mangione, alleged assassin of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Secondly, sexual crimes: Jeffrey Epstein comes immediately to mind. The third sign is religious crimes. This one comes with a wrinkle. Protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza are coded as a religious crime. Officially, they are anti-Semitic, but really they’re a crime against Christianity, given the role Israel plays in Christian nationalism.

Lastly, the desire for the scapegoat accelerates in times of plague. In Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus (c.429 BCE), Thebes is beset by plague, and the hunt is on for the social transgression that is imagined to be its cause. It makes no sense to think of Covid or avian flu as being caused by transsexuals, but we’re not dealing with facts, we’re dealing with symbolic exchange. Culture is eclipsed, the social disordered, differences need restoring, so let’s persecute the transsexuals.

In the modern era, the guilt of transsexuals must be ‘proven’ scientifically. ‘Real’ women are gamete havers. There are only two true genders because science – never mind what the actual science says. In the social-media world, random invocations of ‘science’ has become an internal tactic of mythic thinking. Never mind that we are so few, transsexuals are monsters, guilty in fantasy of all kinds of transgressions against women and children. Remember in 2015 when Pope Francis compared trans people to nuclear weapons? As if a few transsexuals could blow up the world. It’s almost as if we belong to a rival religion.

Trans people are not scapegoated because we are different. We are scapegoated because we seemingly undermine difference itself. Social structures tolerate difference within their order, but we present a difference to the order. That’s scary – because it reveals the arbitrary, fragile nature of the whole thing. The ‘crime’ of the scapegoat is not carried out through any act, but simply by existing. Not ‘Be gay. Do crime,’ as the meme says, but ‘Be trans. Be crime.’

Since the rise in visibility of trans people surged around 2013, right-wing haters made up for lost time in adding us to the scapegoat list, often boosting us to the top. But it wasn’t just the right. Supposedly liberal media figures eagerly jumped on the anti-trans bandwagon, sometimes under the guise of ‘just asking questions’. As every trans person knows all too well, it’s not just Christian fundamentalists generating the hate-fest, publications including The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times, New York Magazine and The New Yorker have all run articles along these lines.   

Beneficiaries of this culture rarely stop to question whether it might be baseless, arbitrary or cruel. The transsexual is beyond their experience, and they cannot tolerate a rival to their desire be the spokesmodel for the universe and will punish what compromises it. The scapegoat is an agent of contagion. She threatens to turn everyone into zombies – and the racialized character of this monster fits here. The default scapegoat in America is always Blackness. Transsexuality and Blackness together is not so much an intersection as a multiplication – black × trans – of viral threats to legitimate difference.

For Girard, modern scapegoating lacks a sacred dimension, but I think the trans woman as scapegoat is also a figure that touches the sacred. Every trans sex worker knows the paradox of the public transphobe as private chaser. The trans body can be both debased and sacred at once.

Facts and reason won’t get us very far in opposing scapegoating. What we need is organized resistance. What we need is solidarity – not just among trans people but among all those who could be the scapegoat. Most minorities and marginalized folks know this. White trans people can be slow to figure this out. Those who transition within whiteness often fail to grasp the privilege of immunity they are losing. I call myself out for that. Among trans people, this means learning from Black and Brown trans folk – the ones who have always known how to survive. The ones who, as always, are the most likely to be cast violently out of life.

_{Main image: Transgender rights supporters and opponent rally outside of the US Supreme Court as the high court hears arguments in a case on transgender health rights on 4 December 2024 in Washington, DC. Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images}