‘Transgender ideology' violence plan pushes FBI to fight 'eliminationist' rhetoric like against Jews

Eight years ago, white men marched through the University of Virginia carrying torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us," implying the planned removal of a nearby Robert E. Lee statue signaled a threat to their lives that justified preemptive force.

In the wake of seven years of violence allegedly motivated by transgender ideology and similar "eliminationist rhetoric," conservative groups are pushing the FBI to create a new category of "domestic violent extremists" who practice the "potentially unlawful use or threat of force or violence, including incitement to unlawful violence."

The Heritage Foundation and its spun-off Oversight Project explained the proposed "Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism" category in a public, four-page memo and a more contextual eight-page memo shared exclusively with Just the News. 

They are also circulating a petition to convince the FBI to create the new tracking category, which Oversight Project President Mike Howell told Just the News can be implemented immediately by the FBI from its blueprint, without congressional action.

He emphasized TIVE is "not a designation of transgenders per se," and that the four-pager specifies the category does not encompass people who "identify as transgender, or support LGBT causes or transgenderism" and simply use "offensive and hateful speech," as long as it remains nonviolent and distinct from First Amendment exceptions.

But Howell confirmed that common rhetoric in transgender ideology, especially the conflation of words with violence and refusal to recognize a person as the opposite sex as life-threatening, is a core feature of the TIVE designation, which he compared to Islamic terrorist expression that portrays peaceful opposition as a "life-or-death struggle."

If a jihadi is holding a sign that reads "they're going to blow us up" while sitting in front of opponents, "right after 'they're going to blow us up' is the justification" for preemptive force against opponents, Howell said, agreeing with Just the News that the Unite the Right refrain "Jews will not replace us" fits that framework too.

Transgender and Islamic terrorist ideology share some elements, he said: "There's recruitment, there's high-minded academic cover, there's money and unfortunately there's violence."

His group shared several posts by or about transgender Alejandra Caraballo in response to the Harvard law school instructor's BlueSky post claiming the TIVE proposal shows "they want us all eliminated" and that it would "label all trans people as domestic terrorists" based on "completely made-up instances of terrorism" and statistics.

"This is an example of an element of TIVE rhetoric," The Oversight Project said. "The notion that opposing Transgender Ideology is a form of violence ('eradication' here) leads people to justify violence," such as Caraballo calling on people to "accost" Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade after the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Howell told Just the News that Caraballo fits the "first half of the definition" of TIVE by embracing "eliminationism" and giving people with serious mental health issues the idea that "you're trying to kill us, therefore violence is justified."

Asked whether parents of gender-confused children could be swept up in a TIVE designation, Howell said those who promote the TIVE worldview and push the eliminationist message on troubled youth are "adding fuel to the fire." The FBI also tracks extreme racism, and a parent who ran a children's camp that uses racial-eliminationist rhetoric would be targeted, he said.

The Supreme Court's refusal to create a transgender protected class, on the basis that the identity is so amorphous, is not a hurdle for a TIVE designation, Howell said. 

Transgender ideology is a "blob of terminological confusion" composed of a "super blob of disaffected people," but so is radical Islam, which is composed of many sects at odds with each other as well as infidels, he said. "It's time to get the ball rolling."

'FBI Readies New War on Trans People'

Heritage, a conservative think tank, has been promoting a TIVE designation for years, but the Biden administration's adoption of transgender identity as a protected class would have made its proposal difficult to implement, according to Howell.

That's no longer a problem following the alleged assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk by a suspect whose romantic partner is a male undergoing a gender transition, just two weeks after a mass shooting at a Catholic school by a suspect who identified as transgender, in light of President Trump's executive orders against gender ideology.

"FBI Readies New War on Trans People," blared an eliminationist headline by independent journalist Ken Klipperstein, formerly of progressive publications The Intercept and The Nation, citing "two national security officials" who claim the Trump administration is planning to designate transgender people, as a category, as "violent extremists." 

Klipperstein cited public comments after Kirk's assassination by FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Trump himself, who said "radicals on the left" were worse than right-wing radicals in part because "they want transgender for everyone."

The "transgender ideology" definition propounded by Heritage and The Oversight Project in the eight-page memo uses an either-or construction, under which any element by itself may constitute such ideology, and a three-part test for designation as TIVE.

The ideology is marked by "the belief that violence is justified against people" who oppose, don't support or "are silent or indifferent" to TI, or that such an attitude toward TI "itself constitutes a form of violence towards" trans or gender-nonconfirming people, is a "true threat" to their existence, or "poses an imminent threat to such persons’ emotional, psychological, or physical safety, including through self-harm or suicide."

TI's adherents use terms such as "cisgender" to identify people at peace with their sex, "deadnaming" and "misgendering" as violent refusals to use a person's preferred names and pronouns, and "erasure," denial of their "right to exist" and "trans genocide" to describe biologically accurate descriptions of sex.

The common refrain of TI-adhering psychologists that parents can choose between a "live boy or a dead girl" – describing a gender-confused male child – is "used to try to pressure, shame, or cause emotional distress" in those who accept biological sex as immutable.

TIVE designation applies to any person who believes "any opposition to transgender ideology is a violent and existential" and "imminent threat to physical safety," justifies violence against opponents on that basis, and "takes, incites, or promotes violent action" based on TI.

Creating this new category would improve the clarity of statistics necessary for informed policymaking, Howell said. 

The press release on its TIVE petition calls on the FBI to "detect, disrupt, and dismantle TIVE cells," another term taken from the War on Terror, though the memos' lists of TIVE examples appears to be only lone-wolf attacks. 

Howell said a cell can refer to both physical and digital gathering places, sometimes "quasi-political," and the federal government should have eyes on them just as it tracked the Islamic State and Osama Bin Laden through their "very complex communications structures." The Joint Terrorism Task Force would translate coded language, he said.

Asked whether the designation's implementation would involve the FBI going undercover on forums such as Discord, Steam, Twitch and Reddit – House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer R-Ky., asked their CEOs to testify at a hearing on "radicalization of online forum users" – Howell said "probably yes" but he didn't want to narrow the targets of investigation.

The shorter memo includes an unsourced statistic that Just the News has been unable to trace: "Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology." It's not in the longer memo.

Howell said Heritage Vice President Roger Severino, a first-term Trump administration civil rights official, shared the statistic online. Just the News could not find Severino sharing it, and he and Heritage didn't answer queries.

The closest source Just the News could find made a broader claim in a different time period: The Western Journal said "roughly" 40% of "successful and would-be school shooters" since 2020 were transgender or "trans-suspected," but the article is paywalled.

Antifascist, anti-white, anti-Christian ... and also transgender?

The four-page memo identifies 11 people since 2018 who committed "TIVE-motivated acts of domestic terrorism," and the eight-page memo elaborates on why they qualify, though the facts laid out in the latter show only one person who apparently expressed a motivation rooted in transgender ideology – Covenant Presbyterian School shooter Audrey Hale.

The 28-year-old Hale, who went by Aiden, said it was "miserable being raised a girl" and she was mad no one told her about medicalized gender transitions until age 22, fearing "I’m too old and too late to become a man" with hormone therapy. Leaked excerpts from her journal said Hale would "kill" to get puberty blockers.

Hale's disclosed writings focused much more on hatred of whites like herself and Christians without reference to their views on gender identity, however, with the eight-page memo's news citation for Hale, the New York Post, citing her desire to "‘kill all the white kids."

The two most recent shooters on the TIVE list, Kirk's suspected killer Tyler Robinson and Annunciation Catholic Church shooting suspect Robin Westman, had potentially more complicated motives. 

Robinson was "living with a homosexual partner who is in the process of transitioning from male to female," the longer memo says, but Robinson's message to his partner said Kirk's unspecified "hatred," which "can't be negotiated out," drove the assassination. His bullet casings included antifascist, videogame and "furry subculture" references.

The fact that Robinson was "deeply in love" and in a sexual relationship with a trans person "is an indication of proximity to TIVEs," Howell told Just the News.

The memo notes Westman, born Robert, publicly identified as transgender and expressed hatred toward Jesus Christ and Christians in a video preceding the shooting. 

It doesn't mention that Westman's journal said "I wish I never brain-washed myself" into identifying as a girl, but that cutting his long hair — the last vestige of a trans identity of which he had "tired" — "would be an embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported."