On Being a Scapegoat
Surviving as a transgender person in 2025
This week has felt like I’m strapped to a yo-yo in the hands of a 6-year-old. Where do I even start? A title for an unwritten essay has been clanging around in my head all week: On Being a Scapegoat. I’m a nonbinary trans man, I consult full time on trans health research, and I educate all ages about all things trans.
I am livid. Terrified. Heartbroken. Exhausted.
Each day this week, a new order has come from the White House to bash my people, the trans and nonbinary folx of the US. In the past 72 hours, executive orders have been issued to remove trans people from the military, ban gender-affirming care for anyone under 19, rescind legal recognition, deny our existence via federal paperwork, demand a scientifically ridiculous definition of sex, ban us from federal bathrooms, and strike us from the educational landscape. Not to mention all the ways removing DEI also disappears us.
What is it like to be a scapegoat, one of the far-right’s targets? It’s been going on for years, really. Years that I have been stating on panels and in lectures that the right is throwing trans kids under the bus to get votes. That they care so little for trans people that they deliberately, calculatingly chose us as pawns, nothing but a hot-button issue to rile up the voting base. They don’t care that youth suicide rates have gone up in states with anti-trans laws, including gender-affirming care bans. They don’t care that they have deprived children—children—of science-backed life-saving treatment.
It's their contempt. Their disregard for our dignity, our humanity. We can scream back that they are depriving us of our human rights, but they have already decided we are not human. And not on accident. It’s not flippant comments that got “misinterpreted,” the kind that gets a non-apology, ‘I’m sorry if I offended you.” These EOs frame trans people as untrustworthy, selfish, sexual predators, radical ideologists—all while denying we even exist. These are direct attacks on our bodies, identities, and rights.
And their lies! The blatant misinformation—statements that can be disproven with existing evidence. The leaders know what they are saying is outrageous. They know that no one is performing genital surgeries on trans kids at school. They know they are fooling enough of the populace into believing them and carrying the anti-trans banner. They know they are manipulating the cautious language of scientists to fit their sexist, white supremacist agenda.
The agenda is about control: of women, of wealth, of their power at the top of the social pyramid. To keep their place as king of the hill, they must constantly push others down. They must police gender boundaries because the precarious place of manhood is predicated on being not-women, not-feminine. In their view, for men to be men, there must be women, the foil.
And trans and nonbinary people challenge that. We upset those boundaries. We show that it can be different. That both the sex binary and the gender binary are social constructs and therefore can be challenged and changed. The king of the hill can be deposed.
Even more: we can stop playing their game altogether.