Part I. Cissexual Necropolitics: The Political Project to Unmake Trans Life

“Neoliberal capitalism has left in its wake a multitude of destroyed subjects, many of whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be one of continuous exposure to violence and existential threat. “In the streetfight that politics will become, reason will not matter. Nor will facts.” (Mbembe, 2019)

I.   Necropower and Cissexual Statecraft

The United States (U.S.) maintains an established gender paradigm that regards cisgender and sex-determinist (hereafter referred to as cissexual) embodiments as the inherent and natural states of gender and sex. These normative conceptions of sex and gender have become deeply woven into a political framework that functions as a foundation for “American” gender politics, to the extent that this artifice may be imperceptible. This framing has transformed the concept of cissexuality into the supposed “natural” state of sex and gender. Consequently, our cultural narrative now positions the emergence of gender variance as a deviation or aberration.

Yet research into the gender-development and cognition of transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) adolescents suggests that TGD people’s identities are non-pathological and show similar stability and veracity as the identities of cisgender people (American Psychological Associaton, 2024; deMayo et al., 2025; K. R. Olson et al., 2015; K. R. Olson & Gülgöz, 2018). And many experts increasingly argue that sex exists along a varied spectrum, rather than a rigid and separate binary of male or female (Ainsworth, 2018; Barnhart, 2024; Clancy et al., 2024; Kralick, 2018; Marinus & Cense, 2024; Rehmann-Sutter et al., n.d.-a). International historical accounts demonstrate that the TGD people have existed for many decades and across many cultures (Gill-Peterson, 2018; Ingelhart, 2024; Utah Department of Health and Human Services, 2025). [SM1] This all undermines the notion that sexual and gender variance is not a natural aspect of human identity development.

In the U.S., this historical context is less legible, in part because of the deleterious effects of settler colonialism and the American eugenics movement (Snorton, 2017). While the dominant cultural imaginary of eugenics is one of a shameful and distant period of history, in the present day, multiple projects of eugenics still operate. Among them are escalations in attempts, by policy-makers, to deploy the tools and weapons of statecraft and public policy to make TGD lives unlivable in the U.S. This essay seeks to intervene on this moment, identifying how contemporary U.S. policy seeks to enact a violent erasure of TGD people from public life.

The socio-political concept of the “cisgender state” has previously been articulated by historian and scholar Jules Gil-Peterson (Gill-Peterson 2021). Gill-Peterson’s deployment of the term emerges from her assessment of how the ongoing project of statecraft in the U.S. is one that seeks to codify artificial and contrived categories of sex and gender that make impossible the existence of TGD people.  Gill-Peterson’s analysis gives a name to a historical bias that has been at the very core of the matrix of contemporary gendered body politics in the U.S.

I will iterate slightly on Gill-Peterson’s diagnosis of American cisnormativity, describing this broad apparatus as the “cissexual state”. This term, which describes political structures and attitudes that seek to erase the existence of TGD and intersex people in order to maintain a coherently “cissexual” body politic in the U.S. will serve as the foundation for an analysis of the political attacks across multiple aspects of public and private life that emerge from the many institutions of the cissexual state. This assessment” will be brought to bear alongside post-modern philosophical frameworks Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and to a lesser extent to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. The deployment of these frameworks will serve as the theoretical tools with which this essay seeks to deconstruct and analyze the existential project at the heart of a decentralized but coordinated campaign of policies and political actions in the U.S. whose objectives is to enforce a cissexual set of boundaries for human embodiment.

Conceived of initially in a focused article by Cameroonian philosopher and scholar Achilles Mbembe, the concept of necropolitics considers how imperialistic power and the carceral mindsets manifest expressions of what he names “necropower”,“the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death” (Mbembe, 2003). This  article was subsequently integrated into a more expansive publication under the same name (Mbembe, 2019). This second publication robustly expanded on how necropolitical power could more diversely be applied to the many imperialist acts of violence by the U.S., under apartheid, and under military occupations. While Mbembe’s work contemplates important international politics, this essay will attempt, imperfectly but perhaps productively, to apply lessons from Mbembe’s necropolitics to the state of anti-trans political animus in the U.S.

Through the application of Mbembe’s theory, we can describe how political actions by the state are not merely public health regulations but represent a willful exposure to the risk of death. Such policy-making and statecraft do not simply promote cissexuality but overtly undermine the viability of life for those whose identities and embodiments exist beyond the cissexual boundaries of the state. Mbembe may call such a capacity for the existential violence of the state as “the brutality of democracies”(Mbembe, 2019).

This form of brutality is helpful to understand how violence can be enacted through mundane manipulations of government levers of power. Such democratic processes as notice-and-comment or the publication of an enforcement memo catalyze tangible actions that expose TGD people to a risk of death. Certainly, transgender people are subjected to more overt and explicit forms of violence and victimization (Dowd, 2021; Johns et al., 2019, 2019; Newcomb et al., 2020; Snorton & Haritaworn, 2022; Suarez, 2024; Walters et al., 2020), but it is beneficial to recognize that violence may be measured beyond forms of violence that are directly interpersonal or the result of an overtly violence physical act such an assault, a stabbing, a gunshot, etc. Violence can be enacted through wholly indirect means by bringing about or facilitating conditions that are deleterious or harmful in an indirect though traceable way. This essay shall analyze how, through bureaucratic tools of policy and regulation at both the state and federal levels, the U.S. has enacted prejudiced policies with violent consequences for transgender and gender-diverse people in the U.S.

This essay brings particular attention to the collection of these political attacks that target both adult and pediatric access to transition-related healthcare or “medical transition”. Such medical care and patients’ ability to exercise bodily autonomy (albeit a highly mediated form) through this care, has been a particular point of focus for political attack over the last five years, particularly for transgender adolescents(Dawson & Kates, n.d., 2025). Utilizing the philosophical framework of Mbembe’s necropolitics and to a lesser extent Foucault’s biopolitics and, this paper will analyze the connections between bans on pediatric transition-related healthcare (PTRH) and a political movement. Historians and scholars Snorton and Haritaworn have rigorously applied this lens to the ongoing epidemic of anti-transgender violence, which asymmetrically victimizes transgender communities of color (Snorton & Haritaworn, 2022). Others such as Padilla and Rodríguez-Madera have diligently applied the works of Mbembe to the violence enacted on transfeminine people in Puerto Rico(Padilla & Rodríguez-Madera, 2021). This paper contributes to the articulation of a transgender necropolitics by considering how this conceptual framework may be useful in assessing emergent forms of political and legal violence enacted on transgender people in the U.S.