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

III. The Production of the Cisgender State

Foucault’s concept of biopolitics responds to a ballooning in the public conceptualization of bodily autonomy brought on by advances in biomedical sciences, as it relates to the power of the state to regulate and delimit the exercise of such autonomy. As liberal society burgeoned and medical technologies developed, which Mbembe names “technomedicine”(Mbembe, 2019, p. 14), life and the body became radically reframed by an emergent “capacity to voluntarily alter the human species – the absolute form of power” (Mbembe, 2019, p. 14). For Foucault, the human body as a locus for the potentiality of life and identity existed in opposition to the apparatus of the state or what Mbembe may call “the sovereign”. Foucault argues that in response to this ballooning the state must establish new forms of control over the body and new boundaries of delimitation to constrain the body’s bio-potentiality through a restriction on and rationing of biomedical advances (Foucault, 1963). as Foucault argues in “Spectacle of the Scaffold”, an unchallenged status quo cannot be easily maintained with terminal and direct violence against the individual citizen, and must therefore be find indirect means of imposing violence and a destruction of the body(Foucault, 2008). [1] Mbembe challenges Foucault’s assessment in his 2003 essay Necropolitics. Mbembe identifies how Foucault’s presumed modesty on the part of the state fails to be prescient in observing contemporary violence carried out on those relegated to the status of “other” (Mbembe, 2003). Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics both challenges and expands Foucault’s nascent concept of biopolitics, pushing at its contours and simultaneously relating it to contemporary modes of state violence and control. Mbembe argues that sovereign power over is exerted not just over the body itself, but how life and death are in fact directly managed in equal forms, through the permission of allowable death. Necropower thus emerges, as does the concept of the “death world”(Mbembe, 2003).

“I have put forward the notion of necropolitics, or necropower, to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds, that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.”(Mbembe 2019;92)

Mbembe’s framework is rooted in an analysis of imperialist and white-supremacist campaigns of violence waged against the xenophobic spectre “terror”. Mbembe describes the intrinsic link between necropower and the political ideology of the state, which includes the integration of violence and the body politic of the state, into the project of statecraft. This link describes how systems of law and governance are utilized by politicians to systematically dismantle the viability of public life for visibly transgender people. It is the ability of necropolitics to describe ideologically driven applications of the state that makes the concept generative for an analysis of the legal and administrative violence enacted on transgender people in the U.S. Mbembe’s necropolitics enables us to diagnose how legal and governmental attacks on access to transition-related healthcare (TRH) connect to a much broader ideological campaign.

Bans on the means of medical transition are just one prong of a multifaceted attack on gender variant people across a number of spheres of public life(Funakoshi & Raychaudhuri, 2023; Vitali & Marquez, 2024). At both the state and federal levels, policies are being introduced and enacted that seek to systematically push transgender people out of public life, from sports participation (American Psychological Associaton, n.d.; Trump, 2025d), military service(Trump, 2025b), access to care(Dador, 2025; Gaffney, 2025b; Johnson et al., 2025; Muoio, 2025; Roth, 2025), use of public accommodations (Lavietes, 2024; Migdon & Beitsch, 2025; Scolforo, 2024; Yurcaba, 2025a), adolescent’s rights in education (Riedel, 2024; Trump, Donald J, 2025), identification documents(Burga, 2024; Raymond, 2025; Rummler, 2024), to even attacking the very notion of gender-transgression itself in anti-drag laws (J. Jones, 2023; Kruesi, 2024). It is no exaggeration to say that the Second Trump Administration has taken unprecedented and discriminatory actions to not simply target the healthcare rights of TGD people, but fundamentally attack their personhood, their dignity, their ability to participate in public life, and their constitutional rights(Adams, 2025; Cassidy, 2025; A. Chen, 2025; Dawson et al., 2025; Dawson & Kates, 2025; Department of Health and Human Services, 2025; Gaffney, 2025a, 2025b; Geidner, 2025; Incorvaia, 2025b; Jacobs, 2025; Johnson et al., 2025; Levitan, n.d.; Liederman, 2025; Masson & Incorvaia, 2025; Migdon & Beitsch, 2025; Muoio, 2025; News Wires, 2024; Perez & Rabinowitz, n.d.; Rector, 2025; Rights (OCR), 2025; Roth, 2025; Ruetenik, 2025; Saric, 2025; Sherman & Glenza, 2025; Steakin & Flaherty, n.d.; Steenhuysen & Hesson, 2025; D. Synder, personal communication, April 11, 2025; The Dangers of “Gender-Affirming Care” for Minors, 2025; The White  House, 2025; Tin, 2025; Trump, 2025a, 2025b, 2025c, 2025d; Trump, Donald J, 2025; Yurcaba, 2025c). When taken under consideration alongside these other policies that seek to dismantle the possibility of trans-life, it may be challenging to see restrictions on PTRH and the many “concerns” raised about the field of transgender medicine as being separate from broader political attacks.

We hardly need to strain our imaginations to observe how these brutal democracies operate within the contemporary conservative politics in the U.S. On January 20^th, 2025 President Trump attempted to make it the explicit policy of the U.S.(Trump, 2025a). This Executive Order, was merely one many of actions within his first 100 days in office to undercut the rights and personhood of transgender people in spheres of healthcare access, housing, education, military service, and beyond(Trump, 2025a, 2025b, 2025c; Trump, Donald J, 2025). From this single order, a host fundamentally corrosive policies and actions have begun to systematically dismantle the public health infrastructure in the U.S. which supports and advances the health and well-being of transgender people. This can be seen in the continuous disruption of federal funding for research into transition-related healthcare, affirmative approaches to gender variance, and otherwise mundane research that is targeted simply for being trans-inclusive in its design(A. Chen, 2025; Globe, 2025; Reardon, 2025; Ruetenik, 2025; Steakin & Flaherty, n.d.). It can be seen in attempts to erase public health data from government websites that is trans inclusive(Rubin, 2025; Steenhuysen et al., 2025; Steenhuysen & Hesson, 2025). It can be seen in dismantling HIV research (Adams, 2025) or ceasing public health data collection efforts at the CDC(Gaffney, 2025a).

Beyond executive orders this administration has launched countless attacks on the nascent LGBTQI+ public health apparatus include termination of employment, scrubbing trans-inclusive public health data from government websites, gender-identity based surveillance, halting funding for trans-inclusive research, and beyond (Cassidy, 2025; Gaffney, 2025a; Hwang, 2025; Mervis, 2025; Richardson, 2025; Rubin, 2025; Samorodnitsky, 2025; Steakin & Flaherty, n.d.; Steenhuysen et al., 2025; Steenhuysen & Hesson, 2025; Trump, 2025a, 2025b, 2025c). In many ways though, President Trump has taken an implicit pre-existing cultural bias and merely formalized it. He is not alone either and his actions may have emboldened some politicians to become much more overt at the state level. We can see examples of this shift towards explicit erasure in the introduction of legislation and administrative actions in the state of Texas that have put forward the argument that to declare oneself as gender-variant is in essence a form of fraud (Hansford, 2025; McGaughy, 2025; Owen, 2025; Yurcaba, 2025b).

The structures of law and governance are used to regulate and delimit the scope of permissible bodies and embodiments in the U.S., confining the body’s bio-potential plasticity to cissexual modalities of gender. Understood in this way, these policies demonstrate by their nature that rather than being attempts to protect any group from any particular type of treatment, that they are in fact attempts to unmake the possibility of gender-diversity in the U.S. This is most explicit in actions that prevent transgender people from semi-autonomously[2] manipulating this bipotentiality through long-established treatments such as puberty pausing medications (PPM), gender-affirming hormone therapy (PP), and other form of transition-related healthcare (TRH).

This paper proposes that a holistic understanding of laws and political actions that restrict or prohibit pediatric TRH (PTRH) is achievable by contextualizing them within a broader political movement, targeting gender-variance itself across nearly all sectors of public life. Maintaining this sense of scope allows us to prevent policies in any one sector from being isolated to pretextual arguments of “fairness is sports”, “protecting women”, “parental rights”, or “experimental treatments”. It provides a valuable frame that ensures, at all times, we relate any individual action to the broader ideological campaign and avoid ceding the terms of argumentation to the bad-faith invocations of the aforementioned pretextual arguments.

Whereas politicians have certainly become bolder and more brazen in their hostility towards gender variance, this “exposure to death” remains an extrapolation, albeit a potentially compelling one. While there are not yet open calls for the eradication of transgender people, we have certainly come quite close with increasingly more naked declarations of the ends they hope to achieve, “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of the bodies and human populations judged as disposable or redundant”(Mbembe, 2019). At one of the largest American conservative political conferences, CPAC, commentator Michael Knowles openly called for the eradication of transgender people and was met with applause(Goetsch, 2023; Tannehill, 2024). Helen Joyce, a “gender-critical” activist, has openly discussed her hopes that attacks on transgender adolescents will catalyze a complete removal of transgender people from public life (Moore, 2024). It is statements such as these and their like that have that has led organizations like the Lemkin Institute of Genocide Prevention release statements cautioning the public about genocidal ideology at its heart (Lemkin Institute, 2023a, 2023b). While the application of this framework can be reasonably challenged by the plurality of conceptualizations of genocide throughout the world and across time, there is something instructive in this framework that interrogates the existential goals of this conservative movement. Cissexual Necropolitics similarly target vulnerable minority populations for whom they can scapegoat for political ends, blaming expenditure on trans-inclusive research for unrelated inflation of the cost of living.

This method of scapegoating convinces the populace that some designated radical “other”, by their very existence, poses a threat to the normative status quo and to their sense of security, enacting what Mbembe names the “state of terror” (Mbembe, 2003).