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

Part IV. The Administrative Deathworld.

A common question being asked by trans people and their loved ones more and ore often every day under this administration is the question of place and belonging. “Do I belong here?” “Can I safely stay here?” Both at the state and federal levels, trans people and their families have long been forced into positions of considering if they must flee their home in order to retain not just their healthcare, not just their civil rights, but their dignity and humanity(Allen, 2025; James et al., 2024; Lang, 2025a; McNeill, 2025; Rector, 2025). Mbembe articulates how this manipulation and disallowance related to belong is a function of necropolitics. He describes the capacity of the state to exile its other “by getting them to leave the country willingly or, when need be, by deporting them en masses.”(Mbembe , 2019, p.18) While the administration has not yet begun mass deportation of trans people, such actions are not beyond the scope of actions this administration may take. We have seen the administration has a taste for deporting people in this country for all many of actions, including simply expressing view the administration deems to be dangerous (Makdisi, 2025; Zhang, 2025).

The bureaucratization of state violence is further supported by the ideas articulated within the works of Hannah Arendt – particularly here concept of the “Banality of Evil”(Arendt, 2006). In her assessments and recounting of the horrors enacted by detached bureaucrats of the Third Reich, Arendt crafts an account that deftly links the complicity of those entrenched in abstracted operations of the state with violent outcomes. Through this lens death and violence emerge from within the mundane architecture and operations of governmental structures. Law is therefore an instrument of violence, a means to, as Mbembe says “expose to death”, which does not rely on direct acts of conventional violence, but instead weaponizes the delimiting power that law has over medicine.

Never has this been more true than after a series of executive orders were issued by President Donald Trump that sought to make explicit, this implicit character of the U.S.(Trump, 2025a, 2025b, 2025c, 2025d; Trump, Donald J, 2025). While lacking the durable force of law these orders are clear directions by the federal government, to make it formal state policy to bring about the erasure of gender-variant people from public life. Such direct administrative attacks emerge alongside further administrative attacks on the nascent LGBTQI+ public health infrastructure (Adams, 2025; A. Chen, 2025; Gaffney, 2025a; Richardson, 2025; Trump, 2025c, 2025b; Wadman & Kaiser, 2025). These attacks on the nascent infrastructure of LGBTQI+ public health can be understood as another prong of cissexual Necropolitics, undercutting and choking off a field of research and scientific pursuit that seeks to improve the field of transgender medicine. In the short time since this order’s publication, countless forms of research and public health data related to transgender and intersex people and their experiences have been scrubbed from the internet or have been subjected to retraction at the urging of the administration(Steenhuysen et al., 2025; Steenhuysen & Hesson, 2025; Wu, 2025). It seems to be the objective of the administration to destroy scientific evidence intended to improve transgender and intersex people’s health while at the same time impeding the production of such data in the future (Steakin & Flaherty, n.d.). It should be noted though, that transgender medicine is only one of many attacks on public health and the biomedical sciences in the U.S.(Adams, 2025; Incorvaia, 2025a; Jewett et al., 2025; Jewett & Stolberg, 2024; Marquez & Bush, 2025; Mervis, 2025; National Institutes of Health, 2025; Reynolds, n.d.). The administration is not content with merely choking off this the production of affirming research into transgender health, but it has also issued explicit directives to invest federal resources into researching pseudoscientific etiological models of gender-variance such as “rapid onset gender dysphoria”(Trump, 2025c).

How can we understand these actions in totality? With the right hand the administration is undermining future production of and destroying contemporary records of the efficacy of TRH. With the left hand they catalyze and push for the development of an alternative framework which is inherent suspicious of and hostile towards the very notion of gender-variance. When you view these two moves in the broader context of state and federal attacks on TRH and the very phenomena of gender-variance itself, one may struggle to see anything other than a conservative ideological project that seeks to erase trans people. It is no surprise that already, comparisons are being drawn between these actions and other historical events that involved the politically-motivated destruction of scientific knowledge about transgender and intersex people(Beccia, 2025; Samorodnitsky, 2025). Certainly, other ethicists have warned of the historical proximity that bans on TRH hold to the fascist project of regimes like the Third Reich(Ashley, Florence, 2024).

In many ways this underlying principle is central to the supposedly distant history of the eugenics movement. Where the two biopolitical issues find overlap is that in both cases, the hegemonic class made its own determinations about the capacity and personhood of others and based on these assumptions, inflicted dangerous forms of control over the bodies of those whom they deemed to lack the necessary capacity to make decisions for themselves. The ability of social elites to make paternalistic decisions about what forms of bodily autonomy social minorities can and cannot benefit from is the core principle at issue is some of history’s greatest human rights violations.

The progression of gender-restrictive policies in the U.S. over the last 5+ years are not unprecedented. As Ashley has articulated (and I will paraphrase vis-à-vis Mbembe) the rationed access to various technomedicines according to an ideological matrix of statecraft was core to the fascist project of the Third Reich(Ashley, Florence, 2024). Ashley aptly draw clear ideological and political connections between the biopolitical project of the Nazis and that of contemporary attacks on PTRH. As this essay has endeavored to show, the character of emergent restrictions on the rights of transgender people and those promised by the incoming administration do not arise in isolation to one another. They are the deliberate and coordinated actions of an ideological movement set on cementing the power of the cissexual state.

I put forward this analysis with caution though. Their foundational principles are the same, but their expression and manifestations vary greatly. Transgender people do not experience the same biopolitical violations and delimitations that Black Americans historically have been subjected to by previous eugenics movements. Most transgender people do not experience the same dehumanization and loss of autonomy that is common for people who are incarcerated. There is a risk of trivializing or commodifying the experiences and histories of other marginalized populations in making these comparisons indelicately or too flatly. What I wish to draw alarm to is how the core principle similarities show the existential threat posed by the nascent biopolitical movement against gender-variance. I also wish to draw attention to how these similarities should be of concern as they demonstrate the re-emergence and escalation of previous conservative ideologically driven biopolitical movements by enabling and/or ignoring the attacks on trans adolescents’ bodily autonomy.

III. (Trans) Futures

It is very likely that in the time between the submission and publication of this article, many new expressions of cissexual biopower will have emerged. With a republican trifecta and a majority conservative Supreme Court, we can expect the cissexual state’s manifestation to outstrip the assessment of this writing. At the time of publication, trans people’s ability to participate freely and authentically in public life will look very different from where the author sits temporally during the writing of this essay. Will the enforcement of a cissexual state produce an epidemic of suicides and suffering? This is the question that lies at the end of a necropolitical argument: given what we know about the risks of suicidality that come from inaccessibility of TRH, do these policies invite this wave of suicides? These policies are neither isolated nor disconnected. They are at best decentralized. But they all have a single goal end result they are intended to produce – a world in which transgender people do not exist in public life. These policies are by no means isolated, but represent a decentralized effort by the far-right to produce a world in which it is functionally impossible to be trans and participate in public life. In this way, to exist within the public sphere, to navigate the world, one must embody a degree of sublimation or sedition.

One must exist as what Mbembe describes as “the walking dead” (Mbembe, 2003, 2019), embodying life, though just barely – a form of life that is reduced to a form of biological persistence but absent of authenticity. The alternative to this life are suicide, which as Mbembe describes in his notion of the suicide bomber, may embody a radical rejection of the aggressor’s power and a devotion of the body and of life as offering to the cause(Mbembe, 2003, 2019). However, there is callousness in this concept, and a tragedy. While philosophically generative for how we may position suicide as a historically rooted act of rebellion, it fails to fully grapple the humanity and loss. Suicide may be rebellious in some form, but it is devastating. It is defined by a systemic failure of the world around the individual to create a set of conditions conducive to life for that individual or for a group of individuals.

Even radical suicide is a tragedy and a very real one that should never be taken abstractly. It is the severing and denial of possibility and potentiality and it is always avoidable. The remaining alternative is the embodiment of sedition wherein one’s gender transgressive existence persists radically against the foreclosure and delimitation of the cissexual state. Such a path is truly radical in nature although conditional and itself exposes oneself to a vulnerability to the state, which has never shied away from exercising its totalizing power to quash dissent and transgression of its values(AFP, 2025; Donegan, 2025; Makdisi, 2025; Steiner, 2025; Zhang, 2025).