A Transgender Writer Reads NSPM-7: I’m in a Category With ISIS
The strategy targets me.
The 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy identifies three principal categories of terrorist threats. Drug cartels. ISIS and al-Qaeda. And “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”
I am a transgender writer. The strategy targets me.
I should say plainly what I mean by that. I have not joined a cell. I have not coordinated with Antifa. I have not committed an act of violence and do not plan to. I am a graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence at a university in South Dakota. I support the Second Amendment as a matter of constitutional principle and am personally afraid of guns. I write articles about transgender identity, biological sex, and policy questions around access to spaces such as restrooms, prisons, and rape crisis centers. I write fiction. I am 60 years old.
The 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy says that people like me are a Tier 3 priority for federal counterterrorism authorities. The document, signed by President Trump and rolled out on May 6 by Senior Director for Counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka, pledges that the federal government will “ prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization” of groups whose ideology is “radically pro-transgender” and will “use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
Map. Identify. Cripple. Neutralize. The verbs are the policy.
I have been reading this strategy and the documents that precede it for the past week. What follows is what I have found.
The documentary chain
The 2026 strategy did not arrive without warning. It is the third document in a chain that begins on September 22, 2025, when the President issued an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later, on September 25, came National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.
NSPM-7 identifies the “common threads animating this violent conduct” as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
It directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices to investigate persons who recruit or radicalize others for political violence. It authorizes investigations of “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations” that aid and abet such persons.
On December 4, 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an implementing memorandum directing federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to prioritize “Antifa-aligned extremists” whose “animating principle is adherence to the types of extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.” The Bondi memorandum orders the FBI to establish a cash reward system for information leading to the identification and arrest of “individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations” promoting “radical gender ideology.”
That last sentence is worth reading a second time. The federal government has offered cash to citizens for naming the leaders of organizations that advance pro-transgender views.
The FY 2027 FBI budget request, reported by Ken Klippenstein and corroborated by Washington Blade, requests $166 million for an NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center staffed by personnel from ten federal agencies. The center’s remit includes “proactive” internet surveillance of people opposed to “traditional American views.” The FBI salaries-and-expenses line would rise by $1.9 billion. The budget cites a 197% year-over-year rise in FBI arrests since January 20, 2026.
The 2026 strategy is what the chain produced. It is a 16-page document that reorders U.S. counterterrorism priorities for the first time since the post-9/11 reorientation, with the third pillar bundling left-wing extremists, anarchists, anti-fascists, and (a separately enumerated subcategory) people described as “radically pro-transgender.”
The evidence inversion
Here is what makes the framework difficult to defend on its own stated terms. The 2026 strategy promises that its operations will be “executed apolitically and founded upon reality-based threat assessments.” So let us look at what reality-based threat assessment actually shows.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Government Accountability Office, the University of Maryland START Center, the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s joint threat assessment all converge on the same finding: right-wing terrorism has been the dominant source of ideologically motivated deaths in the United States since 2001.
PBS, summarizing the federal data, reports the figure at approximately 75% to 80% of domestic-terrorism deaths. Over the past decade, CSIS attributes 112 victim fatalities to right-wing terrorist attacks, 82 to jihadist attacks, and 13 to left-wing attacks.
Left-wing terrorism has risen from a very low base since 2016. CSIS counted five left-wing incidents through July 2025, excluding the Charlie Kirk assassination. If that rate continues, 2025 would set a 30-year record and still amount to fewer than ten left-wing terrorist incidents in a calendar year. Researchers at Just Security have contested the CSIS sampling, noting that the data omits incidents like the August 2025 Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minnesota, an anti-LGBTQ plot to attack a Texas pride parade, and an attack on a Michigan Mormon congregation. The methodological dispute is real. Even on the most aggressive reading of left-wing 2025 incidents, the total stays a small fraction of total terrorist incidents and an even smaller fraction of fatalities.
What does any of that have to do with transgender people?
The Gun Violence Archive tracked approximately 5,748 mass shootings in the United States between January 1, 2013, and September 15, 2025. Five of those attackers were transgender. That works out to 0.087% of incidents. The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University, using the narrower mass-shooting definition (four or more killed in a public place, unrelated to gang or criminal-economy activity), recorded 201 mass shootings between 1966 and 2025. A transgender perpetrator committed one.
Even with the most expansive count after the 2025 Annunciation shooting, transgender shooters stay well under 2% of mass-shooting perpetrators, less than or roughly equal to the transgender share of the adult population. Ohio State’s Laura Dugan, Columbia’s Ragy Girgis, Georgia State’s Mia Bloom, and the University of Victoria’s Aaron Devor are uniform in their assessment: trans people are underrepresented, not overrepresented, as mass shooters.
No dataset (CSIS, START, ADL, GWU Program on Extremism, RAND, GAO, FBI) attributes a coordinated campaign of political violence to transgender activists or pro-transgender advocacy organizations. The 2026 strategy itself names no such organization.
What the data does establish, and establishes overwhelmingly, is the inverse: transgender Americans are the victims of bias-motivated violence at rates that have risen rather than fallen. The FBI’s 2023 hate-crime statistics recorded 2,402 single-bias incidents motivated by sexual orientation and 547 motivated by gender identity, of which 401 were anti-transgender. More than one in five hate-crime incidents in 2023 were motivated by anti-LGBTQ bias.
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation has tracked at least 399 fatal anti-trans violence victims since 2013. Seventy percent of those victims were Black. Seventy-five percent were under 35. Approximately 70% were killed with firearms. GLAAD’s ALERT Desk tracked 932 anti-LGBTQ incidents in the year ending May 2025. More than half of them targeted transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
A counterterrorism framework that names a category of citizens as a Tier 3 threat when the empirical record shows that category to be far more victimized than violent is not a reality-based threat assessment. It is an inversion. The strategy treats victims as the threat and ignores the actual sources of the violence, as its own preamble cites.
