The Billion-Dollar Trans Panic

Happy Trans Visibility Day! A former Chabad Hasid and a lawyer explain why you hear so much hate about this lovely 1% of the population.

There are more left-handed people in America than there are transgender people. More people named John. Maybe even more left-handed Johns.

Trans folks 13 and over make up roughly 1% of the U.S. population — about 2.8 million people — and yet American politics has organized itself around their existence as if they were the primary threat facing the republic, ranking somewhere above climate change, wealth inequality, and not conquering Greenland combined.

In 2026, 740 anti-trans bills are under consideration across 42 states—a seventh consecutive record year.

Today is Trans Day of Visibility. Which is a good day to talk about trans rights and to share the conversation above with you, a conversation I think anyone who cares about fairness in America will appreciate. But we have to wonder why the right is so insistent that the other 364 days in the year are Trans Days of Hate, targeting this minuscule population who asks nothing more than the freedom to be themselves. The overwhelming desire to punish trans people even seemed to baffle Donald Trump, as he noted that in his first run for president, trans rights hardly got his fans riled.

The answer is as simple as it is gross.

Money. Billions of it.

Trump himself let the cynicism slip in a 2023 campaign speech. After the crowd went wild over trans-bashing, he marveled at his own product

“Talking about cutting taxes, people go like that. You’re talking about transgender, and everyone goes crazy, “ he said. “Who would’ve thought, five years ago, you didn’t know what it was.”

He wasn’t describing a deep, abiding conviction about strangers’ genitalia that he or anyone else has. Because we, unlike Elissa Slotkin, know most people are persuadable and could be led to welcome or despise trans people with enough prodding. We know none of this is organic or had to be. If you think about it, it’s as ridiculous as organizing your life around hating people named John.

Trump was describing a demand he didn’t build, but one he seized upon after someone else provided the seed capital.

Alejandra Caraballo is a civil rights attorney, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, and one of the most prominent trans voices in America. Elad Nehorai is a progressive activist, a writer, and the host of Here We Come. Their recent conversation offers some of the clearest thinking I’ve heard on what is actually happening to trans people in America right now, and why.

Nehorai framed it plainly at the top: “I don’t think many people really understand the pain and the fear that’s happening in the trans community in America right now.”

You know he is right.

And the reason we can’t understand because some of the richest and worst people ever to live have made it miserable, either out of strategy, as Republicans have sought to move the political conversation about reproductive rights to a gender-related issue more favorable to scapegoating, and a freakish sense of hatred, the motivation of the two most influential transphobes alive—Elon Musk and JK Rowling.

The Hate Machine They Bought/Built

The right didn’t win the culture war on trans people. They purchased it. Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a Hate Machine that welcomed banned Nazis back and punished users not for hateful transphobia but for using the term cis to show disdain for anyone who uses language that respects trans rights.

As Caraballo describes it, “you could explain so much of the retreat on trans rights in the last three or four years among liberals and Democrats to Twitter because of the disappearance of trans voices.” She left the platform because staying on it was a matter of physical safety. She has a folder in her email labeled “bomb threats.” Hundreds of them. Since she left, the threats stopped.

David Ellison — son of Trump mega-donor Larry Ellison — bought Paramount, merged it with Skydance, and installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. His company is now pursuing an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which would hand him CNN. JK Rowling has spent tens of millions of dollars in the UK funding lawfare against trans rights. The Uline family bankrolled a ballot initiative in Maine. Caraballo’s accounting: “We have been outspent by over a billion dollars. They’re buying entire media institutions to turn them into anti-trans propaganda organs.”

A billion dollars, and that’s before counting the $44 billion Musk spent to buy the platform he turned into the delivery system. He didn’t do it to win an argument. He did it to silence the clearest voices for trans rights and sic neo-nazis on the rest.

Two Weeks, 1,700 People

But money isn’t abstract, not for most people. In Kansas, 1,700 trans people woke up one morning to find their driver’s licenses invalidated.

Senate Bill 244 passed after the Republican supermajority used a “gut and go” maneuver to bypass Senate hearings and public debate entirely, then overrode Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto. Caraballo described how it worked: “They fast-tracked this and passed it. Basically, they got it passed in two days.” The veto override took two more weeks. Start to finish, a person’s legal right to exist in public life was erased on an emergency posture, with no grace period. Many of those 1,700 people can no longer legally drive to the DMV to fix it without risking arrest for driving on a suspended license, a misdemeanor that carries up to six months in jail.

The law also authorizes any citizen who suspects a trans person of using the “wrong” restroom in a government building to sue them for $1,000 in damages. The ACLU filed suit the same day it took effect.

Families have moved from Alabama to New York, from Arkansas to Connecticut, for access to healthcare, only to find the door shutting again. Caraballo described hearing from families for whom a provider stopping services was “their second or third time.” Hospitals that provide gender-affirming care for trans youth keep shutting down that care.

“The people with the money and the power and the resources to fight back are the biggest cowards, “ Caraballo said. “They’re the ones who are like, we don’t want to deal with this. We don’t want to have to deal with filing lawsuits against the federal government.”

The Gateway Drug

Caraballo testified before Congress in December 2022 on the ties between white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ extremism. Her 25-page written testimony documented how antisemitic conspiracy theories and transphobia share the same infrastructure: the same forums, the same memes, the same obsessive posting.

The Venn diagram of people most virulently anti-trans and most virulently antisemitic is, in her description, “essentially a circle.” Total eclipse of the bigots.

“It’s such a gateway drug to broader far-right radicalization,” she said.

The social permission is the on-ramp: transphobia remains the one hatred still acceptable in polite company, which means the radicalization infrastructure can recruit through it before moving people further down the pipeline.

Nehorai, who spent years as an activist in the Hasidic community working on behalf of abuse survivors, pushed on something that rarely gets named: the structural asymmetry of whose suffering counts as evidence. “When you are part of a targeted minority group, your power is not only limited by society,” he said. “It’s limited in the ability that even your suffering can serve as a symbol of injustice.”

It takes someone from outside the group to make the pain clear to people with the luxury of not seeing it. The billionaires funding the panic weaponize that gap and put their massive resources into keeping it open.

Long-Term Optimist, Short-Term Survivor

It’s hard to think of any analogy for the way trans people have been so suddenly and overwhelmingly attacked for such obvious reasons.

The rapid legal dehumanization rhymes with the early Nazi targeting of Jews. But that spark took centuries of antisemitism as kindling. Sure, the anti-trans campaign took decades of misogyny and gender policing that were already baked into American law and culture. Yet, to me, the sudden legislative and propaganda focus on this tiny group only parallels how racial anxiety about Barack Obama’s election transmuted into massive new restrictions on voting and birtherism, which gave us Donald Trump.

Regardless, it’s impossible to comprehend what this focus feels like on a personal level, for someone who has devoted her life to defending the rights of LGBTQ people.

Caraballo remains clear-eyed about what her generation of trans people may be facing. “We’re going to be locked into this for the rest of our lives. We have to just survive so that the next generation can make more progress.” The generation in Paris Is Burning laid the groundwork they never stood on. She got a decade of what they built. We all did.

The bomb threats in her inbox confirm what the billion dollars is actually buying: not persuasion, but exhaustion. Make visibility dangerous enough, and people stop being visible. Make solidarity expensive enough, and people stop being allies.

But Caraballo can’t stop because she’s thinking about the future, the one thing even billions and billions of dollars can’t guarantee. And for her, and everyone suffering the brunt of this strategic hate, we—the other 99%—must step up and say, "Fix your hearts or die.”

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