The Scapegoat Machine: Trans Lives in America’s Political Theater

By Gemma Ortwerth

In this essay I ask what it means when a nation selects a scapegoat, and what that act reveals about its moral fractures. The question becomes: why, in 2025, have trans people been positioned as the conduit through which America attempts to purge its unease?

More than five hundred anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been filed this year, most designed to strip trans youth of public existence. Trump’s second term has intensified these attacks, with federal pushes to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. These measures are not bureaucratic accidents. They are deliberate performances, carried out under a false guise of stabilization, meant to hold together a political order in crisis. When governments tremble, they reach for figures of blame, and once again trans people are among the groups targeted for that role.

René Girard described scapegoating as ritual sacrifice: the channeling of communal unrest into the condemnation of a minority. The United States now enacts this ritual daily. Governors speak of “family values” while dismantling families with trans children. Legislatures frame “parental rights” while prosecuting supportive parents. Media personalities chant “safety” while stirring the conditions for violence. These declarations do not restore order. They sanctify division, making unity possible only through exclusion.

This ritual collides with older questions in political philosophy: what binds us together, and who is deemed worthy of protection? Hobbes argued that people consent to authority to escape chaos, while Locke insisted that rights exist prior to any government. Both visions are betrayed. If Hobbes is correct, the state has decided that trans people fall outside its shield. If Locke is correct, our most basic rights—to live, to exist without persecution—are being stripped. In either case, the social contract, which is supposed to bind society through protection, has been hollowed.

History confirms the pattern. McCarthy’s hearings did not deliver security but spread suspicion, turning neighbors into suspects. During the AIDS crisis, queer communities built networks of care and resistance even as funerals multiplied, while government silence turned stigma into policy and grief into collective memory. Immigrants, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to internment camps to today’s detention centers, have been cast as threats while their labor was exploited to build the nation’s infrastructure. Scapegoating has always promised safety, yet it delivers only abandonment. Today, trans people are written onto the same palimpsest of fear—our existence reduced to shorthand for decline, our bodies treated as fault lines of disorder.

Being that I write as a white trans woman, I must mark the limits of my vantage point. Privilege shields me from the sharpest edge of this violence. Black and Brown trans women face higher rates of incarceration, violence, and poverty. Migrant trans people endure surveillance at borders and the brutality of detention centers. To describe scapegoating honestly, one must recognize its uneven edge. Yet even within my insulated position, I feel the weight of reduction—when healthcare, pronouns, and relationships are turned into political talking points. The mechanism of scapegoating denies complexity. It erases the wholeness of living beings and replaces them with caricature.

Mary Anne Warren once listed traits of personhood—consciousness, reasoning, self-motivation, communication, self-awareness. By these measures, many humans and most animals have been denied recognition. Peter Singer warned that such criteria create hierarchies that justify exclusion. And what of trans people, whose humanity is questioned not because we lack capacities, but because we disrupt rigid categories of sex and gender? Martha Nussbaum answers: justice must extend to every being capable of flourishing. Dignity cannot depend on conformity; it rests on existence itself.

There is sorrow in watching youth grow under siege, and rage in hearing lawmakers criminalize care while ignoring the collapse of healthcare itself. Yet sorrow and rage need not calcify into despair. They can be ground for responsibility. If humans are, as Hobbes imagined, the only creatures capable of constructing morality, then our refusal to extend that morality becomes its deepest corruption. Why should ethical concern end at the boundary of gender identity? Why should it stop at the pulse of a trans life?

This panic is not spontaneous; it is manufactured. Trump, Christian nationalist organizations, and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation choreograph the targeting of trans people. Project 2025 sketches a blueprint for erasure from public life. School boards censor, governors sign, media echo. Each actor plays its part in a theater where cruelty is staged as governance. The aim is not protection, nor truth. It is dominion.

Meanwhile, the true crises persist: rent that swallows wages, medical debt that ruins families, a climate that cracks beneath us. None of these are addressed by banning pronouns in classrooms or prosecuting doctors who provide care. Scapegoating is theft—it steals breath, clarity, and solidarity.

So the question becomes how to resist the script. To cis readers: do not accept the trade of false stability for someone else’s disposability. Do not mistake cruelty for governance. Insist on solutions that meet the genuine wounds of this country.

And to trans readers, I speak as one of us. You are not decline. You are not fracture. You are constellations of survival, carrying light not in spite of chaos but through it. We are not the residue of a failing society. We are reminders that transformation has always been possible, and perhaps it always will be.