If Gun Ownership Is a Right, Trans People Have It Too

This article is a guest post by Ayman Eckford.

What does security mean when you are part of a group that is hated by the leader or ruling party of your country? It’s a question persecuted minorities have been asking themselves for generations, and it’s one many trans people in the United States have been asking themselves of late. Amid the executive and legislative crusade against trans people waged by the Republican Party, not to mention the sharp decline in public acceptance and rise in hostility, many trans people have begun to feel that they can no longer depend on the state or social norms to ensure their safety. In fact, a growing number of trans people are taking self-defense into their own hands. But what happens when the state denies you even that right?

A March 2025 study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law shows that concerns about personal safety are pushing trans people to take proactive measures to protect themselves and their families. The study found that “43 percent of participants were considering pursuing self-defense classes, with almost 9 percent already having done this,” while “Over one-third of participants (37 percent) were considering buying a gun and/or learning how to use a gun, with 13 percent already having done so.” Yet there are some on the political right — including many in positions of real power and influence — who would make an utter mockery of their own values (and the law) by singling out trans people to ban them from owning firearms.

Carrying guns is one of the most culturally American things a person can do. Perhaps this is easier to understand from the outside. As someone born in Eastern Europe, America has always seemed like a country where the laws around carrying weapons were unusually liberal, but just as much a part of the culture as Western movies, Coca-Cola, or Disney. So it’s not surprising that even though many trans people lean left politically and support gun control, when things become dangerous, they, like most Americans, turn to buying guns.

But despite the Second Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” in September 2025, senior Justice Department officials in the Trump administration were considering proposals to restrict the right of transgender people to own firearms. The particular angle the DOJ floated, according to two officials familiar with the matter, was “to ensure that mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable and unwell.”

This followed a Minneapolis church shooting where the suspected shooter was a transgender woman, even though all indications suggested that anti-religious resentment, not gender identity, motivated the shooting. But the discourse around banning trans gun ownership had been building for some months, fueled online by right-wing narratives highlighting high-profile shootings in which the assailants or alleged assailants were trans and connecting trans people to an “epidemic” of violence. Just a month before his death, conservative activist Charlie Kirk called for banning trans people from owning guns, posting: “If you are crazy enough to hormonally and surgically ‘change your sex,’ you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s contribution was to wonder aloud if the true culprit was psychiatric medication such as the SSRIs that some trans people were prescribed.

While no opinion polling has been done specifically asking the public whether trans people should be barred from owning firearms, there’s reason to suspect that this view may be shared by a substantial portion of society, especially as Trump’s DOJ has framed it. A 2023 Pew survey found that 88 percent of US adults supported policies that prevent people with mental illnesses from owning guns, and a separate poll from September 2025 found that 42 percent of respondents considered trans to be a form of mental illness. At the same time, the Public Religion Research Institute found in 2025 that 71 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: “transgender people deserve the same rights and protections as other Americans.”

To set the record straight, there is no correlation between being trans and being violent. According to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun violence in the US, of the 5,748 mass shootings between 2013 and mid-September 2025, just five shooters have been confirmed as trans. If we wanted to keep guns out of the hands of the people who commit the most mass shootings, we would have to prohibit all white cisgender men from carrying weapons. That is obviously absurd. Of course, when Kirk was killed, right-wing figures speculated that his killer was transgender and argued that trans people should be denied gun rights. When it turned out that the perpetrator was, as usual, a cis man, no one called for disarming cisgender men. It’s clear that this is not about any specific safety threat posed by trans people, but about discrimination and stereotypes.

America has a long history of denying minorities the right to bear arms. In 1857, the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision ruled that black people could not be recognized as citizens, and therefore were denied the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Before the Holocaust, German Jews were disarmed beginning in 1938, first locally, then across the country. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin also stripped the Chechen and Ingush peoples of their weapons — despite their long-standing tradition of carrying them — before committing genocide against these nations, deporting them from their homelands in 1944, and erasing their presence from historical archives and the culture.

We can see a clear pattern: the most severe forms of tyranny and oppression often involve taking away the rights of disfavored groups to protect themselves. In the case of trans people in the United States, they have already been recently denied the right to serve in the military, so the politics of making them helpless is obvious, as well as the politics of their alienation.

The Trump administration has since backed away from its proposal to ban trans gun ownership. But the fact that it was ever on the table, and that it has such vocal support among many on the right, has been eye-opening for trans people. “It’s not about gun control. It’s about removing trans people’s autonomy,” one trans person told the New Yorker. Another said that having a gun is a “simple necessity” considering harassment against trans people on the street.

As a trans autistic person who has lived in Russia, I know this too well. In Russia, you can be attacked just for being different. This is why some LGBT people carry knives in their pockets. It is much harder to buy arms in Russia, but if that hadn’t been the case, many LGBT folks would have carried them. In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, even more Russians bought weapons illegally simply because the state could not protect them. Of course, the safer the country, the less people feel they need to carry weapons. When I moved to the UK, I felt safe on the streets for the first time. The urge to carry a knife disappeared, as did the hypervigilance I had carried for years.

There is no link between being violent and being trans, bi, or gay. But there is a clear link between being discriminated against and wanting to protect yourself. Taking unconstitutional and anti-American measures to single out and deny firearms to trans people under the guise of “protecting society” isn’t just the hypocrisy of all hypocrisies among so-called conservatives; it serves to place a bigger target on the backs of an already hated and vulnerable group.

See also: “Anti-Trans Activists are Unprincipled and Depraved”

Share

Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, @jamie-paul.bsky.social on Bluesky, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com. Cover image generated by ChatGPT.