Public debates about transgender issues are often framed as disagreements over evidence or safety.
In my new article published in the International Journal of Transgender Health, I argue current policy shifts are better understood as part of a recognisable escalation pattern.
I call this “trans eliminationism” – efforts to remove trans people from social, legal or physical existence.
The concept of eliminationism was developed by political scientist Daniel Goldhagen to describe ideologies that frame a targeted group as incompatible with society and therefore as requiring removal.
Trans eliminationism exists on a continuum.
At the less severe end, though still deeply harmful, is social and legal erasure such as restricting healthcare access, prohibiting changes to identity documents, removing gender as a protected category, banning trans content from schools and libraries, and pushing trans youth into conversion practices.
Some of these measures are now occurring in many jurisdictions. For example, across the United States, anti-trans bills continue to be introduced in various states and in New Zealand, the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill is currently open for submissions.
Social and legal eliminationism can create conditions in which more severe forms of harm, including incarceration and physical violence, become easier to justify by weakening legal protections, normalising exclusion, and reducing the social and political costs of further restrictions.
For some of the most marginalised trans people, incarceration and violence are already a lived reality.
How escalation happens
Research on eliminationist movements points to recurring mechanisms through which societies move from foundational prejudice to increasingly severe restrictions and harms.
One is dehumanisation. When a group is portrayed as irrational, defective, immoral or less deserving of dignity, moral inhibitions about harming them are lowered. This makes it easier to justify restrictions on their rights or to dismiss their testimony and experiences.
Another is the artificial construction of a perceived threat. Targeted groups are framed as a danger to children, public safety or social order. This generates the urgency needed for public mobilisation, because measures that would otherwise seem discriminatory can instead be presented as necessary forms of protection.
A third mechanism, specific to trans eliminationism, is what I call biological reductionism.
This involves reducing the complexity of sex and gender to a single biological characteristic and treating it as a person’s essential nature – determining who someone really is, regardless of their lived experience, social role, body or self-understanding.
It is then used to determine how they should be recognised and treated in areas such as healthcare, law, education and sport.
Under this logic, trans people become impossible by definition. This is particularly insidious because it makes what is fundamentally a political manoeuvre appear as merely recognising biological reality.
This is the approach taken in a 2025 US executive order that defined sex by reproductive cells and in the bill currently before the New Zealand parliament.
Human biology is more complex than this framing allows. But the deeper problem is the assumption that biology alone should determine legal status or social recognition in the first place.
Author provided, CC BY-SA
These mechanisms frequently operate together.
Claims based on this biological reductionism are used to cast doubt on trans people’s credibility and self-understanding. This dehumanises trans people and enables artificial threat construction in which trans women are framed as men invading women’s spaces, or trans youth as vulnerable children being manipulated by adults.
Each mechanism strengthens the others, and together they create the conditions under which eliminationist policies appear to be reasonable responses to genuine concerns or danger.
Why this matters
Historical research shows prejudice can be mobilised by political actors seeking support, power or cultural influence. Trans people have become symbols of broader social change.
For some political movements, opposition to trans rights has become a way of expressing resistance to changing norms of gender, sexuality and individual people’s authority over their own bodies.
We currently use the broad term “anti-trans” to describe very different beliefs, policies and political projects. These beliefs and actions do not all carry the same implications for harm.
The concept of trans eliminationism provides language for recognising when political ideas and policy proposals move beyond prejudice and into efforts to reduce or remove trans people’s social, legal or physical existence.
Understanding the mechanisms for escalation helps us recognise how harmful policies are often preceded by changes in the way people talk about a group – shifts in language, assumptions and public narratives that make exclusion or elimination appear reasonable, necessary or even compassionate.
This is why current policies, justified as protective or evidence-based, must instead be understood as part of a documented pattern of eliminationist harm.
History shows eliminationist projects generally emerge gradually, becoming normalised one policy, one justification and one compromise at a time.
But history also shows that escalation is not inevitable. Similar trajectories have been interrupted and reversed, including the rollback of criminalisation laws and expansion of legal rights for lesbian and gay people in many jurisdictions.
Those reversals were built on sustained resistance and community leadership. The same is possible now if harmful patterns are recognised and resisted before they escalate further.
