Vice President JD Vance suggested this week that transgender people in the U.S. pose a “domestic terrorist threat,” despite a wide body of evidence to the contrary.

On Wednesday, Vance appeared on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime, where he blamed the September 10 assassination of right-wing Christian Nationalist activist and Trump ally Charlie Kirk on “left-wing political radicalization” and speculated that suspected shooter Tyler Robinson was “probably” radicalized by “trans-related stuff.”

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In a clip from the interview posted to X by journalist Ken Klippenstein, Watters asked the vice president whether he considers “the militant transgender movement” to be a “domestic terrorist threat.”

“If you are encouraging people to commit acts of violence against the United States government or against your fellow Americans, absolutely. You’re involved in a terrorist movement,” Vance responded.

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That portion of Watters’ conversation with Vance appears to have been edited out of the full segment posted to Fox News’ website. But on Thursday, Klippenstein published a report in his newsletter which seemed to confirm the Trump administration’s plan to designate trans Americans as “violent extremists.”

According to Klippenstein, two national security officials told him that the administration is discussing a plan in which the FBI would consider transgender suspects as a subset of its “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” threat category. Sources told Klippenstein that the designation would give the administration political and media cover to target trans people.

“They are cynically targeting trans people because the shooter’s lover was trans,” a senior intelligence official reportedly told Klippenstein. “The administration has convinced itself that the Charlie Kirk murder exposes some dark conspiracy.”

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) confirmed during a September 12 press conference that Robinson was romantically involved with his roommate, who is reportedly transgender. Cox and other officials have repeatedly said that the roommate, who has not been named, knew nothing about Robinson’s alleged plan to kill Kirk and has been “incredibly cooperative” with law enforcement during the investigation. Officials are also still investigating a precise motive for the crime.

But that has not stopped the Trump administration and right-wing media from using Kirk’s murder to falsely cast the transgender community as violent extremists. On September 11, far-right, anti-trans podcaster Steven Crowder posted a since-discredited bulletin from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) incorrectly claiming that bullet cartridges found near the Utah Valley University campus, where Kirk was shot and killed at a speaking event, were engraved with wording “expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” Conservative media personality Megyn Kelly amplified the post, writing on X that “‘Trans & anti-fascist’ apparent motivation in Charlie’s murder. IT IS BEYOND TIME TO STOP CODDLING/PERPETUATING THE SPREAD OF THIS DANGEROUS IDEOLOGY.”

As the Los Angeles Times notes, in a September 11 Rumble livestream, Donald Trump Jr. falsely claimed that it “seems like per capita the radical transgender movement has to be the most violent movement anywhere in the world.” Rightwing figures like Matt Walsh, Laura Loomer, Sebastian Gorka, and Elon Musk have all piled on in the week since Kirk’s death, with Loomer explicitly calling for “the Trans movement” to be designated a “terrorist movement” in a September 13 X post.

Journalist Erin Reed also reported that Republican Reps. Nancy Mace (SC) and Ronny Jackson (TX) have publicly called for transgender people to be institutionalized, with Mace telling reporters that “these people are violently ill and should be in a straitjacket with a hard steel lock on it.”

In reality, evidence shows that the MAGA narrative of trans violence is entirely baseless. Both New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen and the LA Times point to data from the Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University, which indicates that less than 1 percent of shootings where four or more people were wounded in public were by trans people, and that over 97 percent of the mass killings were committed by cisgender men. Earlier this month, an analysis of crime data by PolitiFact also showed that the “overwhelming” majority of shootings were perpetrated by cisgender men. And as Polgreen noted, the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law has found that trans people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victims of violent crime.

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