10 Years of Trump, Part II: The Right, Fertility, and Transgender People

It’s trans people today, but the oppressor will come for anyone and everyone seen as an obstacle to their mission.

This article originally ran on March 26, 2026 in Under the Desk News as “10 Years of Trump: The Right, Fertility & Transgender People, Part Two.” TransLash is co-publishing this piece with permission from the platform and the author. This article has been lightly copyedited, but no changes have been made to the original content. 

Content Warning: This article mentions sexual assault, rape, and includes discussion of anti-transgender and white supremacist topics.

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As we discovered in part one of this retrospective, evangelical Christian extremists are known as Dominionists, who “believe that they’re the rulers of our collective governance, society, and culture. LGBTQ+ people (or anything and anyone seen as a DEI initiative) represent the antipathy of that mandate.”

With appalling power, this sector of the religious right in supposed crisis used Trump as an “avatar” from 2016 (probably before then) onward, but Trump’s own ties to power unfurl another ligament for unchecked and authoritarian control.

During the 2016 campaign trail, so much about Trump’s personal life pooled out into the open — particularly how he talked and behaved toward women.

It is widely known that the current president has allegations of sexual abuse running since the 1970s, according to The 19th News.

By September of 2016, a court case was filed: Jane Doe v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein. In the case, the plaintiff alleged that the defendants raped her and assaulted her, among other horrific acts against her will, at a series of parties in the summer of 1994.

But for some reason, and until this day, transgender people continue to be labeled as threatening to women’s safety, despite the legacy of elites like Trump and Epstein.

If you are asking, “how could this be?” then we need to look furthermore at the concocted controversies that brought us to this present moment.

To understand these last 10 years of Trumpism is to look beyond it; to survey the overlaps and expanded culture in and outside of the right’s politics, white supremacy, and its patriarchal ties that work within Dominionism’s domain. This expanded culture looks a lot like taking control over women, reproduction, and conversations on fertility. However, often, in order to do that, it is necessary to create a common enemy. That public enemy, galvanized by the right, is transgender people.

“I think that this discussion about gender is really at the center of the right wing movement. You’re seeing it pop up in so many different parts of the right and you know how to essentially create a maximally misogynist political movement without alienating women voters,” Madeline Peltz, a journalist who covers the right, told Under the Desk News (UTDN).

Peltz, formerly from Media Matters for America, just released a documentary with More Perfect Union — “We Found The REAL Reason Gen Z Wants To Be Tradwives” — and is writing a book about the future of right-wing media.

In Peltz’s research for her book, she historically sees that some of the tradwife culture emerged in tandem with the anti-trans sentiment in the mid 2010s. Around that time, there was the rise of media outlets like The Daily Wire, or as Peltz calls it, “influencer-forward digital news outlets pioneering personality-driven influence through social media.” On these outlets, people like right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing (The Daily Wire’s co-founder) made a name for themselves by refusing to honor people’s gender pronouns.

Bathrooms, in 2015-2016, much like sports today, were at the epicenter of the argument to keep “girls and women safe.” And outlets like The Daily Wire were popularizing this rage-bait-infused concept, and the mainstream caught on.

One 2015 article in The Atlantic, “How Bathroom Fears Conquered Transgender Rights in Houston” by Russell Burman, has a header image of a man standing with a shirt and matching sign that reads: “NO Men in Women’s Bathrooms: Vote NO on Houston’s Prop #1.”

To this day, at least 21 states have bathroom bans of some kind, according to the Movement Advancement Project (MAP). Of them, eight states “ban transgender people from using bathrooms and facilities consistent with their gender identity in all government-owned buildings and spaces, including K-12 schools, colleges, and more.”

This directly correlates to the priorities of the heir of Dominionism and the Secretary of Education (at the time), Betsy DeVos, but it was also the platform of the late Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA.

“Charlie Kirk was selling a vision of family life wherein the husband submits to Christ and the wife submits to the husband,” Peltz said. “So he is describing a Christian nationalist pure life. When I was at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit (Turning Point’s conference for young women) in 2025, I really felt, at that time, like I was stepping back in time to 2004, like (ironically) anti-Harry Potter panic, conservative movement right — at the height of the evangelical vote’s influence.”

Circulating among this Christian nationalist agenda is a carefully woven anti-trans rhetoric turned policy, something Imara Jones — the founder of TransLash Media and the podcast the “Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality” — has been investigating for years now.

In season two of the multi-season podcast, Jones introduces listeners to anti-transgender disinformationist Denise Caignon, the founder of 4thWaveNow, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) website, where pseudoscience such as “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is widely parroted. Throughout the years, fearful parents have been lured to this site and told to withhold care from trans youth under 18 in a neglect tactic called “watchful waiting.”

Caignon inspired a number of others like her to coalesce amongst the right to espouse aligned talking points; [including] people who profit from anti-trans writing like the New York Times’ Jesse Singal, and the Wall Street Journal’s Abigail Shrier, who represents the religious Jewish right (and whose writing brought her to Regnery Publishing — tied to [founded by] Nazi sympathizer Henry Regnery — to produce the book “Irreversible Damage”). The cover of the book, which highlights, incorrectly, that gender-affirming care is associated with “permanent infertility,” shows a picture of a young girl with a hole in her stomach where her uterus would otherwise be. In a later season of the Anti-Trans Hate Machine podcast, Jones called this cover “objectifying,” as [she] would much of the right’s reductionist questioning about “What Makes a Woman?” in mainstream outlets like the New York Times (2015-onward).

Film

The Anti-Trans Hate Machine

Episode 3

Seduction of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria

Watch

This kind of trans pseudoscience highlights what Jones calls “affinity pivot points.”

“So you have to look at these affinity points between movements. One of the things that trans conversation does, is it creates these affinity points for different areas of movement, and [those] who desire to overturn the social order, to come together and to work together because they realize that they’re speaking the same language and have a common vision,” Jones told UTDN in a follow-up interview. “They’re speaking the same language, and it’s a place for them to coalesce.”

Whether that is religious Zionism, Dominionism, or Christian nationalism, there is a place on the right for these affinity groups to converge.

“That conversation around fertility does that,” Jones continued.

Fertility is a “lighthouse,” as Jones calls it, for the Christian nationalist movement, for white supremacists, and for conservative, binary-gendered, “family first” agenda keepers who’re also hyper-concerned about “the great replacement” — a white supremacist theory that immigrants are coming to displace white people, Peltz mentions — white reproductivity, and fertility.

“There is tremendous cultural anxiety about reproduction in this country,” Peltz shared.

And some of these people, Shrier, Singal, and Bill Mahr, are figures that are leverage points for people like David Ellison (CEO of Paramount Skydance) to literally take ownership of mainstream newsrooms like CBS News, promptly shaking up the social order towards right-wing synchronicity. Especially as billionaires like the Ellison family take over mainstream media as it’s known.

Most notably, David Ellison handpicked CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, a self-described “Zionist fanatic” with a goal of shifting public consciousness to consensus with the right. This mission is in deep alignment with Dominionism’s “seven kingdom mandate” to take control of the arts, media, and entertainment.

“Bari Weiss comes up often as a proprietor in this world of anti-trans ideas, and as a person who works, who has given them legitimacy, both because of her time at the New York Times, and then through her platform that she created,” Jones said.

“This isn’t theoretical,” Jones continued. “She’s actively told people to be comfortable with using skeptical language — hostile language — when it comes to gender-affirming care, and to trans people, and to gender dysphoria, all these things. So, I mean, this is a fact.”

Weiss has long given platforms to anti-trans voices, anti-immigration rhetoric that stands in consensus with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and reporting in alignment with the Trump administration. For example, CBS News has already changed guidelines on trans-centered reporting. Tom Burke, the network’s senior director of standards and practices, wrote in a January memo that CBS News “will use the term ‘biological sex at birth’” with “no quotes needed.”

The right effectively has, for more than ten years, made themselves the dominant culture of American society. However, it isn’t without years of resistance, without independent journalism emerging to counter the weight of suppression and oppression. There are resistance forces active, and brewing, to take on the billionaire-infused patriarchal, religious-right menace of the global order. While Under the Desk News looked outside the Trump administration in this second part of our retrospective, next time, UTDN will go deeper to unearth the oppressive control over trans people, women, and children closeted under the administration’s blanket of lies, coercion, and power struggles of the powerful — namely Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. In the meantime, [we’re] continuing to highlight those informing and fighting back against tyranny.

This article originally ran on March 26, 2026 in Under the Desk News.