GLR July-August 2025

ESSAY Making Sense of the Trans Right E LI E RLICK

T RANSGENDER PEOPLE are typically associ ated with left-wing politics, but a vocal few have become breakout celebrities among the political right. Buck Angel, one of these new faces of right-wing gender discourse, has acquired in creasing attention for his incendiary advocacy against other trans people. Angel gained fame as a pornography star and left-wing activist. He is perhaps the last person one would expect to align himself with white supremacists and Trump-supporting Republicans. His vocal calls to ban trans gender youth healthcare, criminalize trans women for using women’s rooms, deport undocumented migrants, jail student protesters, and end diversity initiatives may be shocking in the context of his trans identity. Nevertheless, Angel’s narrative charts an increasingly common path into far-right circles. I interviewed more than 110 transgender people with far right views for my forthcoming book, Belonging Through Ex clusion: Understanding the Transgender Far Right , which

examines the motivations behind their beliefs and what actions could prevent others from joining them. I attempted to avoid writing about celebrities, but Angel stood out. While I worked on the book, Angel released a fifteen-minute-long video claim ing I was a pedophilic child groomer and calling for my arrest because I had suggested that people with access to hormone therapy share their medications with those in states where trans healthcare is banned. “We got to start really pushing back on these people,” he told his audience. “They are not healthy for our community. They are not healthy for our youth.” Like Andrew Sullivan, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Alice Wei del before him, Angel represents a growing class of LGBT peo ple who build communities around their right-wing politics. Paradoxically, they support politicians, policies, and ideologies that aim to nullify their basic rights. However, they are not un precedented. Early 20th-century figures like National Fascisti secretary and trans man Victor Barker, novelist and fascist sym pathizer Radclyffe Hall, and Nazi spy Violette Morris were act ing against LGBT interests long before Angel was born. More recently, Caitlyn Jenner, Peter Thiel, and George Santos have become some of the best-known Republicans in the U.S. These figures demonstrate that identity doesn’t always correspond to ideology. And they are only a few celebrities among countless lesser-known figures. There is limited information on the demographics of trans gender members of right-wing groups, but there are a few no table trends. The more than 110 subjects I interviewed for Belonging Through Exclusion were overwhelmingly white and older than the average trans population. A majority were trans women, and only two were nonbinary. They were less religious than the general population and more evenly distributed through out the U.S. than expected. As for the general political beliefs of the LGBTQ + community, there is similarly insufficient data. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey conducted by the National Cen ter for Transgender Equality found that only two percent of trans people were Republicans. By 2022, a large Washington Post / Kaiser Family Foundation poll found the number had risen to ten percent, suggesting that Angel is part of an ongoing trend. How did the trans community get here? An atmosphere of dissatisfaction looms over the transgender public as liberal politicians continuously fail to improve their situations. Many trans people feel abandoned by and alienated from mainstream liberal politics. Both U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer of the center-left Labour Party and U.S. Democratic presidential nom inee Kamala Harris avoided the word “transgender” on the cam paign trail despite ongoing conservative anti-trans rhetoric and legislative attacks. Instead of turning to the left, as most trans people do, those like Angel viewed right-wing groups as the only alternative. They are part of what political theorists Daniel HoSang and

Buck Angel. Photo for The Trans List , a 2015 documentary film.

Eli Erlick is the author of Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950 (Beacon Press, 2025) and the forthcoming Belonging Through Exclusion: Understanding the Transgender Far Right (Chicago).

TheG & LR

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