Grief,pain and the politics of annihilation in Moms for Liberty

Introduction

On 27 March 2023, conservative activist and public de-transitioner Chloe Cole stood before the Florida House Health and Human Services Committee to testify in support of House Bill 1421 (HB 1421). Opening her testimony with an expression of gratitude for Florida's pioneering anti-trans legislation, she expressed her hope that this bill would serve as a model for other states’ attempts to stop the ‘barbaric practices of childhood medical transition’ before stating her belief that ‘no adult has the right to manipulate, mutilate, or castrate a child, whether they are parent or pediatrician’ (Florida Channel, 2023). Not only is the language of barbarity used here to distance gender-affirming care from the otherwise proper medical establishment but the threat of manipulation, mutilation and castration evokes a racialized imaginary of nonnormative bodies displaced outside of the domain of whiteness. Such images call forth an imperialist imaginary of deviantly gendered practices imagined to exist in places like Africa, Asia and the Middle East (Patil, 2022). HB 1421 – which would later become Florida's omnibus gender-affirming care ban for minors in the form of Senate Bill 254 – drew wide attention from trans people and their allies. However, it also attracted numerous activists who descended on Tallahassee from across the country to peddle their arguments in favour of denying trans youth access to the bodily autonomy they had only recently come to enjoy on the world-historical stage.

Cole is perhaps the most notable of these professional anti-trans speakers. Over the past three years, she has travelled across the country offering her story as a warning to largely Republican legislators in order to advocate banning gender-affirming care for youth. After living for years as a trans boy, Cole decided to detransition less than a year after her double mastectomy and revert to her birth name and pronouns. While there are a few other detransitioners like her, it is important to note that not all detransitioners push an aggressively anti-trans agenda. Further, transition regret sits at under less than 1 percent, meaning that Cole and her peers have had an outsized impact on the discussions surrounding gender-affirming care for trans youth (Astor, 2023).

Cole further qualifies her statement by emphasizing the fact that she came from a ‘loving, nuclear family’ and that ‘neither my parents nor my siblings or other relatives pushed me to transition’. Cole invokes the image of a ‘loving, nuclear family’ to lend authoritative weight to her narrative by rejecting the idea of exogenous influences causing the gender dysphoria she experienced earlier in her life. Hers was an authentic experience. Cole then relates how her parents were willing to allow her to experiment with her modes of self-expression but balked at her desire to undergo a medical transition as she was ‘too young to be making lifelong decisions’. Yet all this changed with the involvement of doctors at the gender clinic:

They [Cole's parents] were becoming increasingly concerned, but upon meeting and speaking with my doctors, they were dismissed and told that children already know what gender they identify with from a very young age, that I was pushing for this because I understood what I wanted and if I was not allowed to transition, then it would be life or death. (Florida Channel, 2023)

Cole's claim, therefore, is that the spectre of child suicide was wielded as a cudgel to bludgeon her parents into submitting to the mandates of gender ideology, mandates that prescribed her ‘mutilation’ and ‘castration’. Through such a rhetorical turn, Cole renders a startling social cosmology, one replete with helpless children, hapless if well-meaning parents and sinister doctors who prey on the familial bond itself for their own nefarious purposes. Transness is thus linked irrevocably to harms both physical and psychic that accrue under the sign of the suicidal child, a sign which is understood as a constructed phantasm used to usher children away from the truth of the body itself. The pain of the trans child barred from gender-affirming care is a denied pain, a pain, as I will show, that is overshadowed by the inevitability of the regret that must accompany the departure from a properly white, cisgendered lifeworld. It is through Cole's turn of phrase, then, that we can understand the disgust, horror and unthinkability directed towards trans life as fundamentally wrapped up in projects of patriarchy and racism, evoking a fear of the loss of the racialized capital that accrues to the properly gendered civilized white body (Schuller, 2018).

In this article, I will argue that the anti-trans movement seeks to ameliorate their grief and feelings of erasure by annihilating the trans other. By this, I mean that they are seeking to eradicate the object of their bad feelings by removing all possible cultural and political resources for a trans identification and in so doing stabilize the ascendency of a properly white, cisgendered, middle-class subjectivity. As Chloe Cole's testimony illustrates, the American anti-trans movement hinges on a sense of erasure born from the grief of a perceived loss of a proper white, cisgendered, middle-class subjectivity. Drawing on Cameron Awkward-Rich's (2017) work on the imbrication of bad feelings and subject formation, I deploy the feminist theory of emotion and the body to show how the pain of the anti-trans activists – understood here as the unusual alliance between trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and right-wing ‘parents’ rights’ proponents – leads to a political project aimed at the disavowal and destruction of trans life in all its forms.

I show this through a discourse analysis of the conservative activist organization Moms for Liberty based on the entire 58-episode run of the Joyful Warriors Podcast, hosted by the organization's cofounder, Tiffany Justice. Methodologically, I approach this podcast as a text in order to excavate the arguments, assumptions and beliefs that structure the basic grounds upon which the organization articulates its beliefs. Inspired by the genealogical approach of Michel Foucault (1977, 1984), this article takes a post-structuralist tack in reconstructing the psychosocial investments into the relations of power that form the orientating subjectivity of the people who speak on behalf of Moms for Liberty. This language serves as a point of entry through which we can understand the circulation of patterns of belief and habitual action in such a way as to distil the convention choices for the discourses that flow in and through the organization. Thus, I seek to excavate the ways in which these key speakers draw on and invoke their knowledge about transness, in addition to the linguistic practices employed for the communication of anti-trans ideas themselves (Johnstone and Andrus, 2024).

Towards a phenomenology of transphobia

The deployment of the word ‘annihilation’ is not chosen here as merely a synonym for destruction, erasure and death, though that is certainly a part of it. Rather, the concept of annihilation here draws on a particular theoretical lineage inherited from thinkers such as Gayle Salamon (2010) and Cameron Awkward-Rich (2017) that highlights a dual process of foreclosure through which a particular identity category is erased from a given political and cultural milieu. This is a process of ‘having one's identity denied or substituted for another from the outside’, which includes both ‘the bad feelings or potential life or death consequences that attend to being the object of this denial’ (Awkward-Rich, 2017: 822). Thus, one can feel annihilated without actually being annihilated. This distinction is not to reduce one ‘type’ of annihilation below another; it is, rather, meant to emphasize two core processes. First is the importance of the anxiety, depression and bad feelings that attend to the encounter with the other. All persons, regardless of positionality or access to the levers of power, feel annihilated in some sense when told their lived reality does not exist.

Second, however, is the process of being denied itself that speaks to the contested viability of any given identity in social life. While all persons are at risk of having their identity erased by another, accessing the ability to do so as part of a coordinated political project speaks to the importance of the distribution of power in society for the maintenance of some subject positions and the erasure of others. Thus, we must think of annihilation as a ‘slippery’ term (Awkward-Rich, 2017: 822). While it is often the case that feeling annihilated often results from an actual attempt to foreclose one's identificatory possibilities, this is not always the case. Instead, feelings of annihilation can also stem from the sheer fact that ‘there will always be a residue of bad feeling, an unavoidable fact of being embodied in a world split by difference’ (Awkward-Rich, 2017: 826). This splitting is an inevitable part of Awkward-Rich's social cosmology, as there is an always-already incommensurable separation between the self and the other that is endlessly productive of bad feelings.

Yet are bad feelings always born from rupture? Sara Ahmed (2015: 21) writes that ‘the ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’ the reader should feel when faced with the other's pain is what allows the reader to enter into a relationship with the other’. For Ahmed, pain serves as an invitation, an empathic link through which we can forge relations of generosity. Yet the ‘should-ness’ of the feelings that Ahmed invokes speaks to the open contingency of our relationship to the other. We should feel empathy for the other's pain, yet often we don’t. We are too often guilty of dismissing the other's pain as something foreign or aberrant, repeating the same mistakes that Awkward-Rich warns us about. However, even our most vigorous attempts to dismiss the other cannot negate one simple fact: that pain is always born of the relation between self and other (Ahmed, 2015) while simultaneously serving as the vehicle through which the subject is itself constituted. For it is through the ‘flow of sensations and feelings that become conscious as pain and pleasure that different surfaces are established’ such that ‘the impression of a surface is an effect of such intensifications of feeling’ (Ahmed, 2015: 24). The boundaries of the subject are thereby established through the experiential material that is itself a feeling of negation, the presence of an other who leaves an impression upon me and to whose presence I cannot help but react. This negation is not an erasure of my self but is, in fact, constitutive of it in as much as I am impressible from outside contact. Through the ‘materialisation’ (Butler, 1993) of a boundary, then, we can understand what separates self and other as a surface that is felt only when being impressed upon in our encounter with the other. There is an ‘intensification’ (Ahmed, 2015) of feeling that produces a fixity of where we are located, both as bodies in space and, I contend, as persons in a broader social cosmology. Thus, ‘what separates us from others also connects us to others’ (Ahmed, 2015: 25).

The connectivity of pain and feeling allows us to understand JK Rowling's transphobia as being inextricably bound up in a broader cultural reading of trans women as ‘really’ men. This sits alongside a reading of Rowling's own past encounters with patriarchal violence that result in a misapprehension of trans women as existential threats to women's safety. Rowling's personal biography thus furnishes us with the structures of recognition that serve as the vehicle for her ability to make sense of pain in the present and future.

However, Ahmed is careful not to posit that this sense perception is always active and at the forefront of the mind. Rather, she underscores a complex process through which such narratives and perceptions become active, stating that pain works to ‘impress upon the surfaces of bodies through negation: the surface is felt when something is felt “against” it’ (Ahmed, 2015: 27). She goes on to write:

It is this perceived intrusion of something other within the body that creates the desire to re-establish the border, to push out the pain, or the (imagined, material) object we feel is the ‘cause’ of the pain. Pain involves the violation or transgression of the border between inside and outside, and it is through this transgression that I feel the border in the first place. (Ahmed, 2015: 27)

Pain invokes a territorialization of the self that manifests in and through a process of intensification. This increase in feeling and perception of a transgression is met with an almost involuntary drive to abjure the object of pain, whether or not it is actually the cause of our anguish. This contingency leaves an openness for misapprehension that allows for psychic energy to flow freely between objects; for example, to return to Rowling's account, between the patriarchal violence of her own life history and the presence of trans women in women's public toilets.

Thus, pain causes the self to be forged under the threat of annihilation – the feeling or reality of having one's identificatory position denied from the outside. However, in a move dissimilar from Awkward-Rich, Ahmed's phenomenology of pain highlights that it is this threat (real or imagined) that is itself constitutive of the self. The transphobic subject, in this rendering, thus accedes to their bad feelings towards the perceived object of their pain (trans people) through a process of psychic displacement whereby the felt sense of patriarchal violence is collapsed under the sign of fundamental biological difference between men and women. They are, then, indelibly linked to trans life in all its manifestations. This is quite a different accounting of identity and subject formation than the theory of differentiation offered in Awkward-Rich's writing. It is not that bad feelings are produced by difference – a difference that exists a priori to emotionality itself – but rather that similarity and difference, self and other, are materialized through the moments where bad feelings are intensified through the process of encounter. I thus argue that it is the socio-historical connection of these moments through which a life narrative comes to form that the subject is instantiated. Pain, as it is conceptualized by Sarah Ahmed, functions as perhaps the original ‘bad feeling’, a necessary relay that we must pass through in order to understand ourselves as subjects in relation to others. Desire, then, appears as the drive towards healing this rupture, a need that is short-circuited by the social itself.

Moms for Liberty and annihilation feminism

What connects the grief of right-wing anti-trans activists to TERFs’ bad feelings over their remembered encounters with patriarchal violence? Certainly, there is a great deal of intellectual cross-pollination between the two camps, with books like Abigail Schrier's (2021) Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters circulating widely between both British TERFs and American right-wing anti-trans activists. The ‘diagonalism’ (Klein, 2023) that connects these two political movements seems rooted in a similar disgust with the semiotics of inclusion, equality and rights along with a severe mistrust of experts. Similarly, many TERF organizations such as the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF) have received funding from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a far-right think tank that has long supported conversion practices for trans youth as well as other members of the broader queer community.

While the full extent of this political alliance falls beyond the scope of this article, it is important to note that this strange assemblage between gender-traditional, socially conservative women and their TERF counterparts finds its expression in the advent of what I call ‘annihilation feminism’. This movement is unified over a ‘dehumanization of the subordinate party as innately harmful and therefore requiring elimination’ (Schotten, 2022: 334). This ‘extinction phobia’ (Stahl, 2021) not only renders political opponents as inherently evil but also works to reverse the comprehension of power's actual deployment in such a way as to reverse its material realities. Thus, proponents of extinction phobias ‘insist on their own marginalization and victimization, instrumentalizing claims of oppression in order to wield them against their actually marginalized political opponents’ (Schotten, 2022: 335). In this way, TERFs understand trans women as insidious agents of patriarchal oppression in a diagonal way to how, as I will show, the right-wing women of Moms for Liberty read trans children as relays for nefarious ‘gender ideology’.

A reactionary activist nonprofit, Moms for Liberty is headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, where it coordinates membership in around 278 chapters across 45 states with the stated purpose of ‘fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government’ (Moms for Liberty, 2025). The idea of parental rights is particularly striking, as it implies the existence of the fundamental ability for parents to determine the upbringing of their children codified into law. The organization has deep ties to the Florida Republican party and to Governor Ron DeSantis in particular (Atterbury, 2023) and boasts deep connections to the levers of power and money in the American far right. While advertising itself as a ‘grassroots organization’, the organization has received substantial funding from far-right think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the George Jenkins Foundation as well as high-net-worth individuals such as Publix heiress Julia Fancelli – a bankroller of the 4 January 2021 rally that preceded the insurrection (Roush, 2022) – who personally donated over US$150,000 in 2022 alone. This has allowed Moms for Liberty to launch numerous campaigns to ‘flip’ school boards across the country in an attempt to implement anti-queer ‘parents’ rights’ policies (Atterbury, 2023). Further, the founders of this organization have several ties to the conservative political establishment, with co-founder Tiffany Justice having recently been hired to be the executive vice president of Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation (Nichols, 2025).

Using its position, the organization has advocated for and advanced some of the harshest anti-trans legislation in the country. Moms for Liberty's influence in local and national politics reflects the growing centrality of public education in debates around American political and national identity (Zimmerman, 2022) while simultaneously drawing on a long history of white women's activism in the American right wing (Schuller, 2021). In particular, Bracewell and Daily (2024) underscore the maternal rhetorics that undergird this group's claims of being divinely empowered defenders of the home and family. The rhetoric of ‘joyful warriors’ harkens back to Phyllis Schlafly’s crusade against the ERA in the 1970s and 1980s and references essentialist understandings of a divine femininity that allows for women's unique capacities to secure the home and the family against external threats. Such ideology is deeply rooted in white-supremacist understandings of the home and the family that read gender identity, particularly motherhood, as bound up in ensuring the purity of the white race (McRae, 2018).

The Joyful Warriors Podcast serves as an important touchstone of meaning making for Moms for Liberty. Formerly hosted by the organization's co-founder, Tiffany Justice, the podcast serves as a vehicle through which Moms for Liberty directly connects with numerous activists, scholars and nonprofits. The podcast's topics vary from appearances of Florida governor Ron DeSantis to the story of an individual father who ‘saved’ his child from ‘transgenderism’. The unifying themes of the podcast revolve around ‘parents’ rights’ in education, healthcare and childhood welfare – as determined and implemented by parents. While many issues are veiled with rhetorical tactics such as colour-blind racism – such as a podcast episode dedicated to discussing how ‘all lives matter’ – sex and gender serves as a frequent emotional flashpoint. For example, in discussing male-to-female vaginoplasty, host Tiffany Justice likened the procedure to an ‘open wound’ full of ‘rot’ and ‘decay’ and compared surgeons who perform the procedure to Nazi scientist Josef Mengele. The intense emotions around trans-related issues thus underscore the importance of annihilating the very figuration of transness to ameliorate the grief experienced by Moms for Liberty.

‘What does it mean’, asks historian Jules Gill-Peterson, ‘that the crusade to inflict social and literal death on trans children is being spearheaded by white moms?’. For it is indeed the case that the ‘political position of the imperiled white mom produces some of the most powerful alibis available to authoritarian projects because it marries them to liberal democracy and state power’ (Gill-Peterson, 2024: 205). In so doing, the white mother is rendered as both highly capacious – in her ability to shepherd the futurity of the child – while simultaneously threatened and overwhelmed by the ‘gender nonsense’ being taught to their children that requires the urgent intervention by the state in the form of legislation targeting the very thinkability of trans life in the classroom and civil society more broadly. Moms for Liberty purports to offer a remedy to this anxiety, yet in so doing they lay the foundations for the death of the very group they seek to usher into a properly white, middle-class cisheterosexual life. This suturing together of death and life through the paradoxical form of the child, then, presents us with a unique glimpse into a possible answer to the question posed by Gill-Peterson. In the next section, I dive into the discourse deployed by Moms for Liberty as they wield their grief and bad feelings as evidence for the necessity of annihilating the thinkability of the trans child. It is through this process that the transphobic subject thus seeks to uphold a properly white, cisgendered social order through the production of certain emotive states surrounding minoritized and minoritarian life.

‘There is no such thing as a transgender child’ is a phrase and sentiment that Tiffany Justice often repeats on her Joyful Warriors Podcast. While rhetorics of radical newness have long suffused the debates surrounding trans children, Justice's statement stands out for its complete discursive erasure of the agential capacities and bodily autonomy represented in the figure of the transgender child (Gill-Peterson, 2018). Such a turn of phrase indexes a broader commitment on the part of the organization to solidify authority over the child under the aegis of the family through opposition to a variety of projects understood as evoking aberrant desires where ‘naturally’ there would be none. A childhood gender transition – replete as it is with implications of the primacy of youthful self-knowledge – represents a radical rupture in the coherence of the child as helpless, innocent and abjectly dependent (Meiners, 2016). Thus, political projects aspiring to the total annihilation of trans people in public life through their explicit disavowal into unthinkability operate as a way to secure the fantasy of a stable white personhood and the colonial imperative that accrues to such a position.

Grief and annihilation

In a podcast episode titled ‘Gender Ideology: Tools to Help You Push Back’, host Tiffany Justice conducted an interview with Natalya Murakhver, the co-founder of Restore Childhood, a 501(c)(3) founded to protect children from perceived governmental overreach in health and education. The conversation between the two women centred around a toolkit developed by Murakhver's organization titled ‘An Urgent Conversation’, which features various infographics, expert testimonies and legal analysis about so-called ‘parents’ rights’ that detail how school's approaches to transness and gender identity come into conflict with these rights. In particular, the toolkit stresses how a social transition – the adoption of a new name and/or set of pronouns – in a school setting without notifying the parents serves as a fundamental violation of a parent's right to direct the upbringing of their children. As the argument goes, parents should be the ultimate arbiters of their children's education as well as their mental, physical and emotional well-being, regardless of any potential harms that may accrue to a child from the parents. This claim is based on a conservative interpretation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that underscores how the basic right to privacy for students’ educational records is meant to protect students from unwelcome scrutiny from third-party actors and that all information pertaining to the child ultimately falls under the jurisdiction of the parent, over and above the school system. The basic demographic information – such as name, pronouns and gender marker – that falls under the purview of FERPA has become a hotly contested battleground around which meanings of parental authority are forged for conservative political activists based on their own understanding of the political and social order. Thus, the state is seen as both adversary and potential ally, a tool that can be used to enforce a particular kind of family by annihilating all others.

The toolkit developed by Murakhver and featured by Justice on the Joyful Warriors Podcast sees protections for trans youth as a fundamental assault on parents’ rights. It argues that the government, through the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, has been putting pressure on school districts to adopt policies that privilege the self-understanding of children over and above the vision of and for the child held by their parents. This process construes parents as a source of potential harm to trans children, reflecting the staggering 64 percent of trans and queer youth who experience discrimination or stigma from within the family unit (Morton et al., 2018). Given the conservative interpretations of FERPA that animate much of the discourse surrounding the issue of ‘parents’ rights’, the designation of a youth as queer or trans represents a fundamental disruption of the baseline organization of society, thus causing the figure of the transgender child to act as a loadstone for the fear and anxiety of their parents regarding their own understood position in the social milieu. As Justice states in a later podcast episode:

Everyone knows that from the dawn of time parents are their child's greatest protectors, right? The whole Mama Bear concept [the idea that women are natural born protectors of their children] And yet, suddenly, in this new lexicon, parents aren't. It's no longer normal to notify parents like you would have anything else. It's ‘forced outing’. (Moms for Liberty, 2023a)

The use of the idea of the ‘Mama Bear’ invokes the long-standing tactics of right-wing women that grew out of the post-segregation era. This lexicon has long served as a tactic to downplay conservative whites’ racial identity through a focus on gender that revolves around a maternalist discourse that buries how whiteness shapes the very conditions upon which the idea of the ‘traditional family’ was able to emerge (McRae, 2018). The utilization of gender-affirming language therefore acts as a radical disruption to the identificatory economy of the white mother, one that is understood as imperilling not only the child but the future of the white family itself.

The destabilization of Justice’s identity is read as part and parcel of a regrettable destabilization of the entire social order. For example, she argues that the schools’ and governments’ play for authority over the child represents the existence of a ‘school-to-clinic pipeline’, which sees a social transition in schools as a way to put vulnerable children – children with autism, mental health issues or ‘natural’ gender nonconformity – on the path of an imposed binary medical transition. Rather than recognizing the possibility for the agency and discretion of trans and queer youth, she instead locates the ultimate project behind the recent uptick in such identificatory positions as belonging to other nefarious adult actors with various political, monetary and sexual objectives. Indeed, the term ‘groomer’, now associated with an anti-trans agenda, originates from anti-violence advocacy work that seeks to complicate our understanding of abuse towards children, notably claiming that violence and harm can start well before illegal activity takes place. This term has recently been co-opted by gender critical moms and TERFs to link trans life with child sexual abuse. As Justice states:

it's just a social transition, because we know it's the first step in a medical transition. And of course, anytime you tell a parent or a child that you will keep a secret from their parents, then it's setting the child up for all kinds of dangers. You know, once you say that other adults can be trusted, but not your parents. (Moms for Liberty, 2023a)

Thus, rather than protecting trans youth from harm, withholding information from parents instead serves to weaken the bond within the family unit, rendering children even more vulnerable to outside influences. This disruption represents a much more fundamental threat to the social order: without proper cisheterosexual parental guidance, vulnerable young ‘women’ will find themselves in situations where they are prey for the imagined voracious sexual appetites of queer and racialized bodies, thereby exposed to social and literal death (Spence-Mitchell, 2020).

From this excerpt, we can see Justice expressing a type of grief about the patriarchal abuses that befall vulnerable populations. Youth, girls and, yes, trans people are correctly apprehended as being at increased risk for male sexual abuse. It is grievable, from the standpoint of the Joyful Warriors Podcast, that we are unable to prevent these harms. However, the cause of such harms is misapprehended as trans life, representing a kind of grief: a grief for the understanding of a social order that would protect the most vulnerable, if they would just remain in their ‘proper’ place.

In connecting dangers such as rape and suicide to exposure to ‘gender ideology’, Justice is revealing a twofold process. First, she is positioning the loss of a world where transness remains unthinkable as a deeply grievable process. The emergence of transness has, from her perspective, unleashed a veritable flood of social ills on an extremely vulnerable population, to say nothing of her own increased bad feelings. Second, however, she is marking the argument that the desire for a trans life spreads like a disease, as a social contagion. For Justice:

these ideas are coming from everywhere. I think that, you know, TikTok pushes a lot of it onto kids. And I think that obviously schools and everything, but, like, there's so many bills too, like, from there's 665, which allows kids to, you know, leave their parents’ home and go to, like, a government home. (Moms for Liberty, 2023b)

The circulation of trans desires through the broader social milieu is here understood as an invasion of foreign ideology that has infected both formal institutions such as the school as well as informal aspects of civil society such as social media platforms like TikTok. In another episode, Justice interviews January Littlejohn, an anti-trans activist whose child had expressed trans desires. Littlejohn states:

So even though she hadn’t felt this way for very long with no history, and this happens with these kids, things start escalating very quickly, where they want a new name, they want new pronouns, they want new clothes, they want binders […] they even start talking about very serious medical interventions like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and surgeries, and they don’t have the capacity to even understand what they are asking for […] their brains are not fully developed. (Moms for Liberty, 2022)

We can therefore see how the child is understood as lacking the discretion to recognize desire itself. Paradoxically, then, desires that the child expresses that run counter to the cisgendered norm are seen as emerging from the outside and only become embedded in the subject like an infection or foreign invasion. Yet at the same time, if children are fundamentally incapable of recognizing the proper desire, then it must be the case that the desire for a cisnormative life is instilled in them from an alternative external source, namely their parents. In this way, then, we can see that the combination of children's lack of discretion and the school's lack of proper authority in the dissemination of desire culminates to pollute transness as ‘ideology’. The blank-slate model of human development utilized by Moms for Liberty thus serves as a mechanism that gathers anxiety and fear about the radical impressibility of the child into a framework of meaning making through which the proper cisgendered subject is produced.

The above vignettes serve to introduce us to the importance of the fear and anxiety surrounding the reproduction of the current social order as it is figured in the child who may be disrupted by alternative ways of desiring and being. Such a viewpoint highlights a rejection of what Lauren Berlant calls the ‘inconvenience’ of being, the ‘affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation’ that points to the fact that we are ‘inescapably in relation with other beings and the world and are continuously adjusting to them’ (Berlant, 2022: 2). Rather than accepting human impressibility and the changing circumstances of the world, the speakers in the Moms for Liberty podcast instead advocate for a radical walling off of the subject from the potential desires that could flourish through the encounter with the other, represented by trans lives and trans futures.

While Berlant, similar to Cameron Awkward-Rich, pushes us to accept the constant discomfort at needing to – and sometimes failing to – take the other into account, Tiffany Justice and Natalya Murakhver seek to (re)produce the subject in ways that are free from ‘external’ influence. In naming the desire for trans lives and trans futures as a product of ‘gender ideology’, Justice and the various guests on her podcasts seek to resolve their grief at the loss of a taken-for-granted cisnormativity through the creation of a world without the other, a world without bad feelings. Annihilation, in this sense, provides the promise of release from inconvenience and pain, no matter how minuscule, and the sublimation of the drive to engage in the world towards self-mastery. Thus, even the implied existence of trans people is interpreted as an assault on parents’ rights; the right, in this instance, to completely dictate the upbringing of the child without the corrupting influence of the other. Hostilities will continue until the other side is deprived of their most offending assault: the basic thinkability of their existence.

Conclusion

I began this article with a discussion of the idea of annihilation as the feeling or reality of having one's identity denied from the outside. It is through the slipperiness of this term that we are able to understand the direct connection between the bad feelings of the members of Moms for Liberty and the actual attempted annihilation of trans children that they undertake. Indeed, as I have shown in the preceding sections, the formulation and execution of this project of and for the world is to resolve the anxiety and grief invoked by the trans other; the very recognition of the agentic capacities of trans youth serve to inspire feelings of annihilation in the white mom that serve as the seedbed for their political violence. Yet, at the same time, we know from Awkward-Rich's scholarship that the annihilation of the offending other is not predetermined by the bad feelings that such differentiation evokes. Thus, the route chosen by Moms for Liberty – the reduction of the trans child to nothing – can be thought of as a particular political orientation to the world: the politics of annihilation.

The politics of annihilation can best be thought of as a political project that seeks to stabilize a given subject position by effacing the other – an other that represents the inherent differentiation of the world and the breakdown of the system of meaning that undergirds a particular identificatory position. It is thus through a process of social denial that is predicated on the organization and deployment of power that gives one group the means to not see or hear the other. In the case of Moms for Liberty, this manifests as the mobilization of deeply embedded transphobic elements of the modern social milieu that render the trans other as nothing, as things denied, stripped of all discursive claims to medically and socially self-determine. Thus, the process of actually annihilating a group of people is predicated on the unevenness of power while the possibility to feel annihilated emerges from the basic ‘inconvenience’ of the encounter with the other and our attempts to take the other into account. The actual annihilation of trans people from public life serves as a political process insofar as it presents a cure to the fear and anxiety surrounding a group's position in the social order. In so doing, it conjures a fantasy of a world without the other, a world free from the bad feelings that encounters with such a figure engender. If, as Andrea Long Chu posits, regret is freedom projected into the past, then the anguish of grief points to an opening of new horizons, of freedom's inevitable return.