When I was in sixth grade in the mid-’90s, I got an assignment at school to write a political essay either for or against a political issue being debated at the time in the U.S. I chose to write in favour of the Brady Bill, a gun control bill named after James Brady, a man who was severely injured in an attempted assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Reading about the terrible crime that took Brady from this earth and the common sense measures proposed by the Brady Bill, it made sense to me to pass this legislation.

That was until I got home and told my dad about it.

You see, I grew up in a hunting home in upstate New York on the Massachusetts border ( our family’s property literally bumped into the state border), a place where our guns were displayed in a locked glass case in our living room. By that time I was already trained in safe gun handling and was famously the best target shooter in the family. My dad was a lifelong card-carrying member of the NRA and he wasn’t about to let his child write in favour of a proposed gun control bill.

So he talked me out of it, instead persuading me to write against the Brady Bill. It was a compelling essay; I got an A on it, and now I write political essays for a living.

I am now firmly in favour of strict gun control measures in most instances, as an epidemic of mass shootings has gripped the U.S. for decades. I believe that guns are far too easy to get in this country and we are all worse off for it. But I find myself thinking back to that sixth-grade essay again as the Trump administration has loudly signalled their intent to ban trans people from owning guns.

I found myself last week having to reconcile my belief that guns are simply too easy to get with another very targeted—and frankly—bigoted restriction on trans lives.

“The DOJ is actively evaluating options to prevent the pattern of violence we have seen from individuals with specific mental health challenges and substance abuse disorders,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement to the Daily Wire. “No specific criminal justice proposals have been advanced at this time.”

To me this feels very similar to my last Xtra column about the trans military ban. Opposing a ban on trans people owning guns does not mean that I support the near universal gun access the U.S. already has. Trans people deserve all the same rights as every other citizen of this country, including the right to bear arms.

@xtramagazine Texas will likely be the next U.S. state to ban trans people from public bathrooms. SB 8, which passed in the Texas senate this week and is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, also bans trans people from using locker rooms and being placed in facilities that align with their gender identity while incarcerated. The bill is the latest of several anti-trans measures passed in Texas. But SB 8 is the culmination of a decade-long effort that hasn’t been successful until now. Roughly 16 bathroom bill proposals have been filed across 20 different bills in the state since 2015, but they have often died in the House. That changed when Abbott included the issue in a special legislative session, resulting in the House voting 86 to 45 and the senate voting 18 to 8 to pass it. What’s even more notable are the financial repercussions of the bill. Violators will face a $25,000 fine for the first offence and a whopping $125,000 fine for the second, making it the most financially punitive bathroom bill in the country. Nineteen U.S. states have passed some form of an anti-trans bathroom bill since 2016, with a sizable resurgence in the last few years. But research has shown that bathroom bans do not make anyone safer, nor is there a correlation between trans-inclusive bathrooms and crimes in public restrooms or locker rooms. 🏳️‍⚧️🚽 #texas #lgbtqnews #politics #transgender #transrights ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine

The culture-war right has been working for a very long time to build a casus belli for taking away the right to own guns from trans people. For years now, nearly every new mass shooter in the U.S. has immediately been accused of being trans, until we inevitably learn it was a white male conservative once again.

This time, however, it was someone who once identified as trans who was the shooter in Minneapolis two weeks ago. That was all this country’s culture warriors needed to start calling for a trans ban on gun ownership, baselessly claiming that trans people, as a class, are too mentally ill for it.

Nevermind that the shooter was part of an online cult that has produced numerous mass shooters in the past and worships past mass shooters like Anders Breivik, a Norwegian neo-Nazi mass shooter—it must have been the hormones. Can’t let pesky facts get in the way of compelling propaganda.

I texted my dad about it. I was curious about his thoughts but didn’t hear back. This is not uncommon with my dad, who barely pays attention to his phone unless he’s bored and scrolling YouTube Shorts. The NRA released a statement about the proposed ban saying: “The NRA supports the Second Amendment rights of all law-abiding Americans to purchase, possess and use firearms. NRA does not, and will not, support any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.”

Suddenly, on an issue that I feel strongly about, I find myself unexpectedly agreeing with the NRA, and my dad didn’t even need to talk me into it this time.

Trans people might be a small and widely misunderstood demographic and we may trigger deep-seated bigotries in many who otherwise wouldn’t consider themselves bigoted, but we are your neighbours, co-workers and fellow taxpayers. As with military service, we are entitled to do all the things everyone else is allowed to do because we were all born equal, allegedly.

Comic artist Sophie Labelle released a comic about the proposed gun ban over the weekend, pointing out that Nazi Germany first denied firearm licences to Jews in 1936 before completely banning Jews from owning guns in 1938, just before Kristallnacht. I don’t know yet if that’s the type of place Americans will end up in under this conservative administration, but our list of rights that everyone else in society is entitled to, from participating in sports, to bathroom usage, to access to hormone treatments, grows thinner by the day.

This is what happens under a government that simply does not believe we have a right to exist and is bent on stamping us out of society.