Senior Justice Department officials have held internal deliberations in recent days over potentially issuing a rule that could restrict transgender individuals from being able to own firearms, two officials familiar with the discussions confirmed Thursday to ABC News.
The policy discussions, which are believed to be in their early stages and driven in part by chatter in right-wing media, follow last week’s Minneapolis Catholic church shooting that the FBI has said was carried out by a transgender woman.
Such a proposal could face significant pushback not only from civil rights groups but from gun rights organizations, which have historically been resistant to the issuance of any regulations restricting people’s access to firearms.
There is no evidence to suggest transgender people are more likely to be violent than the general population. However, transgender people are far more likely than average to be the victim of a violent crime.
Still, the discussions have percolated in recent days among top officials in the Justice Department, including in the Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to all executive branch agencies.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) and other major medical associations do not consider being transgender a mental illness and recognize transgender and gender diverse identities as normal variations in human expression. The APA distinguishes gender dysphoria — which is defined as “clinically significant distress or impairment” that transgender individuals may experience when they feel a difference between their assigned sex at birth and their gender identity — as a separate diagnosis, and supports gender-affirming care while opposing practices that try to change a person’s gender identity.
DOJ officials have debated whether having a diagnoses of gender dysphoria could disqualify someone under a federal law that restricts people who are “adjudicated as mental defective” from owning guns, sources said.
The possible move would be the latest escalation in an ongoing push by the Trump Administration to restrict the rights of transgender individuals — and would appear to conflict with other moves by the Justice Department to lift what it has argued are unfair burdens restricting Americans’ Second Amendment rights to bear arms.
Among its efforts, the DOJ has proposed a new rule that could restore gun ownership rights to certain people with felony convictions, and has said it would pursue civil rights investigations into cities that it says engage in a pattern or practice of depriving local citizens of their Second Amendment rights.
Laurel Powell, director of communications at the Human Rights Campaign, told ABC News in a statement, “The Constitution isn’t a privilege reserved for the few; it guarantees basic rights to all. Transgender people are your neighbors, classmates, family members, and friends — and we deserve the full protection of our nation’s laws, not anti-American nonsense from the White House.”
“If rights can be stripped from one group simply because of who they are, they can be stripped from anyone,” Powell said.
A Justice Department spokesperson told ABC News, “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. No specific criminal justice proposals have been advanced at this time.”