In the wake of Trump’s second election, the liberal fantasy of a benevolent state reared its head: the right policy, politician, or police officer will end anti-trans oppression. This article heeds the warning from generations of abolitionists before us that violence is not a defect of the state but endemic to it. By consequence, reforms that strengthen the state by expanding avenues for criminalization, resourcing the police, and incorporating more people into the military further jeopardize those subject to premature death, trans or otherwise. The current U.S. political regime’s overt cruelty provides an opening for widespread reckoning with the state’s legitimacy and empty promises of reform. This article reenvisions this moment as an urgent opportunity to: 1) raise awareness about intersectional oppression across and beyond trans people; 2) nourish broad-based solidarity movements; and 3) cultivate strong networks of care in our communities outside of and against the state. Rather than pursuing a liberal politics that incorporates more of us as police and imperial soldiers and expands the state’s capacity for violence domestically and abroad, we call for an abolitionist commitment to gender, sexual, social, and political liberation via an end to state control over our bodies and lives everywhere.

Sokol, Koda, and Kaden Paulson-Smith. 2026. "Beyond Liberal Apologies, Toward Abolitionist Trans Politics." Journal of Feminist Scholarship 27 (Spring): 48-58. 10.23860/jfs.2026.27.04.

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