The integration of marginalized communities into two tines of American-ness—national identity and full citizenship—has always been a fraught process. From its inception, American sociopolitical life emerged as a series of hierarchies which situated the (presumed heterosexual) White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) at its apex. Privileged-group members inherently see the ascent of marginalized communities as a threat to their traditional dominance. This process played out in the arena of race with white Catholics and non-Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries. While the ascendant marginalized communities change over time, the reaction of the traditionally dominant is consistent. Treating their dominance as innately natural, they view themselves as victims of outsiders who seek equality.
The last few decades have witnessed a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ people into the American mainstream. However, this admittedly imperfect and piecemeal process does not guarantee against backsliding. Urvashi Vaid warned: “The liberty we have won is incomplete, conditional, and ultimately revocable.”Footnote 1 Those who have traditionally enjoyed privileges associated with dominant group status feel threatened by today’s sexual minorities pursuing equal rights. In fact, some are employing the same kinds of racialized tropes used to peripheralize non-Protestants and non-whites in earlier eras. In the mainstream imagination of the 1960s, sexual minorities were in league with non-white civil rights agitators. Throughout the late 20th century, cultural forces—such as the mainstream media—effectively whitened this group. Today’s new far-right is attempting to turn back the clock and recast LGBTQ+ Americans as effectively non-white and, therefore, inherently menacing. Scholars can gain leverage in understanding this intersection between racism and homophobia/transphobia by examining how political ideologues have come to target the pink threat to their apex status.
1. Two tines of inclusion and exclusion—national identity and citizenship
In what ways are traditionally marginalized communities seeking inclusion? Generally speaking, they aspire toward equality within American sociopolitical life. However, those who have traditionally enjoyed full membership in society have historically been reluctant to welcome newcomers. What, then, is the essence of the thing being contested—American-ness? There are two interrelated answers to that question: one involving national identity, and one involving citizenship. Debates over full acceptance revolve around who is a “real” American and what kind of inclusion the society of a given era is willing to extend to newcomers.
Scholars have conceptualized American national identity in three different ways. Each one makes different assumptions about who belongs and who is excluded. The first takes the civic creed at its word. It insists that our peoplehood is not based on any ascriptive features but on a commitment to a shared ideology.Footnote 2 That interpretation has always been at odds with a rival notion that understands American national identity as a series of hierarchies, situating white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants at the apex of national authenticity.Footnote 3 A third understanding proposes a hybrid civic-ethnic conceptualization of American-ness. In this understanding, civic mythology and ethnonationalism blend to produce a multitiered American-ness privileging the English-Protestant core of the early republic while maintaining a veneer of universal egalitarianism.Footnote 4
The second avenue of inclusion/exclusion involves the American state policing who is and is not a citizen. Beyond passport holding, a bona fide citizen is accepted as a full member of society with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities that entails. The boundaries of who is allowed to experience citizenship are politically constructed. Historically, those boundaries excluded women, non-whites, and gender minorities from enjoying citizenship’s full panoply.Footnote 5 However, the concept of citizenship cannot be disaggregated from conversations of who is and is not able to fully partake, have rights, and belong—and therefore it cannot be disaggregated from questions of national identity.
As Margot Canaday argued by way of Rogers Smith, “the trajectory of American citizenship in the twentieth century has not been one of continual expansion but is defined rather by the persistent ‘nexus of exclusion and inclusion.’”Footnote 6 As such, belonging has been adjudicated by ebb and flow as national priorities have changed. Immigration laws, for instance, have changed over the life of the republic to include or exclude different racial and ethnic communities based on the politics of different eras.Footnote 7 This process has also typified the experience of domestic minority groups. The inclusion of African Americans into the national fabric, both in terms of national identity and citizenship—halting and imperfect as it has been—heralded a critical change in American partisan politics. Over the course of the past half-century, the main political parties have evolved on these issues. The Democrats have become the party of civil rights, while the GOP has maintained its ascriptive understanding of ethnonational American-ness, all the while claiming to uphold the civic creed.Footnote 8
2. Inclusion and hierarchies
Conditional acceptance into one or both tines of American-ness does not automatically confer equality within the American community. The tendency to categorize “others” runs deep within the polity and can be disaggregated along many different lines. Kalkan et al. have argued that Americans consider racial and religious minorities as one favored band over another, while cultural minorities are a separate, less favored band.Footnote 9 The boundaries, even within those striations, are malleable. For example, although Muslim Americans comprise a culturally, ethnically, and even racially heterogeneous religious group, they have been thoroughly racialized and marginalized as a racial minority regardless of phenotype.Footnote 10 Jasbir Puar has linked this process directly with not only nationalism, but also with sexual minorities. “National recognition and inclusion, here signaled as the annexation of homosexual jargon, is contingent upon the segregation and disqualification of racial and sexual others from the national imaginary. At work in this dynamic is a form of sexual exceptionalism…”Footnote 11
As this malleability would indicate, policing racial boundaries is a fraught process that has variously targeted many traditionally marginalized communities as the politics of the country have changed.Footnote 12 Even whiteness itself has not been consistently defined over time, with different groups finding themselves described and included (or excluded) at different junctures. Regardless of the complicated boundaries of policing race in the United States, the impulse to stratify citizenship into hierarchies invariably leaves one group at the top: white people generally and white Christian men specifically.Footnote 13
How does the LGBTQ+ community fit into this? Citizenship can be conceptualized as ascriptive along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and, critically, sexuality.Footnote 14 These concepts are not mutually exclusive categories. In the 1960s, the incipient gay rights movement collaborated with the various Civil Rights movements. Indeed, Huey Newton—a co-founder of the Black Panther Party—insisted “the women’s liberation front and gay liberation front are our friends, they are potential allies, and we need as many allies as possible.”Footnote 15 Consequently, mainstream society saw the gay rights movement in league with non-white people and even communists. Pink was deemed non-white, a racialization that endured for a few decades until the popular media began to slowly integrate some parts of the community, restoring them to something of an “off-white” status.Footnote 16
Therefore, sexuality and the gender binary impact belonging in both citizenship and national identity. As such, they provide the state with more boundaries to police. The United States and the wider West more broadly have traditionally put clear sexual (as well as racial) conditions on citizenship, tying it to heterosexual marriage and excluding homosexuals.Footnote 17 Zein Murib described the relationship between sexuality, race, gender, and citizenship: “The myth of the ideal-type American family—one in which heterosexually partnered White parents nurture children who will assume the responsibilities and rights of citizenship—naturalizes the race and class hierarchies embedded in the presumably neutral language of legal citizenship.”Footnote 18 In this construction, all sexual minorities are placed on a lower rung of the hierarchy. But within the LGBTQ+ community, not all sexual minorities are on the same rung–particularly those who are transgender and/or people of color.Footnote 19 As Murib argued, constructing identities along the lines of sexuality has marginalized individuals with intersectional identities. Critically, “within-group marginalizations and exclusions such as these have been used by political actors to define and reinforce the boundaries of the LGBT group as white, middle class, gender normative, able-bodied, and male.”Footnote 20 This formulation clearly excludes transgender people, and as such, the LGB community has been effectively whitewashed and pinkwashed. Politics has normalized the conditional acceptance of LGB people into whiteness and, as we shall see, this has triggered a sense of existential threat within a segment of the far-right that would see them re-racialized.
3. Lost rights: backlash and victimhood on the right
There is a deep sense on the American right of loss and dislocation—of declining privileges articulated as lost rights—spurred by the loss of a status quo ante in which white and male dominance were unchallenged within American life. Perhaps this is best conceptualized in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s deep story—white men are a population that believes that America was created by and for them, and that their hard work—and place in line for reaping its benefits—is being subverted by undeserving others, namely marginalized communities of all stripes.Footnote 21
The WASP ethnonational core, then, is a population that views itself as under existential threat. Among their enemies are a constantly changing set of sociocultural others who would undermine their dominance. Eric Kaufmann coined the term Whiteshift to describe the process underway in Western societies where members of white majorities may be intermarrying with other races, but they remain attached to the framework of whiteness. As the composition of the American public has changed through immigration and intermarriage, among other factors, fears of white demographic decline and replacement—which have long lineages in American politics—have been revived.Footnote 22 Immigration restrictions, for instance, have been employed to protect American white supremacy from their first appearance in the 19th century through to the Trump era.Footnote 23
What, then, is the response of these traditionally hegemonic populations to the inclusion and ascension to rights of sociocultural “others”? This question hints at one of the underlying reasons for Trump’s 2016 win: a vindication, of sorts, of the right’s deep story.Footnote 24 As Parker and Barreto argued, Trump “won [his first term], at least in part, because those who supported him believed that the country was changing too fast.”Footnote 25 The attempt of aggrieved whites to maintain their privilege as society changed around them has motivated the American reactionary right, and the Trump administration’s policies can safely be categorized as reactionary.Footnote 26
As the data presented in this paper will show, even the rightward shift enabled by Trumpism has not ameliorated the sense among far-right groups that others are being privileged in their stead and at their expense. They feel that notions of equality have harmed them, and that American national authenticity should rest on an even more extreme brand of white patriarchal and heterosexual dominance than Trumpism achieved. The acceptance, however conditional it may be, of the LGBTQ+ community into American-ness has crossed a similar Rubicon in the minds of the far-right as racial integration did, and to their thinking, LGBTQ+ people should be re-racialized and pushed back down the hierarchy.
4. Identity Dixie and the re-racialization of the LGBTQ+ community
One particular and very poignant subsection of the American far-right ecosystem features an intentional blending of racism, white nationalism, patriarchal dominance, and exclusion of sexual and gender minorities from their vision of the American story. The sociopolitical groups in this subsection are animated chiefly by the broad universe of the myth of the Lost Cause—a mythology based in Confederate apologia which holds a constellation of views defending slavery, the Old South, and those who fought for them in the American Civil War in the 1860s. The Civil War saw, in the eyes of the Lost Cause, a beleaguered and outnumbered—but still morally superior—South defend the American inheritances of liberty and democracy from a tyrannical North, eventually losing on the battlefield but not in the hearts and minds of its people. Joined prominently in the postbellum period to the mythology that the war was fought in defense of states’ rights and not the preservation of chattel slavery and white supremacy, the Lost Cause was a post-hoc invention that helped Southerners make sense of their upended world.Footnote 27
The devastation that followed in the war’s wake, felt distinctly in the South, has been relegated to memory.Footnote 28 Reconstruction—the short-lived attempt of the federal government to not only reassert political control over the South, but to ensure that emancipated African Americans were able to exercise the rights that had been extended to them at the War’s end—has, in Lost Cause mythology, been ongoing for nearly 150 years. How is the Lost Cause still a compelling mythology on the far-rightward margins of American society?
Owing its origins to memorial work in the postbellum decades, the Lost Cause became a truly multigenerational project that has spanned space and time. In the various ways its proponents have memorialized it over the years—in monuments, multimedia, and mythmaking, to name a few—it has entranced people from Japan to the White House, from the heart of the South to California, and to much of the space in between. This endured even amidst something of a scholarly reorientation regarding the Civil War and its causes, even as the consensus solidified that the Civil War was fought over slavery.Footnote 29 And as of 2025, myriad sociopolitical groups have continued to carry the Lost Cause’s flame, with Identity Dixie (ID) prominent among them.
On their About page, ID wrote bluntly about their place within the broader zeitgeist. Their slogan of “retake everything” indicates much by itself; ID positioned itself as the vanguard of a once-hegemonic class that has lost its rights, and those rights must be taken back from “multiculturalism” and “modernism.” These losses did not occur naturally to that hegemonic class; in ID’s logic, they were victims of a wrongful usurpation of power and sovereignty. Among a litany of other concerns, they state that they “affirm, with sobriety, the ongoing tyranny of the Federal Government. Our land is under military occupation, and our people suffer from economic exploitation and cultural genocide.”Footnote 30
While ID, like many Lost Cause organizations before them, wished for the South to secede from the United States, they presented as more measured than other militant groups in this regard. One particularly prominent writer, Padraig Martin, noted in 2019 that immediate action against the U.S. government would be ill-advised, and a campaign for Southern hearts and minds needed to be undertaken to build support and show Southerners where the American nation had erred first.Footnote 31 As this campaign operated in tandem with their adherence to the aforementioned Lost Cause belief that the South was the defender of America’s foundational values during the Civil War, ID’s writers positioned themselves, effectively, as commentators on the fabric of American-ness through their writings.Footnote 32
4.1. Data collection
This paper’s analysis is based on a large sample of ID’s writings. I collected five full years of their blog posts, or at least those that were extant on their website at the time of my January 2025 data collection. Although the posts technically spanned the period of 2017–2022, there were relatively few posts from 2017 and no surviving posts from 2018. Several later posts allude to a deplatforming that impacted the material from that period. After my data collection was complete, it appears that ID was once again deplatformed sometime in July of 2025. However, the Internet Archive—always a fantastic resource—contained archived versions of much of ID’s website. This enabled me to revisit many of the blog posts in my original sample even after ID’s most recent deplatforming and, critically, to provide working links for them. The total number of posts collected in my sample was 1839. Indeed, averaging over 367 posts annually (excluding 2018), the small band of writers at the core of ID wrote prolifically.Footnote 33 It is this proliferation of text that makes ID such a valuable lens into the world of the Lost Cause and Southern nationalism. And not only were they prolific; before their deplatforming, they were also trendsetters. In 2019, Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch noted that ID had overtaken League of the South as “the country’s preeminent neo-Confederate hate organization.”Footnote 34
4.2. The priorities of Identity Dixie
ID’s writers were largely concerned throughout my sample with much of what would be expected from a far-right organization animated chiefly by Southern nationalist concerns and the Lost Cause. The loose collection of perhaps a couple of dozen writers responsible for much of ID’s blog content provided commentary on a range of historical and contemporary political concerns. Much attention over the course of my sample, for instance, was devoted by the writers to the slowly developing national reckoning with Confederate symbology and mythology in public places that has increased in urgency over the past decade. The white nationalist march at Charlottesville, Virginia—Unite the Right—occurred near the beginning of my sample in 2017. Having grown as it did out of controversy surrounding a planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, ID’s writers were of the mind that the removal of the statue was an affront to them. And, to them, it did not occur in a vacuum but was part and parcel with the era’s broader efforts to take something they loved from them. A writer using the moniker “Harmonica” wrote a retrospective on Unite the Right in 2021. He noted that those “who had not abandoned the Confederacy’s heritage after Dylann Roof, were now doing so,” after Unite the Right. Roof, the white nationalist who had murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, had been pictured with the Confederate flag. In the aftermath of the massacre, then-South Carolina governor Nikki Haley removed the Confederate flag from the state capitol. Harmonica, however, captured a sense of loss among Southern nationalists—a sense that the loop that had opened in 2015 had closed after Unite the Right.
Those next few weeks were among the darkest and most blackpilling days of my life. Dixie’s symbols, something I have loved my whole life, were being destroyed and anyone who fought back was demonized and found themselves unemployable. The worst of it was that it wasn’t just the Yankees, blacks, and liberals doing this—it was normie conservative Dixians hating themselves and their own culture.Footnote 35
That Harmonica considers the national reckoning with all things Confederate and the loss he associated with it to be “blackpilling” is telling. The alt-right has traditionally used riffs on The Matrix film’s “pill” metaphors to communicate their understanding of the world—red for “the true nature of reality,” blue for ignorance, white for good news, and black for bad news.Footnote 36 However, black pills often, in some corners of the internet, also stand for something far darker than just bad news. They have often been used in the context of incels, or involuntarily celibate men. As Brittanica’s Allison Rauch puts it, black pilling “refers to accepting the futility of fighting against a feminist system,” and often includes encouraging the black-pilled person to commit suicide.Footnote 37 It is unlikely that Harmonica was unaware of this use of the term, and his use of it showcased the depth to which ID believed they were losing their rights to celebrate the Lost Cause in public. Who, in the Southern nationalist mindset, bears responsibility for this loss?
4.3. Identity Dixie, lost rights, and racism
At least one of ID’s most prominent writers—Padraig Martin—was present at Unite the Right. He even wrote a book about it. A review of Martin’s A Walk in the Park: My Charlottesville Story, written by League of the South co-founder Michael Hill, tied together all of the threads discussed so far: the Lost Cause, Southern nationalism, and the deep sense that something critical is being taken from the communities that support them; a sense of rights being lost. In Hill’s words:
Like many I’ve talked with after the fact, Martin does not regret going there and indeed fulfilling the moral imperative of standing strong and resolute for our shared Southern cultural heritage. But he understands, too, that it was a trap into which we walked, and that we ought to be smart enough to avoid such things in the future. Indeed, there will not be another Charlottesville, and there doesn’t need to be. The original served its purpose. It laid bare the face of a monster that has been loosed and is rampaging openly against the Christian civilization that defines the South and much of the rest of historic White America.Footnote 38
Critically, Hill was very clear about who he believed this “monster” was: “the power of the state as well as thousands of Antifa and BLM [Black Lives Matter] thugs.”Footnote 39 ID’s racism across the sample I collected is similarly neatly wrapped into a package with their sense of victimhood. Much of ID’s ire was directed at the BLM movement and its supporters. The BLM movement had, of course, been active in the early 2010s. It served as a frequent bête noire of ID, as my sample covered not only the period around Unite the Right but also the racial reckonings of 2020 and beyond. However, it was not just BLM—it was not just anti-black racism—that prompted this reaction from ID. Where did their formulation of loss leave different sociopolitical others?
4.4. Identity Dixie, victimhood, and the re-racialization of the LGBTQ+ community
ID pined openly for a world in which Southern nationalism and the Lost Cause could be lionized. Critically, this is also a vision in which patriarchal Christianity would be unquestioned. ID’s About page made it clear that they saw themselves as the heirs of the white people who settled in the South, and that this made the land theirs. Critically, when delineating the culture they wished to preserve, they noted that they “affirm father-rule, the primacy and necessity of the traditional household,” and that they “oppose the systematic deconstruction of our families.”Footnote 40 What became clear throughout the process of reading so many of their blog posts was that not only was the LGBTQ+ movement one of the prime perpetrators of ID’s inability to live in their idealized Southern Christian patriarchy, but that ID often considered them as a threat in league with racial minorities. ID was never alone in linking an obsession with masculinity and traditional patriarchal values to racism; the alt-right has exhibited what Jacob Johanssen has called “fascist masculinity,” blending “misogyny, anti-feminism, homophobia, and racism/fascism.”Footnote 41 Additionally, ID followed in the footsteps of a long tradition of neo-Confederates and Lost Cause acolytes; early and durable attempts of white Southerners to reassert white supremacy over the South included invoking the myth of the Black rapist purportedly preying on white women to justify lynchings, thus cementing the interconnection of racial and gender hierarchies.Footnote 42
ID joined this race-sex/gender threat matrix to homophobia, which formed a consistent part of their writings. By sheer numbers, 525 posts in my sample featured homophobic language. I conceptualized this category to encompass any writing that was derogatory or exclusionary, in the broadest sense, to sexual minorities. By contrast, 1,123 posts in my sample featured some type of racist language.Footnote 43 It was reasonable to expect that a group with ID’s priorities would have a deep sense of racism ingrained within their writings. However, that nearly half as many posts as featured racism featured homophobia indicated the strength of this current that ran through ID’s worldview.
What, then, was ID actually saying about sexual minorities that situated them as a threat? One intriguing answer to this question is actually quite straightforward. When ID’s writers listed the maladies they perceived as plaguing the country, they often considered sexual minorities, as well as racial minorities, as key components. Take, for instance, a piece by a writer named Jedediah Van Horn from the very beginning of my sample in June 2017. Van Horn was concerned with what he perceived as the drift of the South toward less exclusive, and thus dangerous, ideologies over the past century. The sense of victimhood was stark in Van Horn’s formulation; he argued that the Southern Baptist Church (SBC) had “been used as a vehicle to attack Southern identity.” Among the side effects of ideologies such as Americanism, Liberalism, and Globalism, Van Horn lamented immigration (“The South, like the rest of the Western world, has been subjected to large influxes of foreigners,”), Christian Zionism, racial reckonings with the legacy of slavery, and—critically—overtures made by SBC leader Russell Moore to gay people. These factors proved to the author that Moore “has shown himself to have little in common with Southerners,” and, by implication, had removed their right to speak for themselves. The title of Van Horn’s piece also says quite a bit about how the author perceived the ostensible devolution of the SBC away from Southern control; it includes the phrase “Campaign to Un-Cuck the Southern Baptist Church.”Footnote 44 Acceptance of racial and sexual others, then, was perceived as a symptom that Southerners had lost control.
Faith was not the only arena in which ID’s authors believed they were losing their rights and control. There was also a tendency among them to believe that LGBTQ+ acceptance had been fully integrated into public school curricula alongside “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-Southern messages designed to guide children away from their heritage and roots and into dependency, self-loathing, and marginalized positions in the civilization their ancestors created.”Footnote 45 Perceived clearly as a threat and implicitly as a lost right to imbue their children with their own worldview, many of ID’s writers supported homeschooling. A writer using the name T. Morris indicated in a 2021 piece that he begrudgingly agreed to homeschool his kids “because, and only because,” he believed the school system was teaching elementary school children about “homosexuality and anal sex” in an approving way.Footnote 46
The language that ID used when referring to the LGBTQ+ community indicates a few things at once. Not only did they perceive that they were losing their rights to rule the South in the racially exclusionary ways they wished to, they also perceived that one of the agents of that loss was the LGBTQ+ community. As such, they worked to rhetorically re-racialize the LGBTQ+ community. They made clear that in their vision of the South, sexual minorities who may have achieved more—if ever conditional—inclusion as whites into the rights of American citizenship and the privileges of American national identity would be pushed back down the hierarchical ladder among other racial minorities. ID’s writers situated themselves as victims of American overreach, and they took issue with various other traditionally marginalized communities that America had, in their view, accepted into the fold. Their slogan of “Retake Everything” is extremely telling; they wished to usher in an age in which their white, patriarchal, heteronormative, and Christian values were the ones at the apex of the South.
4.5. The “T” in “LGBTQ+” as a unique target
While ID conceptualized the broader LGBTQ+ community as a threat to their worldview, special ire was reserved for the transgender community. Of the 525 posts containing homophobic language, 288 featured specifically transphobic content. These posts, as with the more general suite of homophobic posts, often tied racism into the mix as well; the writers presented themselves as victims of transgender people as well as racial minorities, considering them to pose similar threats. An example of this from the early part of my sample joined that perception of victimhood very poignantly with the sense that America as a whole—not just the South—had spun out of the control of its traditional hegemons. In a 2017 piece titled “Welcome to Clown World,” author Larry Ridgeway stated:
From forced “equality” with unequals and the fact degenerate homosexuals are allowed to parade through our streets, it’s often hard to imagine living in a world that is more backwards than this one. We live in a country that is basically a shopping mall of degeneracy—whatever crazy, destructive nonsense you’re into, we got it. (emphasis in the original text).
Immediately, Ridgeway’s reader understood that he considered sexual and racial minorities to be birds of a feather, causing destruction together. He continued on to specifically implicate trans people in this destruction. He described reading a story in which a trans man and his husband were expecting a child, claiming—as many of his fellow writers would over the course of my sample—that they must, by their very nature, be mentally ill. Ridgeway also noted that the couple had previously adopted two children, who happened to be white. He stated: “I move that any children adopted by homosexuals and trans critters have to be minorities. They deserve it.” And, to put as fine a point on this as possible, Ridgeway continued:
It wasn’t that long ago that “people” of this ilk would be ostracized from all social circles. Now, it is the proud white man who is relegated to the back of the bus to make way for this band of filthy, child molesting, reality distorting scumbags. People that make a mockery of everything good in this land, and they’ve felt no shame? They haven’t been ridiculed? Why not, white man? We are well within our rights to make these people feel disgrace. We should be doing all we can to remind them whose country this is. It is so sinister, the agenda of our enemies. Good people, like you, the reader, wish to have a nice place to raise your children and the means to provide for them. Instead—you are threatened with the prospect of having your means of providing for them taken away for speaking to power about returning to the customs that made this land great.Footnote 47
In Ridgeway’s piece, the entire picture seems to come together: a more racially and sexually inclusive America, in which equality is on the horizon (however imperfectly), is perceived by those who claim to represent the WASP core of the country as a sign that they have lost their rights to rule it. His piece also exemplifies another way in which many of ID’s writers demonized racial and sexual others in their writing: casual use of extremely offensive language.
5. Discussion
While ID was, prior to its apparent 2025 deplatforming, a self-proclaimed Southern nationalist organization, its perception of lost rights transcended the American South. In the more general direction of the nation—one that has haltingly and imperfectly sought to include racial and sexual minorities into the fold of American citizenship and national identity—ID perceived that white, heteronormative, Christian, patriarchal supremacy was eroding. This loss was keenly felt by ID in the case of sexual minorities, who have come over the past few decades to be seen, more or less, as “honorary whites.” As long as the LGB community presents as whitewashed and thus marginalizes other sexual minorities, it has been allowed to pass in American sociopolitics.Footnote 48
Several questions remain. Why, for instance, does ID—and the world at large—reserve special ire for the “T” in LGBTQ+? Much scholarship is devoted to this question; Susan Stryker stated that people tend to struggle to see the humanity in those who do not distinctly fit into the gender binary, and that seeing them can “feel for others like an encounter with a monstrous and frightening unhumanness.”Footnote 49 ID’s writers seemed to express this feeling. As we saw in the previous section, Ridgeway used quotations around the word people when referring to trans people, and also used the term “critters,” usually associated with animals, to refer to them.Footnote 50
Another question that remains concerns the viability of the message of lost rights espoused by groups like ID during the second Trump presidency. We have seen that the reactionary politics that animated his political career during his first term were not extreme enough for some people. At the time of this Summer 2025 writing, many of the priorities of groups like ID have returned to the forefront of American politics. With the Trump administration’s support, Confederate monuments have made a resurgence on the political stage, trans people have been once again ostracized from military service, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives have come significantly in the crosshairs. Additionally, a writ of certiorari was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court that would take aim at Obergefell v Hodges, the 2015 case that guaranteed federal marriage equality.Footnote 51 Wheels are in motion that would, if they continue to turn, make the America of ID’s nostalgia seem more within reach.
Another question concerns other sociopolitical groups animated by a conception of lost rights. Much scholarship has been dedicated to the priorities of the far-right, and in this paper, I have sought to enter the discussion of a new group into this framework. ID is, I argue, an extremely poignant example of the tendency on the right to view traditionally marginalized communities’ progress as an existential threat, as if American citizenship and national identity are a zero-sum game. Rights gained by the traditionally marginalized—in this case, racial and sexual others—equal lost rights for the traditionally hegemonic. Whether, and the extent to which, other far-right sociopolitical groups agitate for the return of their lost rights provides a fruitful avenue for further investigation.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: A.A.; Data curation: A.A.; Formal analysis: A.A.; Investigation: A.A.; Methodology: A.A.; Writing—original draft: A.A.; Writing—review and editing: A.A.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Open access
