WOKE-LAHOMA: ANTI-TRANS IDEOLOGY ON THE FRONTLINES

The past decade (2015-2025) of American politics has been marked by a sharp rise in anti-trans politics. Indeed, during this period, anti-trans rhetoric and legislation have become central to American conservative politics more broadly. As the Republican party under Donald Trump works daily to remake the federal government in its image, studying the recent past of Republican-controlled states like Oklahoma offers a window into the future of anti-trans politics at the national scale. This thesis uses a mix of discourse analysis of anti-trans media and participant observation at 2SLGBTQ+ Pride events to analyze the ideological underpinnings of the present-day anti-trans panic in the state of Oklahoma. Anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, I contend, cast trans people as deceptive, delusional, dangerous, and disgusting. For anti-trans ideologists, trans people pose an existential threat to the fabric of American society, of which the basic building block is the white Christian heterosexual nuclear family. In this panicked, anti-trans climate, 2SLGBTQ+ pride events across Oklahoma are sites for trans and queer community-building, cis/straight allyship, and contestations of anti-trans politics. At the same time, these pride events’ corporate and military-industrial entanglements fundamentally constrain the radical content of trans politics by imposing limits on what constitutes “politics.”