What to know about claim FBI plans to categorize trans people as 'Nihilistic Violent Extremists'

On Sept. 18, 2025, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published a Substack article saying that the FBI was getting ready for a "new war on trans people" (archived).

In the report's first paragraph, he claimed that two unnamed national security officials told him that U.S. President Donald Trump's administration was "preparing to designate transgender people as 'violent extremists' in the wake of [conservative commentator] Charlie Kirk's murder."

He clarified his claim six paragraphs later, saying that, under the plan, "the FBI would treat transgender suspects," not all trans people, as "'Nihilistic Violent Extremists' (NVEs)." If such an order did come to pass, it was unclear how the FBI would assess or profile a transgender person accused of a crime.

That same day, the Oversight Project, an organization sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank that sponsored Project 2025, published a statement calling for the FBI to "designate Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism."

The assertion that the FBI was going to label transgender people as extremists spread on social media and was reported by publications like Them magazine. Our readers also wrote us asking for more information about the claim.

Snopes elected to not provide a definitive rating for the claim because we could not independently confirm the veracity of the information, given that Klippenstein cited anonymous sources.

Speaking via email, the independent journalist said that the two senior national security officials were people he had "known for years." He also noted: "One often must rely on unnamed officials in national security reporting because so much of the documentation is secret or non-public."

The FBI declined to comment.

Klippenstein's article

Klippenstein has a history of publishing purportedly leaked documents. However, anonymous sourcing does not meet Snopes' standards for providing a definitive rating.

His article cited unnamed national security experts to claim that the Trump administration was preparing to label transgender people as "violent extremists." In particular, the plan being discussed would involve the FBI classifying transgender individuals under the recently created designation "Nihilistic Violent Extremists," or NVEs for short.

However, as stated above, the article went on to say that only transgender criminal suspects would be treated as NVEs, not all transgender people. Additionally, one of the anonymous sources reportedly told Klippenstein that there was "no process per se for dealing with trans people as a 'threat group'" but felt the trans community would "be increasingly targeted under the banner of 'violent extremism.'"

With that said, it was unclear what actions the FBI would take if a transgender individual in the U.S. was accused of a crime, and whether the potential designation would allow law enforcement to extend its powers to more easily target transgender people.

What is 'Nihilistic Violent Extremism'?

In April 2025, Klippenstein published a separate article (archived) claiming that the Trump administration's justice department coined the term "Nihilistic Violent Extremism" as a replacement for the previous "Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism" (AGAAVE) label used by the Biden administration. (The writer did not provide any evidence to support the claim that the NVE label had officially replaced AGAAVE. Snopes asked the FBI whether it still used the AGAAVE label. It declined to comment.).

As of this writing, the FBI did appear to use the NVE label in some contexts — Klippenstein provided a screenshot of a California district court document that defined the term as follows:

a. Nihilistic Violent Extremists ("NVE"s) are individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability. NVEs work individually or as part of a network with these goals of destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors.

The document in question was the FBI's warrant request for a man associated with a group known as 764, a decentralized, online collective whose members sexually exploit children. That group and other similar online spaces often align with Satanist, neo-Nazi and accelerationist (the idea that capitalism and technological advancement should be allowed to progress as quickly as possible in order to hasten an inevitable collapse of society) beliefs, according to reporting from Wired.

Why now?

In the last two years, two separate individuals attempted to assassinate Trump, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated on the streets of New York City, Minnesota State House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in an attempt that also left another lawmaker and his wife seriously wounded and, most recently, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a campus event in Utah on Sept. 10. 

That's not to mention any of the 47 school shootings that took place in 2025 before Kirk's death, according to an archived CNN article (since Kirk's death, that figure had increased to 53 as of this writing, with the incidents reportedly leaving 19 people dead).

In the days after many of those killings, social media users attempted to discern the identity and politics of the perpetrators. In conservative spaces, rumors often surfaced that the respective shooters were transgender individuals, which led to calls for "Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism" to be designated as domestic terrorism (archived, archived).

So it went after Kirk's death. For example, the day after he was killed, U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, claimed (archived) that the shooter was "a tr***y or pro-tr***y," using a slur for transgender people, before any verified information had been released about the perpetrator. Authorities have provided no evidence the shooter is transgender. 

Klippenstein claimed in his email that "the same Heritage expert calling for the designation has also complained that putting trans suspects under NVE is inaccurate." He shared an X post from Mike Howell (archived), the president of the Oversight Project, calling FBI Director Kash Patel "unwilling to name the threat of Transgender Ideology Inspired Violent Extremism specifically as domestic terrorism."

In his April article about "Nihilistic Violent Extremists," Klippenstein reported that "everyone and anyone can be NVEs, like pedophiles." However, the rumor that the FBI was planning to label transgender people NVEs, defined in the aforementioned California court document as someone with a "hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse," likely gained traction because it is similar to how officials in the Trump administration have spoken about transgender individuals.

Klippenstein's September article documented officials in the Trump administration, including Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump himself, blaming Kirk's death on the "radical left" and connecting it with transgender individuals, despite the fact that the person accused of fatally shooting Kirk hadn't been identified by authorities as transgender, and, as of this writing, had not been connected with left-leaning groups.