“Trans people have every reason to be afraid because we are being attacked,” Rodriguez said. “Every single day, another right is lost.”

She believed Republicans were playing on fear to stoke transphobia, so she thought trans people should play the game back. “They’re going to fear us no matter what,” she said. “So let the fear come from a place of reality.”

And so when she turned 21 in November, Rodriguez bought her first gun, a Rock Island Armory model M206 revolver.

“They’re making a database of Mexicans owning guns,” she said jokingly to the White male gun clerk.

“I think it’s racist and a shame,” she recalled him saying. She was surprised by his sympathy.

Rodriguez posted videos of herself shooting on social media. Her Reddit post got 1,500 upvotes. “A lot of people messaged me and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so cool to see you have a gun. I think I want to get one,’” Rodriguez said.

When Rodriguez recognized she was trans at 14, she handled things herself. Believing her Mormon mother wouldn’t be accepting, Rodriguez bought hormones from a Mexican pharmacy both online and in person. She came out in her junior year of high school. Her mom still hasn’t acknowledged that she is trans.

Rodriguez explained why she thought trans people were taking up arms. “A lot of trans people kind of share the sentiment of death before detransition,” she said. “If our hormones are taken away, we’d rather just kill ourselves. So, we’re not going out without a fight.”

The Washington Post spoke to a dozen trans people for this article. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity — or insisted that only their first name be used — for safety reasons. All said they were arming and educating themselves about guns because they were scared of what Trump’s presidency will bring. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” one election ad famously intoned.

Hate crimes against trans and gender nonconforming people had already increased 16 percent in 2023, according to a Human Rights Campaign report based on FBI data. At least 32 trans people were killed in the United States in 2024. One in four trans people reported being physically attacked because of their gender identity, according to a 2022 survey by The Washington Post and KFF. An analysis of Bureau of Justice data from 2017 to 2018 in the American Journal of Public Health found that trans Americans are four times as likely to be the victims of violence than cisgender people. Three-quarters of trans victims of fatal gun violence are Black and Latina trans women, noted a 2024 report by Everytown, a gun-control organization.

“People respond to situations of threat or uncertainty by seeking security. And one of the things that people associate with security in the United States is firearms,” said David Yamane, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture.

“Anecdotal accounts suggest [an increase in trans gun buyers] is absolutely happening,” Yamane added.

At least 2,500 people have joined the subreddit r/transguns since the election, according to the subreddit’s moderator. National LGBTQ gun groups Operation Blazing Sword and Pink Pistols told The Post that they have seen an uptick in interest in membership, which includes classes. Clara Smith-Elliott, the founder of Arm Trans Women (ATW), an organization that teaches gun-safety courses in Connecticut and Virginia, said her courses have started selling out.

Smith-Elliott thinks an increase in anti-trans laws may be driving interest in her courses. “People who already don’t like trans people … are seeing [anti-trans laws] as tantamount permission to act out against our community,” she said.

“People literally come to me in tears because they’re so scared of what’s going on. They don’t want to have to learn how to use a firearm, but they recognize the need.” Some of those signing up, Smith-Elliott said, are mothers of trans children.

“With personal protection being the top motivating factor, an increasing number of Americans are choosing to exercise their right to self-defense, as evidenced by the recent explosion of new gun owners from all demographics,” the NRA said in response to whether it had seen a rise in trans gun ownership.

Trans gun owners are part of a larger American tradition of minorities purchasing guns for safety, Yamane said, citing the Black Panthers in the 1960s and women seeking self-defense options in the 1970s and 1980s.

“What’s happening today among trans people is in the tradition of people demanding their rights and saying that they’re willing to defend those rights with force if necessary,” Yamane said.

Some gun purchases may be driven by the fear that being transgender may be classified as a mental illness, which could prevent gun ownership in states like Colorado that have “red flag laws.” (New guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services asserts a person’s sex is “unchangeable.”)

A queer Colorado firearm instructor named Drew said he visited a gun range a few years ago and a poster about red-flag laws was pinned on the wall next to one a law about rights for trans people. “The general implication was, if you were queer, you were mentally ill enough to not own firearms,” said Drew, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used.

Before Rodriguez bought a gun, she asked her friends for a reality check. Before the election, they would have told her not to buy one, she said: “This time around, no one told me I was crazy.”

Rodriguez is sitting on the gray sectional in her third-floor apartment, pink-lensed prescription glasses perched on her nose, her lips painted a Taylor Swift-style red.

She points her revolver at an “Eyes Wide Shut” poster propped up against the wall.

“So, if you want to shoot Tom Cruise over there, you really want to line it up,” she said to the group of women gathered around her.

Watching the demonstration were Max, 25, and Luci, 19, trans friends Rodriguez knows from college, as well as June, 23, a cisgender barista in a leather jacket. (The trio spoke on the condition that only their first names be used out of concern for their safety.)

June, who has been living on her own since she was excommunicated from Jehovah’s Witnesses as a teenager for being a lesbian, said she was “pretty fearful of guns growing up.” But now, she said she has “realized I’d feel a lot less scared if I could shoot and if I was able to not only protect myself, but my friends and family.”

Rodriguez went over gun-safety rules that she’d scrawled on a small whiteboard above a sketch of Kirby, the video game character, toting a gun.

“Treat all guns as if they’re always loaded,” she said. “Never point at anything you’re not willing to destroy. Finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.” Only Luci, clad in safety-pinned pants with a “unionize sex work” patch, had ever held a gun before — shooting a .22 with her father.

Rodriguez picked up her revolver — which she calls her “little cowgirl gun” — and flattened her index finger next to the trigger to demonstrate.

She then passed it over to Max. “Always just try to keep it pointed in that direction, where no one is,” Rodriguez told her. “Pull the trigger. It takes a fair bit of force.”

Max pulled it, a bit gingerly. “I’m trying to get over the idea that it’s not loaded,” Max said.

A bespectacled environmental studies major, Max said she fears for her safety due to “the exponential rise in anti-trans legislation proposed and passed.”

She had the opportunity to shoot a gun as a kid, she said, and had declined: “I was pretty afraid of guns, and I didn’t want to be comfortable with guns.”

Max has since changed her mind.

All the training was in preparation for a trip to Skagit Shooting Range, about 25 miles to the south.

There, Rodriguez paid $69.16 for range time for the four of them; four paper targets shaped like torsos; and the rental of a Sig Sauer P365-XL pistol from the White male clerk.

He briefed them on safety before they headed to the indoor range’s stalls, breaking up into pairs. Despite earplugs, the sound of bullets whizzing through the corridor made conversation nearly impossible.

The shooter in the adjacent stall wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Jesus is My Savior/Trump For President” in large letters. If he noticed the shooters next to him, he didn’t let on.

Rodriguez copped a shooter’s pose to demonstrate, her gleaming Doc Martens wide apart, her left foot pitched ahead. She grasped the gun, her arms straight.

June copied the stance and took the gun from her friend. She was a bit shaky as she placed her arms in front of her, aimed and fired.

There was a loud pop as the bullet squeezed out of the pistol and sliced through the cardboard dangling above the target. June felt the sound’s vibration in her teeth. The shell casing clattered to the ground, joining hundreds of others in the range. She turned to face Rodriguez and smiled widely.

“I don’t think I hit the target,” she said.

Now it’s Max’s turn to shoot. Afterward, she’s a bundle of nerves as she sits at a table in the gun store outside the range.

“I kind of honestly, like, forgot to breathe,” Max said. “My chest feels really tight. … It was definitely more powerful than I expected.”

June said her first time shooting a gun was “a little nerve-racking, to be honest.

“But I think learning how to do it makes me feel a little bit more comfortable about holding one. I feel more inclined to get one.”

The group went back to practice some more. After they fired their rounds, they pushed a button that sent the target flapping toward them for inspection. Luci proudly pointed to her perfectly placed body shot.

Though these women felt rejected by their political leadership, they were participating heartily in an American tradition: defending themselves with firearms.

“We have the same Second Amendment right that any Republican has,” Rodriguez said. “We just don’t have the numbers to do, like, a march on Washington. We’re just super easy to pick on. The only equalizer we have, really, is guns.”