"Scapegoat" — Elias Sharp's Book on the Political Demonization of Trans People in the US
An analysis of moral panic and the political scapegoating of trans people in modern America.
On September 15, 2026, the American publishing house Desert Light Press released the English-language volume Scapegoat: Why America Made Trans People The Villain. The book is written by American author, public speaker, and community advocate S. Elias W. Sharp. The foreword is contributed by renowned transgender civil rights scholar Jamison Green, Ph.D., with additional contributions from author and activist Thomas Beatie.
Elias Sharp works as a cultural commentator and writer focusing on power dynamics, vulnerability, and social identity. He previously published the memoir Dreams Are For The Dead, which addressed the destigmatization of people recovering from addiction and challenged societal prejudice against vulnerable groups. Living and working in the American Midwest, Sharp collaborates regularly with community advocacy centers and historical archives, including the Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in Florida. His co-contributors bring deep historical weight to the project: Jamison Green spent decades leading the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and FTM International, while Thomas Beatie became internationally recognized in the late 2000s following the release of his memoir Labor of Love, which transformed public understanding of transmasculine reproduction and parenthood.
Scapegoat investigates how transgender and nonbinary people in the United States became the focal point of an engineered culture war. Sharp contends that contentious public debates over medical transitions and restrictive state legislation are not genuinely driven by pediatric welfare or public safety, despite conservative political framing. Instead, he demonstrates how anti-transgender campaigns operate as a deliberate electoral strategy and political-economic tool designed to mobilize conservative voting blocs while diverting public scrutiny from systemic crises, including deteriorating public schools, wage stagnation, privatized healthcare barriers, and unchecked corporate lobbying.
At the center of Sharp’s inquiry is a sociological examination of moral panic. The author traces how panic is systematically manufactured: starting with ideological framing in conservative think tanks, broadcast and amplified across right-wing media ecosystems, and eventually naturalized within public discourse as common sense. Sharp situates the current anti-trans crusade within a long trajectory of American political scapegoating. Across the twentieth century, political campaigns repeatedly weaponized manufactured fears of vulnerable populations: from civil rights activists and immigrant laborers to the racist caricature of the “welfare queen” during the Reagan era and the Anita Bryant and Briggs Initiative campaigns seeking to purge gay teachers from public classrooms in the 1970s and 1980s.
Ultimately, Sharp warns that manufacturing a societal villain inflicts severe harm not only on transgender individuals facing targeted state bans and elevated hostility, but also on the structural integrity of American democracy itself. The institutionalization of exclusionary rhetoric and state encroachment on personal autonomy undermines the rule of law, creating dangerous precedents that compromise the civil liberties of all citizens.
