The Trump administration is reportedly continuing to engage in efforts to prevent trans people from owning guns, or at least intimidate them into changing their minds.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) confirmed to the Independent that it is still working to update its policies in conjunction with the president’s executive order declaring there are only two innate sexes – male and female.

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Most concerning for many trans advocates is the plan to alter ATF Form 4473, the Firearms Transaction Record that all applicants must fill out, so that folks must list their sex assigned at birth.

For trans people who have a different gender listed on other legal documents, the shift could both cause bureaucratic confusion and put their safety at risk, as the administration would more easily be able to identify trans gun owners by finding people whose sex on various legal forms contradict one another.

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Patrick G. Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute, told the Independent that the change will no doubt deter trans people from legally buying guns.

“Just the announcement is going to have a chilling effect,” Eddington said, adding that “it’s pretty clear that [the administration wants] to try to collect data on individuals who don’t fit the regime’s idea of who is male and female… [creating] a de facto registry of people by gender identity.”

The policy change would also put trans people in jeopardy of prison time for making a false statement on a federal form if they put down their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth.

“Whether that rises to the level of materiality for a criminal charge compared to say, using a false name, is up the courts, but the mere possibility is enough to chill people from purchasing a gun,” trans activist Alejandra Caraballo told trans journalist Erin Reed when discussing the policy change in January.

Caraballo also predicted “more instances of this with the federal government weaponizing forms and applications to force trans people to out themselves or even revert state IDs to get basic services.”

The status of the policy update is unknown, but ATF did confirm it was continuing to work on updating policies in accordance with Trump’s view of trans identities as illegal. The Independent, however, stated that officials “softened their language” in response to the publication’s recent questions.

The Trump administration has been stoking endless fear about the “dangers” the trans community poses to others, including false claims that trans people are more likely to commit mass shootings.

After a mass shooting in Canada in February perpetrated by an 18-year-old trans woman, James Densley, co-founder of The Violence Prevention Project, which tracks mass shootings in the United States, spoke about the extreme rarity of transgender mass shooters and how people often overassign significance to the unusual cases.

“When a shooter is transgender, that fact becomes the story, especially on social media,” Densley explained. “Whereas when the shooter is male, their identity is never really mentioned because it’s just unremarkable.”

“That creates an asymmetry in the coverage, where people will recall all the unusual cases because they were unusual.”

Densley shared Violence Prevention Project data, which has found that 97.5 percent of mass shootings are perpetrated by cisgender men, two percent by cisgender women, and only half a percent by trans people.

Another group that tracks U.S. mass shootings, the Gun Violence Archive, cites an even smaller percentage of trans mass shooters. The group found that of the 5,748 that took place between Jan. 1, 2013, and Sept. 15, 2025, only five perpetrators, less than one tenth of one percent, were confirmed to be trans.

Nevertheless, rumors swirled last September that Justice Department leadership was considering using its rule-making authority to declare transgender people as mentally ill and deprive them of their Second Amendment right to possess firearms.

The deliberations at the highest levels of the DOJ followed the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, an attack police say was carried out by a 23-year-old former student at the church’s school who may have been a transgender person or a de-transitioned individual. Two children were killed in the attack, and 21 others were injured.

The potential policy change angered gun rights organizations, including the NRA, which released a statement in September declaring it does not support the GOP push to ban transgender people from owning guns by classifying them as mentally ill.

The controversy also comes amid reports that trans Americans have been increasingly arming themselves as protection against the Trump administration.

Adding more complexity to the matter, Reed pointed out, is the fact that progressives in favor of trans rights also tend to favor strict gun regulations, which puts them in the contradictory position of needing to argue that trans people deserve the right to buy guns if everyone else does, even though, in general, they want gun purchases significantly limited.

Eddington of the Cato Institute suggested the policy change could be unconstitutional and said that asking for any demographic information at all may also violate the Constitution.

“The idea that it’s okay for the federal government to engage in an inherently discriminatory policy against people on the basis of their characteristics is not simply offensive, it strikes at the very heart of the entire reason for having the Second Amendment,” Eddington said.

“It’s facially unconstitutional, but this regime doesn’t care about the law. It thinks it is the law.”

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