Freak Generations: The Moral Panic Playbook from Crack Babies to Trans Kids

Introduction

On April 3, 2025, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation marking National Child Abuse Awareness Month. In it, he declared that "one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today is the sinister threat of gender ideology" and claimed that its proponents are "outrageously indoctrinating our children" with the "lie" that they are "trapped in the wrong body." Gender-affirming care—described in his words as "hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and sexual mutilation surgery"—was framed as an act of abuse.

This proclamation is not an aberration. It is the latest chapter in a long American tradition of moral panics that have historically cast marginalized people—especially children and their caretakers—as threats to national innocence and social order. Trans youth have become the newest target in a well-worn political playbook, one that cloaks carceral violence, medical gatekeeping, and family separation in the language of "child protection." From the "crack baby" hysteria of the 1980s to today's bans on gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary patients, the underlying logic has remained unchanged. Deviance is positioned as a contagious threat to children's purity, allowing the state to justify surveillance, punishment, and control.

In a previous piece for Scalawag, I argued that the Trump administration's anti-trans rhetoric foreshadowed the exact position it would later codify in this proclamation. By examining how U.S. political institutions have long used these panics to pathologize and criminalize marginalized communities, I argue for a cross-movement analysis that rejects respectability politics and state inclusion, and instead confronts the state itself as a source of harm.

The Logic of Deviance as a Threat to Children

Framing marginalized people as threats to children—and by extension, the future of human life and the social order—has long operated as a political technology of control. In this narrative, deviance is not merely personal—it becomes a public emergency. Once the state deems an identity or behavior dangerous to children, it gains the moral license to surveil, coerce, and punish in the name of "child protection."

This logic was deployed with particular ferocity during the early years of the War on Drugs. The figure of the "crack baby"—a medically-exaggerated and racially-charged symbol ascribed to children who had been born to mothers who used crack cocaine—became shorthand for a generation of children portrayed as biologically-broken and socially-doomed. Media and political figures played a pivotal role in stoking the moral panic by broadcasting images of premature Black infants in incubators, describing them as cognitively-impaired, emotionally-volatile, and even "shrieking like cats." These children were not only marked as victims but as burdens—"the most expensive babies ever born," in the words of Representative George Miller—destined to overwhelm welfare, education, and healthcare systems. 

The mothers of these children, often poor and Black, were cast as irredeemable villains. In 1989, Jennifer Clarice Johnson was convicted in Florida of "delivering" cocaine to her newborn through the umbilical cord and sentenced to 14 years of probation, with restrictions on her movements, future pregnancies, and access to care. Her conviction was later overturned, but the damage had been done. By 1992, more than 160 women across 24 states had been prosecuted under similar charges. These prosecutions didn't protect children; they asserted the state's authority to criminalize reproduction. This legal maneuver has recently been revived as southern states like Texas and Louisiana pursue felony charges against the telehealth providers, midwives, and family members who support abortion seekers. This year, Texas filed a criminal affidavit against Houston-area midwife Maria Rojas for violating its near-total abortion ban, while Louisiana prosecutors indicted a New York-based telehealth provider and sought extradition following the indictment of a Louisiana-based mother for obtaining abortion pills by mail for her minor daughter.

That logic has now been rebranded and redirected at trans youth. The crisis rhetoric has shifted focus from drugs to gender, but the moral panic structure remains intact. Moral panics require a subject on behalf of whom the state seeks to manufacture consent to "rescue" from deviance. Under the trans panic paradigm, trans children are not treated as autonomous individuals but as victims of brainwashing by predatory ideologies. Gender-affirming care is portrayed as genital mutilation and affirmation becomes abuse. Once again, the state positions itself as the crusader tasked with rescuing these children, while it simultaneously expands its capacity to surveil, investigate, and punish. 

Child Protective Services has investigated families for affirming a child's gender identity, while The Department of Health and Human Services has created a tip line to report gender-affirming care providers. The pattern repeats: punish the "bad" adult(s), rescue the child, and disappear those who fall outside the state's reproductive norms.

The Specter of the "Freak Generation"

What unites these past and present moral panics is a foundational belief that certain lives are incompatible with maintaining the health of the nation. Whether cast as chemically-damaged or psychologically-deluded, trans children are imagined not simply as at-risk, but as risks themselves. In this frame, deviance becomes intergenerational. 

This is the specter of the "freak generation," a term informed by various pieces of queer and disability theory that I use to describe a generation whose existence signals an imagined breakdown of morality, reproduction, and national coherence. The crack baby panic of the 1980s did not just demonize individuals—it created an entire generational mythos. These children were positioned as living proof of the failure of Black motherhood, as drains on public systems, and as justification for carceral expansion. They were never allowed to simply be children, but pawns in the Reagan-era's crusade to dismantle the welfare state. 

Reagan's rhetoric—fueled by the racist "welfare queen" stereotype and the moral panic over crack cocaine—vilified Black mothers as irresponsible and criminal, justifying brutal cuts to public services. This manufactured crisis framed poverty as a moral failing rather than a systemic issue, justifying the state's complete abandonment of poor and working-class people who previously relied on these programs. The groundwork laid by Reagan's neoliberalism—the defunding of social programs, the militarization of policing, and the dehumanization of Black families—set the stage for the expansion of the prison industrial complex. By the 1990s, this logic reached its apex with Clinton's 1994 crime bill, which Democrats, including former President Joe Biden, helped architect. As adults, the very children who once drew sympathy for being "crack babies" became the prime targets of an increasingly militarized police force and rapidly expanding prison system.

Decades later, the Trump Administration accelerates us towards the final stages of this legacy: proposing cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, while signing executive orders mandating the involuntary institutionalization of unhoused and mentally ill people under the pretext of "ending crime and disorder in America's streets". Today's panic over trans youth follows the same blueprint. Trans children are cast as mutilated, confused, and ideologically-contaminated. Their very existence is  a threat to the nuclear family, to the gender binary, and to the state's vision of the future. In both cases, the deviant child is treated not as someone to support, but as a warning of what society must eradicate in order to reproduce a desirable future—a warning of an emerging social illness.

Trans children are cast as mutilated, confused, and ideologically-contaminated. Their very existence is a threat to the nuclear family, to the gender binary, and to the state's vision of the future.

These narratives echo the language of eugenics and social hygiene. Just as disability, poverty, and queerness were once linked to unproductivity and public burden, transness is now framed in economic terms: too expensive for the state, too disruptive for the school, and unduly burdensome on taxpayers. The belief that a child's identity can derail the stability of society reveals a fundamental fear of the non-normative future. Trans children are constructed as a break in the chain of a "proper" society—a failure in the reproduction of both cultural values and biological reproduction.

The imagined "freak generation" represents a horizon the state cannot assimilate: futures that are queer, trans, Black, disabled, and economically "unproductive," or as queer theorist Lee Edelman argued, no future at all. And because these futures cannot be folded into normative visions of citizenship or value, they must be preemptively contained—or, better yet, prevented entirely.

State Violence as a Continuum, Not a Break

In the 20th century, state-sanctioned sterilization programs disproportionately targeted disabled people and people of color under the guise of public health. Following Buck v. Bell (1927), more than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the U.S., many of whom were held in prisons, public hospitals, or other carceral institutions when they were subject to the procedures. This violence continued well into the 1970s and 1980s,  including the thousands of Native Americans who were sterilized by the Indian Health Service and the Latina women coerced into sterilization procedures at L.A. County-USC Medical Center. In 2020, reports of forced hysterectomies in ICE detention facilities in Irwin County, Georgia revealed that the practice had never truly ended.

Alongside these medical interventions, the family policing system—formally known as Child Protective Services—has served as a racialized reproductive regime. It disproportionately targets Black, Indigenous, poor, and disabled families under the guise of protection, punishing non-normative kinship structures and parenting styles. The myth of the "welfare queen," the trope of the "anchor baby," and now the panic over "trans ideology" have all been deployed to justify state intervention and control. These myths function to demonize the reproductive choices of poor and marginalized communities by portraying their children as inherently problematic and their families as requiring intervention for the "greater good."

Today, gender-affirming care is being criminalized in over 20 states. According to the 2025 Anti-Trans Bill Tracker, more than 900 anti-trans bills have been introduced across 49 U.S. states, and 115 have passed so far. Of the top 10 states with the most anti-trans bills under consideration in 2025, six are in the U.S. South: Texas (130), Missouri (67), West Virginia (35), Oklahoma (34), South Carolina (32), and Tennessee (30). Overall, about 30 percent of the 49 states considering anti-trans legislation in 2025 are within the U.S. South. The majority of these bills restrict puberty blockers, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and aspects of social transition for young people in schools, like being referred to by chosen names and pronouns. 

Some states have directed CPS to investigate affirming families. Others have attempted to strip custody from parents who support their trans children. These policies do not just regulate medical care—they police who is allowed to exist. Trans youth are framed as a societal disruption, one that must be eliminated to preserve the status quo.

The escalation in anti-trans state violence coincides with rising anxieties about population decline in the U.S. and in other parts of the Global North, which have only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump administration is considering "baby bonuses" of $5,000 to incentivize people to have more children, in the wake of conservative-led state administrations' escalating criminalization and restrictions on abortion and birth control since the overturn of Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022. Roe v. Wade expanded abortion access but anchored it to fetal personhood via its arbitrary trimester framework—a standard now weaponized to justify extreme bans. Post-Roe, many of these bans need only meet 'rational basis' scrutiny, a legal green light for state coercion.  From forced sterilizations to family policing, violence has always been 'rational' in service of reproductive control.

The message is clear: The state seeks to cultivate a specific kind of reproductive citizen—one who can give birth, raise children in normative families, and reproduce national ideals. Trans people, especially trans youth, are threats to this vision—not only because of who they are, but because of the future they represent. 

Building Cross-Movement Resistance

As the tactics of moral panic are recycled, so must our strategies of resistance. We cannot defend trans youth without confronting the carceral, racialized, and reproductive logics that underpin this moment, nor can we treat gender-affirming care as separate from the broader struggle for bodily autonomy, housing, healthcare, and family dignity. The surveillance of trans families is not an isolated injustice, but the evolution of systems that have long targeted Black motherhood, Indigenous reproduction, and disabled people's survival. The attack on bodily autonomy—whether through abortion bans or gender-affirming care restrictions—reveals the violent biopower of a state invested not in life, but in discipline.

Building cross-movement resistance means connecting these histories without collapsing their particularities. It means rejecting the "child protection" framing that so often legitimizes state violence, and instead asking: Whose children are protected? Whose childhoods are preserved? Who is allowed to grow up?

To defend trans youth is to fight for a future not built on containment, but on self-determination; not maintained through surveillance, but imagined through solidarity. It is inherently abolitionist. These are not just moral battles—they are material ones. And they demand that we dream and build together, across issue lines and beyond the state's terms. By framing trans liberation as a practice of cross-movement solidarity, we can build a future that values all children. Not as tools of the state's reproduction but as whole, autonomous individuals capable of determining their own futures.