LBJ’s quote about how if you make a white person feel like they’re better than a black person, they will let you take the money out of their pocket is pretty spot on. Except it applies to more than just black folks. Capital has always needed a large segment of the white working class to feel like they have a special place of privilege in the US. That’s always been the implicit trade: the white folks (especially conservative, religious white folks) get to feel special - like this is THEIR country. And in exchange capital gets to ACTUALLY run the country. Without carving out a large group to elevate to a place of privilege, the working class writ large would probably start to unify against them.

This means there always needs to be “others” who are getting beat down to make those reactionary white folks feel like they’re in charge. It can’t (openly) be black folks anymore, though the anti-CRT push is 100% rooted in this. Gay folks were it in the 90s and into the 00s but that isn’t tenable anymore (though it’s making a bit of a comeback). It was immigrants for a while but that’s a tricky one for capital since without undocumented workers, profit in this country would collapse.

So the Wheel O’ Fascism spun around and landed on trans people. Easy group to target. It dovetails with all the other bigotries the white evangelical working class holds. And as a bonus, trans people are a group that a whole lot of liberals don’t really want to defend. So in that sense it’s a bit of a MacGuffin for capital: I don’t think there’s anything intrinsic about trans people that makes them the target per se, it’s just that the white working class folks that capital relies on need to punch down on someone.

TL;DR read Settlers