The Onion skewers Trump administration’s trans panic in hilarious parody video

The Onion is back on top satiricial form after posting a hilarious news clip about a “trans alarm” scare in the White House.

The satirical news site, which brands itself as “America’s finest news source” and claims to have been running for over “268 years,” took another jab at the US government’s transphobic vitriol with a viral parody news clip claiming the White House had been evacuated after its “trans alarm goes off.”

The video, which has gained over 116,000 views on YouTube in less than a day, purports that the US president’s official residence went into lockdown after the building’s “infrared estrogen sensors” detected a “large spike in gender-fluidity.”

The fake news clip then showed edited footage of US president, Donald Trump, during a state visit with UK prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, with a text-to-speech voice screaming the word “trans” repeatedly as the colours of the trans flag were super-imposed over the footage.

A similarly fake news story published alongside the clip wrote that the alarm was activated at 10:02 am after a “transgender individual actively approached the perimiter of a highly restricted cisgender-only area.”

Onion News Network (ONN) senior political analyst, Jason Copeland, said during the clip that the Secret Service had initiated a “Code Rainbow” and had fitted Donald Trump and senior cabinet officials with “hormone-proof vests” to be taken to the White House’s “traditional values bunker.”

The fake report then shared joke text messages between cabinet officials, which saw one individual write: “Trans alarm just went off. Hiding under desk. Can’t call. Have to stay quiet so it can’t hear us.” Their hypothetical partner then responded: “Omg baby I love you. This can’t be real. I love you so much.”

“I’ve spoken with some sources to determine the severity of the threat. What we do know is, of course, this trans alarm is known to be hypersensitive,” Copeland continued. “Vice president JD Vance has set it off on multiple occasions with his eyeliner for instance.”

The parody news clip received rightful elation from fans of The Onion’s work, with one user giving “huge props” to the video’s producers.

The Onion has a history of publicly roasting transphobic individuals and institutions. The news site famously posted a parody opinion article in 2023 titled: “It is journalism’s sacred duty to endanger the lives of as many trans people as possible.”

Skewering the continued trans hate campaign by several news media outlets, The Onion’s Editorial Board noted that trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victim of violent hate crimes, adding: “We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.”

In the parody article, the Editorial Board spoke about a 14-year-old trans teenager, Quentin, who they said “stole his parents’ car” to have top surgery, which a doctor “immediately” performed on him.

“We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay,” the article continues. “It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist.”