I’d seen the ad only once, here in Los Angeles — the anti-trans ad where Trump argues that while he is very much “for you,” Kamala Harris is in fact only “for they/them.” But visiting family in Ohio last week, I felt like I saw it everywhere — on televisions in various private homes but also on TVs hanging over bars in restaurants, on some endless nightmare loop. It makes sense that I’d see more political ads in a swing state, but why that ad specifically?
The reason, it turns out, is football.
The Daily Beast reported this week that “just eight days before the election, Donald Trump’s campaign is running inflammatory ads demonizing transgender people during NFL games aimed at predominantly male audiences.” Apparently, this targeted ad campaign hopes to get men off the couch and into the voting booth by making them fear that their tax dollars are being haphazardly spent on gender affirmation surgery for federal inmates. (In reality, only two federal prisoners have successfully accessed gender affirmation procedures — so it’s a pretty minor line item.)
It goes beyond just football, though. This ad is part of a massive ramp-up in spending on transgender fear-mongering as the Trump campaign lumbers into its final, terrifying days. ABC News recently found $21 million dollars, or nearly one third of recent campaign funds designated for TV advertising, was spent on anti-trans messaging. Independent journalist collective the Bulwark found even more — around $40 million — spent on that specific cause. The ads attack Harris for past indications of supporting gender-affirmative care for incarcerated trans people and for “letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports,” assuring viewers that Trump, on the other hand, will do wonderful things for our economy and spend sensibly. (Starting with his $20 billion dollar plan to deport one million immigrants a year, I guess?) According to Politico, Republicans have spent more on ads criticizing Harris’s support for trans rights than they have on any other subject in the campaign’s closing days.
Doubling down on transphobia feels like a strange eleventh hour tactic, considering transgender people are less than one percent of the population and most Americans don’t consider trans issues a political priority. Furthermore, according to a Ground Media randomized control trial, these ads are unlikely to inspire people to vote or support Trump, but they will contribute to overall anti-trans sentiment.
The latter is frightening enough on its own, but I’m hesitant to entirely believe the former. If there’s no evidence these ads will move votes, why is the Trump team putting so much money into them? There must be some indication, somewhere, that this issue has legs.
The reaction to Megyn Kelly’s appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher last week might offer some answers.
On Trans Issues, Trump Finds Moderate Allies
On his program, comic and commentator Bill Maher, a moderate who generally supports Democratic candidates and holds a variety of bigoted views on a range of issues, challenged Megyn Kelly’s choice to vote for Trump.
So Kelly made her case, beginning with a hateful and inaccurate diatribe on immigration, before transitioning into her next point: “almost equally as important, maybe as important [as immigration], is what we’re doing to our children with this trans insanity. This is almost my single issue. We are chopping off the healthy body parts of young children—100 percent we are doing that.” She claimed 9-year-olds are regularly having their genitals removed because doctors have been backed into a corner wherein depressed and confused cisgender children whimsically announce trans identification and immediately receive accordant surgeries and medications.
Bill Maher went ahead and agreed with Kelly, dismissing his audience members who knew better: “We are definitely doing that. That’s what it is. I don’t know what the ooing is about.” Maher only differed from Kelly insofar as he did not consider the issue to be a Major Issue, and therefore was not factoring it into his decision to vote for Harris. The clip went viral on a certain side of the internet, championed as an example of how important it is for conservatives to go into the lion’s den with liberals like Bill Maher and reduce them to ashes. Kelly claimed that after the show, audience members came up to her and said her arguments were “eye opening.”
Of course, Megyn Kelly is wrong. A study from Harvard found “little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) minors in the U.S.” In fact, the vast majority of gender-affirming surgeries performed on minors in the U.S. were performed on cisgender males, who accounted for 80% of gender-affirming breast reduction or removal procedures.
Yes, the number of people receiving gender affirmation surgeries has grown rapidly in the last several years — but that’s a good thing, an indicator of increased access to care, more awareness around trans identities, and more insurance companies covering gender-affirming surgeries. But even for adults contemplating these decisions, the process is serious and extensive, and it can take months for a patient to undergo all the necessary tests, appointments and diagnoses. After that, it can take a year or more for a surgeon to fit a patient into their schedule. Ultimately, regardless of age, these are decisions that should be made by a patient and their doctor — not by the government.
But in a campaign where Democrats have been attempting to paint Trump as “weird,” out of touch, dishonest and delusional, transgender issues are the rare subject area in which the Trump team has a shot at legitimizing his views using a liberal yardstick. The anti-trans ads proudly quote liberal media orgs like NPR, CNN, PBS, and The New York Times to bolster Trump’s claims while the voiceover reminds us that “liberal media agrees.”
The New York Times’ coverage of transgender, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people has, indeed, been biased and appalling, imploring readers to believe (incorrectly) that “huge swaths of children are receiving surgery for gender dysphoria, and that many or even most of them regret their transitions.” Other “liberal” media orgs, from The Atlantic to Netflix, also regularly platform hateful rhetoric and inaccurate information about trans people and discount the gender-affirming care that can be life-saving for transgender youth.
Indeed, it’s not just Republicans who have been swayed on these issues. Data shows that “there is no broad consensus in the U.S. when it comes to policies affecting transgender people” and that “transgender inclusion in athletics, prisons, and public bathrooms all receive more opposition than support.”
A recent 30-second version of the anti-trans Trump ad centers The Breakfast Club radio host Charlamagne Tha God saying, “Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners” and then saying, “Hell, no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that.” Charlamagne Tha God is a Kamala Harris supporter, and he has issued a Cease and Desist to Trump’s team, arguing that the ad manipulated his comments and took them out of context. Charlamagne is often a vocal challenger of his political allies, like when he called out CNN for going too easy on Trump. But even in context, him and his team were sharing their honest reactions to Trump’s ad — basically, they were lamenting that the ad was so successful it even resonated with them, despite their loathing of Trump.
Kamala Harris called in to The Breakfast Club this week to address the topic, saying Trump lived in a “glass house” because his administration followed the same laws Biden did concerning gender-affirming care for incarcerated people, and that only two federal inmates have accessed this care. (“Glass house” is a really gross term to use in this case, as it’s generally used to describe shameful or unflattering shared circumstances.) She accused Trump of hyper-focusing on this issue to distract from his plan to gut the Affordable Care Act. She took a similar approach when asked about trans issues in her Fox News interview. There has clearly been an intentional and strategic retreat from the more vocal support for the trans community, which is disheartening — and also suggests that there’s real fear that this issue could motivate voters.
Even if this strategy does not work for the Trump campaign or the Republican Party at large, these messages are likely to shape societal attitudes toward trans people. The dismissal from Harris and the Democrats rather than fact-checking and committed advocacy only makes this more troubling.
Today, a close friend told me that one of her sister’s coworkers had said she wasn’t sure who to vote for because she cares a lot about abortion access “but is horrified by the thought of her daughter playing on sports teams with biological males.” This is just one anecdote, but I fear so many more.
Conservatives Find an Easy Scapegoat in the Trans Community
On this issue, as conservative strategists have been laying out for years now, Trump can appear to simply be the only candidate willing to take action against an issue that matters to Dems and Republicans alike, because Trump alone is willing to stand up to the Woke Transgender Mob and their wasteful spending of tax dollars.
It wasn’t that long ago that conservatives had focused similar levels of ire on cis gay people. Then, marriage equality eventually garnered widespread support and its implementation did not in fact result in the apocalypse they promised, nor did any lesbians ride a slippery slope into marrying their cats. Visibility and acceptance of queer people underwent a massive cultural shift and did so incredibly quickly. LGBs were no longer adequate boogeymen for the culture wars, so groups needing a scapegoat and anti-gay orgs who needed to keep the revenue flowing needed a new cause to drum up donations.
Whereas rich white gay men are abundant in the rooms where things happen, including Republican rooms, transgender people on the whole don’t have that same level of influence, power or political capital. Trans people continue to “face steep economic and health disparities while a rash of anti-transgender state laws have caused thousands to flee their homes.”
Aja Romano wrote in Vox that trans people have become “scapegoats in the historical sense — canaries in the coal mine for the growing march of fascism in the US.” They note the anti-trans focus of Trump’s campaign isn’t new, but is rather “the culmination of a decade-long conservative political strategy of weaponizing anti-trans messaging to undermine and reverse what was a broad cultural shift toward LGBTQ equality.”
Trump’s Ads Are Already Making Life Hell For the Trans People In the Ads
In some editions of the ad, Trump features an image from a 2012 USA Today article about a 50-year-old transgender woman playing on a junior college basketball team in its section about “men playing girl’s sports.” Gabrielle Ludwig had played basketball as a kid and in college, then went on to serve in the military, have two failed marriages, one failed suicide attempt, and by 2012 had begun a journey towards living as her true self.
The article describes an accepting California Community College Athletic Association commissioner and a coach who worked hard to get Gabrielle a spot on the team, seeing her inclusion as a learning opportunity. Her supportive teammates stood behind her, one telling USA Today, “We all have our own oppressions we are facing ourselves. Either we are lesbians or we are different races or we dress like boys or we have piercings or tattoos or different hairstyles. All of us are already different, so it’s like, where else would she be?” Still, Ludwig faced transphobia and harassment from opposing teams and fans.
Ludwig is now one of a few trans people and drag performers furious at Trump’s appropriation of their images for his campaigns. “I fear for my life, for my family,” Ludwig, who now lives in Nevada, told The Hill. Her image appears in at least nine Senate Leadership Fund ads targeting Democratic incumbents as well as in Trump’s ad. Now, she’s getting harassed again.
She and her wife are considering legal action, but fears increased publicity, concluding that her experience on the team, which connected her with younger LGBTQ+ people and inspired her to embark on a fitness journey, re-visiting the sport that she loved, was a mistake.
“I wish I never lost my anonymity,” she told The Hill. “I wish I never, ever joined a women’s basketball team.”
Trump’s Plans for Trans People Are Terrifying
Trans voters are understandably concerned not only by Trump’s ads, but his plans. As outlined by NBC, states across the country have passed more than 100 laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights since the start of 2023, many of them focused on trans access to health care. At least a dozen RNC speakers mentioned gender identity or sexuality negatively in their speeches.
If elected, Trump has promised a full suite of actions that would directly harm the trans community. This includes revoking Biden’s policies giving access to gender-affirming care, ordering all federal agencies to “cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age” and declaring that any clinician who provides care to trans minors terminated from Medicare and Medicaid. He plans to go after teachers, open pathways towards litigation against doctors who perform gender surgeries and “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique.”
He concludes this page of bigotry and nonsense claiming that, “no serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender—a concept that was never heard of in all of human history—nobody’s ever heard of this, what’s happening today. It was all when the radical left invented it just a few years ago.”
Trans people have existed for all of human history, obviously, but it also seems like Trump has already forgotten his own support of a transgender Miss Universe contestant in 2012 — Canadian model Jenna Talackova, who began taking estrogen when she was 14.
But the issue is not Trump’s hypocrisy, or even what he does or does not believe. While his personal bigotries are obvious, they’re secondary to his desire to win votes. And yet, even if this strategy works for this election, it is not sustainable. Like the scapegoating of cis gay people, there is a time limit on this kind of moral panic. But in the meantime it is already causing harm. I hope we’ll soon see supposed allies to the trans community taking this as an opportunity to reaffirm their support, rather than shying away out of fear.
I’ve been seeing those commercials everywhere too. At first we laughed them off, the “trump cares for you, kamala is for they/them” framing seemed almost laughable. But as I kept seeing them more and more and more, I started to get worried. I hate how he is scapegoating trans people. It’s painful to witness and I’m so nervous.
Thank you for this
Thank you for this. Also just so you know- some of these ads have actually been displayed on Autostraddles website along with ads spreading some myths around election fraud. I don’t know if you all have the power to choose ads, but it could be worth looking into .