Republicans and President-elect Trump vilified transgender people and Kamala Harris in the media and through $215 million dollars in paid advertising during the Trump campaign for president, suggesting that Kamala Harris was with trans people, and Trump was with everyone else.
This anti-trans campaigning was the worst in history for trans people. Full stop.
This highly orchestrated trans panic was brought to us by far-right extremists, strategists and politicians who literally want to stop people from living authentically as LGBTQ+ people, particularly those identifying as transgender. They want to erase transgender people from public life altogether.
This could look like denial of gender-affirming health care to adults and even criminalization of treatment, something Trump suggested in a campaign announcement nearly a year ago.
Trump makes all kinds of wild and untruthful allegations about young people, but children do not medically transition. Children are not given hormones. They are accepted, loved, and cherished for who they are. There can be haircuts, changes in clothes, pronoun changes, but there are no hormonal treatments.
When they reach puberty, with a consultation with their doctor, a family and the youth may decide to use puberty blockers to give them more time to decide. But Trump has threatened to prosecute any doctor or parent who treats their child.
The playbook that these politicians and strategists are using to instigate culture wars through anti-trans and gender-affirming bans are similar to those used to attack reproductive rights and a person’s right to choose.
As with the abortion playbook, restrictions targeting minors are a stepping stone to broader restrictions for adults.
These attacks come at a time of extreme vulnerability for LGBTQ+ youth. A recent study published in Nature Human Behavior confirms what many in the LGBTQ+ community have long feared: Anti-trans legislation is directly linked to a staggering increase in suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary youth. The Trevor Project’s research reveals suicide attempts among these young people surged by as much as 72 percent in states where harmful, discriminatory legislation was passed. The research involved 61,000 transgender and non-binary youth analyzed between 2018 and 2022; it’s clear what’s at stake.
These anti-transgender attacks have been documented beyond the United States, specifically in authoritarian right-wing movements around the world, by academic scholar Judith Butler in their recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender. Authoritarian, fascist regimes and right-wing politicians around the world have sought to systematically undermine reproductive justice, protections against sexual and gender violence, and to strip trans and queer people of their rights by inflaming fears about transgender people.
In this context, at least one Democrat and some pundits have fallen into a trap of anti-trans extremism and begun to use Republican talking points that would make Trump and other far right-wing leaders proud.
Congressman Seth Moulton and others are positing that Harris lost her race for president because she campaigned as too woke and supported trans youth in sports.
Moulton’s analysis ignores that Harris was facing multiple strong headwinds. She had very little time to put together a campaign; most candidates have at least a year to campaign and introduce themselves to voters. Many are arguing that Biden should have gotten out much earlier to give her time to prepare herself and to adequately campaign. Others have argued that she lost because she was too closely associated with an incumbent with high negatives and that perhaps she should have distanced herself from him more. That’s tricky though and arguably impossible since she was his vice president.
Weirdly, some argued that she ran as a woke candidate who didn’t reach out to voters with different viewpoints. But that also seems laughable since she actively campaigned with Republican Liz Cheney and sought out and received endorsements from more than 400 Republicans including Dick Cheney.
Finally, Former President Barack Obama has argued that she faced the same inflation challenges that many post pandemic incumbent leaders have faced worldwide and that all lost because of it.
Regardless, Equal Protections laws cover trans people in sports. While Mouton might argue that Democrats should compromise on this issue, this is a losing strategy.
Trans journalist Erin Reed spoke to this well. She argues that attacks on transgender participation in sports was never about sports, and always about getting people comfortable with discriminating against transgender people. If Democrats concede this issue to Republicans, it legitimizes the idea that transgender people are not equal under the law, enabling further attacks. As she said, this isn’t compromise, it’s complete capitulation.
Reed argues that accepting transgender bans in sports means accepting a Republican framework explicitly designed to justify further eradication efforts. If transgender people are deemed “dangerous” on a soccer field, why wouldn’t they also be considered “dangerous” in a bathroom?
Reed notes that in all the states where politicians actively fought back against this anti-trans message, the Democrats won. Where they didn’t, Democrats lost.
Trump’s bigoted attack that Harris was financing transgender surgeries for prisoners failed to acknowledge that his administration was the first to finance them in his own Budget memo in 2018 at the advice of Bureau of Prisoners officials, along with the costs of other gender affirming care like hormones. Trump was simply and rightfully following the law. Harris basically said as much during an interview when she was confronted with the ad, but that discussion got so distorted and the attacks were so toxic that her response, any response, got lost.
This reckless, bigoted, dehumanizing rhetoric needs to be denounced by all who care about human rights. The anti-transgender movement is demonizing struggles for equality, fueling aggressive authoritarianism and opening the door for Trump to further oppress the transgender community.
During Transgender Awareness Week, which concludes on Wednesday, November 20th with Transgender Day of Remembrance, it is especially important to call out the work that is still needed. The Democrats and those that care about human rights need to condemn and fight against this dehumanization that has been erupting within the Democratic Party and call on leaders within the party, as many have, to support the most marginalized members of our community in the face of a coming wave of oppression by President-elect Trump and other Republican leaders.
Gabriel Haaland, who is trans, is the former president of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club and a union activist. He now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is a member of Queers 4 Voting Rights, a grassroots antiracist group. He proudly supported Kamala Harris for president.
