Among swing voters who broke for Trump, according to a post-election survey by Democratic polling firm Blueprint, the most frequent criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris was that she focused excessively on “cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”
Among all swing voters in that Blueprint poll, the attack ad against Harris, which aired more than 15,000 times, successfully turned transgender surgeries for prisoners into a bigger issue for voters than inflation or immigration.
After the success of Trump’s advertising, there is no longer any argument about the Republicans’ political wisdom in highlighting transgender rights to label Democrats as weak on traditional family values. What is puzzling about the success of the strategy is that there are few transgender people.
There are even fewer transgender athletes competing with women. And there are few tax dollars spent on surgeries to help them change their bodies.
Still, one-third of the Trump campaign’s advertising budget in October was devoted to “gender-changing surgeries” for the small number of transgendered, incarcerated, undocumented immigrants.
The ads, ending with the line, “Kamala is for they-them; President Trump is for you,” ran repeatedly, especially during football games.
The advertising triggering American anxiety over transgender people was so successful that it distracted from the reality that there is no past policy difference on the issue between the parties.
When Harris was questioned about her support for surgery for transgender prisoners while serving as California attorney general, she accurately responded that Trump had presided over the same policy on gender surgeries for inmates at the federal level as she had advocated for in California.
The truth didn’t matter; Republicans still used the issue against Democrats.
“It’s too much against what [Democrats] stand for,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, which for the last five years has been running ads attacking Democrats as supportive of transgendered people.
“They hate the family, they know it’s a threat to them, and they don’t like parental rights,” Schilling told Semafor. “This is a hugely winning issue for Republicans, across the board.”
Trump’s Cabinet picks already make it clear that he agrees. His choice for attorney general, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) once won headlines for berating top military leaders at a congressional hearing about “taxpayer money” alleged to have been spent on “drag queen story hours on military bases.” It turned out that the military did not pay for the event, but Gaetz got his headlines.
Trump is reportedly considering Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, or Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters for the post of secretary of education. Justice’s organization has led efforts to ban books containing mention of gays and transgendered people. Walters has pushed for Bible mandates in schools, infringing on the constitution’s church-state separation.
Also, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, promotes the unproven theory that chemical “endocrine disruptors” are being used to damage children and create sexual and gender diversity. Kennedy’s bizarre claim fuels Trump’s efforts to target transgendered people to create support for his administration.
Trump’s strategy is also likely to be helped by a new Democrat in the House of Representatives, Congress’s first openly transgender representative, Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.).
Although she won by campaigning on issues like paid family leave and curbing inflation, McBride’s gender identity will likely make her a Trump target.
Already Democrats are split over how to deal with the GOP use of the transgender issue.
The head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), mother of a transgender child, told David Weigel of Semafor that it is “very, very painful to see Democrats throw certain vulnerable communities under the bus.”
She added: “Too often, our party kind of abandons [vulnerable transsexuals, the poor, and union members] and tries to be Trump-lite.”
She spoke after Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) told the New York Times that too many Democrats are “afraid” to say that “a male or formerly male athlete,” playing school sports should not be allowed to “run over” his daughter.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s words from his opinion in the decision ending federal protection for abortion rights now also loom over the transgender political fight.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote, opening the possibility of the high court rolling back civil rights laws protecting gay people from discrimination.
There are tragic consequences for trans-Americans and their families. The Associated Press reported last week that transgender youth have been “flooding crisis hotlines since the election of Donald Trump, who made anti-transgender themes central to his campaign.” The AP also noted that his administration could swiftly start work on excluding transgender students from Title IX protections, which affect school policies on students’ use of pronouns, bathrooms and locker rooms.
“We get scared so bad that we hurt ourselves,” the late columnist Molly Ivins once observed. “Scared of communism or the tide of illegal aliens or pornography or crime or some other menace, we think the only way to protect ourselves is to give up some of our freedom, sacrifice some of our constitutional rights.”
Under Trump and with Republican control of both sides of Congress, Democrats find themselves in a strange political fight over fear of transgender people.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
