Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
Cole-Finley Nelson, right, speaks at a protest of House Bill 1125, which would ban gender-affirming care for trans children, at the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson, February 15, 2023.
Transgender Americans are under political assault. According to the ACLU, Republicans have proposed 116 bills restricting the rights of LGBT people at the state level just in 2023 alone. Most are primarily aimed at transgender folks. As Axios reports, Utah, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas, Arizona, and Missouri have all enacted some kind of ban on gender-affirming care for minors (though some have been put on hold pending legal challenges).
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has instructed state child protection agencies to investigate parents who seek such care for their children. Legislatures in Kansas, South Carolina, and Oklahoma are working on bans for people under 21, and Texas for people under 26. At time of writing, the Florida House was holding hearings on a bill that would ban all insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, even for adults.
All this smacks somewhat of the post-Reconstruction assault on Black rights in the South. Yet from a political standpoint, the odd thing about this attack is that it is a proven electoral liability. Republicans have paid a heavy price going all in on transphobia for going on six years now, yet they continue to double down.
But this red-state attack means that the only way to protect all transgender people across the country is with federal civil rights legislation.
The “ettingermentum” Substack newsletter has a useful breakdown of the electoral record of transphobia. In a word, it’s terrible. In 2016, Democrat Roy Cooper pulled off a shocking upset in the governor’s race in North Carolina almost entirely thanks to the state GOP’s bathroom bill (mandating that individuals use bathrooms of their birth gender, instead of their current identity), which caused a serious backlash both within the national population and, more particularly, major national corporations. In 2019, Republicans in Kentucky and Louisiana ran viciously transphobic campaigns for governor, and lost—in states that Trump won in 2016 by 30 and 20 points, respectively. And in 2022, Republicans whiffed no fewer than ten winnable Senate and gubernatorial races with explicitly transphobic campaigns and candidates.
Now, there were a lot of other factors in these races as well, and not every Republican transphobe has lost. But it’s fair to conclude that boiling transphobia is simply not an electoral winner. Polling on transgender questions is somewhat mixed, but most Americans seem to find the people compulsively fixating on it weird and off-putting. America’s deep strain of knee-jerk libertarianism likely helps in this regard—even for those who find transgender issues odd or uncomfortable, most probably see gender identity as a private matter for individuals, families, and doctors. Moreover, transphobic legislation in the form of forcing female-identifying people to use the men’s bathroom, or monitoring the periods or genitals of female athletes, or forcibly detransitioning people (if not confiscating children from their parents) is so obviously creepy and cruel that it alienates nonconservatives.
However, as ettingermentum also points out, we shouldn’t conclude that supporting trans rights is a guaranteed electoral winner either. In an NBC poll prior to the 2022 election, for instance, jobs and the economy, threats to democracy, inflation, immigration, and abortion topped the list of the most important issues. Trans issues are simply not top of mind for most people.
The odd thing about this attack on trans rights is that it is a proven electoral liability.
In most red states, however, Republicans likely have substantial leeway to charge ahead in their attack on trans people, even if their deranged obsession with policing how people raise their children or what they do with their bodies causes them to blow the occasional statewide race. In any case, as we’ve seen, they’re going to do it regardless of how it plays politically.
This means that the only way to halt this unconscionable attack on Americans’ civil rights is at the federal level. Democrats will have to retake control of Congress and pass a Civil Rights Act–style law protecting trans people’s access to health care, imposing penalties for harassment, banning discrimination in employment, housing, and education, and so on.
Future Democratic campaigns, of course, should naturally center around traditional high-salience issues like the economy, protecting and expanding Social Security, taxing the rich, reducing the price of prescription drugs, and so on. By the same token, though, Democrats should not fear defending trans rights at the same time. Tactically, we’ve seen that it can be a significant political weapon, which only underscores the importance of the party not going wobbly on the issue.
As I’ve previously written, there has been a significant movement among centrist and liberal journalists over the past few months to enable the transphobic panic with an endless series of duplicitous “just asking questions” articles that play into the Republican narrative. It’s the early stages of a process that happened in the U.K., where cowardly Labour Party leaders have been reduced to stammering incoherence by bitterly transphobic journalists, despite ordinary Brits being reasonably pro-trans. This absence of a Labour Party defense of trans rights allowed the Tories to attack on trans rights without fear of major-party contradiction.
Here in the U.S., such center-left party mumbling needs to be nipped in the bud, for the sake of both Democratic electoral victories and the rights of our fellow citizens. Selling out transgender Americans would be bad politically and worse morally.
