Republicans spent close to $20 million on anti-transgender ads in the final weeks of the election.
This article appears in the December 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Donald Trump pivoted from his two main issues—immigration and the economy—to go on a rhetorical assault against transgender people. He spent close to $20 million on ads. Swing-state audiences, particularly football fans, likely saw an anti-LGBTQ+ spot that focused on Kamala Harris’s record on transgender rights. The ad ends with a chilling tagline: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you.”
A Gallup poll in late September found that only 18 percent of respondents viewed transgender rights as “extremely important,” while a majority, 52 percent, labeled the economy as “extremely important.”
In an October Fox News interview, Bret Baier asked Harris to explain her views on transgender rights. She said that she would “follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump also followed,” a reference to the fact that the first Trump administration had also allowed transgender inmates to receive gender-affirming care.
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The co-director for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, Chase Strangio, told Them, an online LGBTQ+ magazine, “Courts have consistently held that blanket denials of medical care, including medical treatment related to gender dysphoria, are unconstitutional. This is a clear constitutional principle that applies in all confinement settings. The government, once it confines someone against their will, cannot deliberately withhold needed medical care.”
Harris’s answer, however, may have unintentionally undercut the potential danger the new Trump administration could pose to transgender people. It was also criticized for being unusually evasive, given her long record of open support for LGBTQ+ rights throughout her political career. From her time as the district attorney for San Francisco to her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris has supported pro-LGBTQ+ policies, such as banning conversion therapy and providing affordable gender-affirming care.
Trump didn’t need to focus on LGBTQ+ issues. He was already on solid ground with his base on inflation and immigration and had made significant inroads with other groups, including Latinos, young men, and swing-state voters. But by attacking transgender Americans, Trump brought identity politics to the forefront of the 2024 election season. For some, prioritizing problems like inflation seems to require turning away from supporting the hard-won rights of people once forced to exist on the margins. In this volatile political environment, transgender Americans have become scapegoats.
By attacking transgender Americans, Trump brought identity politics to the forefront of the 2024 election season.
With the Democratic Party already engaged in rounds of finger-pointing over Harris’s brutal loss, some Democrats are ceding ground to conservatives on transgender rights, backtracking from their previous support, and repeating the anti-transgender language of Republicans. The day after the election, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) told The New York Times that Democrats must “stop pandering to the far left” on transgender rights issues. “I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports,” Suozzi added, using language commonly employed by Republicans and other social conservatives to describe trans people.
Remarkably, a day later, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA)—a two-time co-sponsor of the House’s Transgender Bill of Rights, which includes protections for transgender athletes—criticized the party on the same grounds, buying into fears of trans people dominating women’s sports, a phenomenon that has been widely debunked but, nevertheless, persists—even among once-supportive lawmakers.
“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” Moulton told the Times. “But as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” There’s no nationwide count of the number of transgender high school students who participate in sports, but researchers at UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute told Newsweek in 2023 that they doubt the number exceeds 100 nationwide.
Many Democrats have already suggested that a renewed emphasis on economic populism—a focus on kitchen-table economic issues like inflation, health care, and jobs—could be the solution to the Democrats’ hemorrhaging of support among working-class, non-college-educated voters. The argument is convincing—Senate candidates who leaned into economic populism, like Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Jon Tester in Montana, both ran around seven percentage points ahead of Harris in their deep-red states, despite losing their elections.
Anti-transgender rhetoric doesn’t always benefit Republicans’ campaigns and can cost them elections. Two North Carolina GOP candidates, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Michele Morrow, ran on platforms that heavily demonized transgender people. Robinson, who lost his bid for governor to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, had called for transgender women to be arrested—“or whatever we gotta do to you”—if they were found using a women’s public restroom.
Morrow narrowly lost her race for state superintendent of public instruction to Maurice “Mo” Green, her Democratic opponent. She has repeatedly called for the exclusion of LGBTQ+ topics from public-school curriculums, labeling efforts to educate students on these topics as “grooming” or “indoctrination.” Both the Stein and the Green campaigns successfully leveraged their opponents’ extreme rhetoric to highlight the dangers they posed to North Carolinians.
Have Democrats emerged as protectors of transgender rights only to abandon them in a period of great danger? Transgender Americans, particularly Black transgender women, are at a high risk for hate crimes, which data shows rise whenever Trump is a candidate; in 2016, hate crimes spiked 20 percent. In 2024, an estimated 29 transgender people have been murdered; about half of those victims were Black women. What’s more, transgender Americans are at an elevated risk of suicide: 40 percent of transgender adults have attempted to end their lives. In the days since the presidential election, the Trevor Project reported a 700 percent increase in calls, texts, and chats made to its suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.
Project 2025, the far right’s blueprint for Trump’s presidency, uses several derogatory terms (“pornography,” “transgender ideology,” and “the sexualization of children”) to refer to transgender issues. It calls for all mentions of transgender people and transgender identity to be rooted out of educational curriculums. Its proposed attacks on Medicaid and Medicare would also disproportionately harm transgender people, who are more likely than cisgender people to live in poverty and are therefore more likely to rely on state-subsidized medical care.
Many of Trump’s anti-transgender proposals focus on youth under 18. In an Agenda47 video from early 2023 that outlined the Trump GOP’s platform on gender issues, Trump said that he plans to ask Congress to stop using federal money to “promote or pay for” gender-affirming care, regardless of the age of the patient. In the same video, Trump threatened the Medicaid and Medicare eligibility of any health care facility or provider that offers gender-affirming care for minors, which would be a devastating blow to hospitals that rely on those funding sources to provide this care and to remain open.
He also claimed that he will use the Department of Education—which he has threatened to eliminate—to “inform states and school districts that if any teacher or school official suggests to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body, they will be faced with severe consequences, including potential Civil Rights violations for sex discrimination, and the elimination of federal funding.”
Democratic leaders must resist succumbing to far-right conservative transphobia, and find ways to support transgender people and to forcefully articulate that they understand that all Americans face profound economic challenges. In a November 12 essay in The New York Times, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear articulated a path forward that doesn’t require abandoning marginalized groups.
Beshear describes having vetoed anti-LGBTQ+ bills sent to him by the state legislature and still beating his Trump-endorsed opponent in 2023. “Even if some voters might have disagreed with the vetoes,” Beshear writes, “they knew the next day I would be announcing new jobs, opening a new health clinic or finishing a new road that would cut 20 minutes off their commute.”
Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, who have already announced their intentions to block extreme Republican measures and codify essential rights in their respective state constitutions, may emerge as leaders of efforts to resist backsliding on transgender policies. Some state and federal judges may also block Trump’s anti-transgender policies. As the Democratic Party rebuilds its coalitions, it must also continue to protect transgender people. Beshear’s assessment of this moment rings true: Democrats must focus on the things that affect Americans’ everyday lives—their commutes, jobs, and health care—without sacrificing the most vulnerable people.
