Republicans are ramping up their rhetorical attacks on LGBTQ+ people even further with a series of attack ads that hit airwaves this month, in which candidates up and down the ticket are trying to leverage transphobia for their own gain.
The targeted attacks on trans people stretch to the very top of the GOP’s ballot, as the Trump campaign apparently refuses to beat the “one joke” allegations. On Friday, the campaign unveiled a new ad with the slogan “Kamala is for They/Them” on Instagram, featuring a foreboding voiceover that claims “even the liberal media was shocked” at Vice President Kamala Harris’ allegedly radical stances.
The ad hinges on the viral moment Trump had in the September 10 presidential debate when he said that Harris supports “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” That claim is spun from a 2019 ACLU questionnaire resurfaced by CNN the day before the debate in which Harris, then running for president, answered that she supported the provision of gender-affirming care, including surgery, to incarcerated and detained trans people, and that such care is a “medical necessity” and should be made available regardless of a person’s legal status. (As ACLU attorney Chase Strangio told Them this week, necessary medical care must be equally provided to incarcerated people under the Constitution, and courts have ruled that blanket denials of medical care violate that principle, even though they are common in U.S. prisons.) Harris appears to reiterate her support for those policies in a video interview with the National Center for Transgender Equality, which was clipped for the ad.
Conservatives leapt at the opportunity to paint Harris as a deranged “woke” ideologue who would enact ludicrous measures as president — like meeting the constitutional requirement that people in state custody receive medical care and, uh, using the singular “they.” That seems to be irrelevant for the Trump campaign, which prominently links to CNN’s original story on its website, even though Trump himself notoriously denigrated CNN as “fake news” throughout his presidency. (On a similar note, right-wing press breathlessly reported last month that the Harris campaign offers a choice of nine pronouns on job application forms; in reality, Harris is not a cool neopronoun crusader, but rather used a recruitment service which offers the same nine pronoun options on all of its listings, as Them confirmed independently.)
Trump isn’t the only candidate going back to the transphobia well to mobilize his base. Voters in Texas must now endure a TV ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which accuses Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat, of “push[ing] sex changes for kids.” The attack refers to Gonzalez’s support for the as-yet-unpassed Equality Act (which would establish federal anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity), but Gonzalez — whose campaign website does not presently mention “LGBTQ+” or “transgender” issues — is hardly a staunch trans ally. Contrary to conservative propaganda that paints Gonzalez as a far-left radical pushing for queer and trans rights, he voted with Republicans on a spending bill earlier this year that would have blocked veterans from accessing gender-affirming medical care, and told the Texas Tribune in a statement this week that he has “never supported tax dollars paying for gender transition surgeries and never will.” Gonzalez’s Republican opponent Mayra Flores is further to the right on LGBTQ+ acceptance, having called school policies that protect trans children’s privacy “an attack on family values and parental rights.”
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz fired another volley in Texas this week, releasing two attack ads that accuse challenger Rep. Colin Allred of being “wrong for our girls,” based on his support for the Equality Act and opposition to the Republican “Protection for Women and Girls in Sports Act,” which if passed would ban trans girls from competing in athletic leagues matching their lived gender. Allred released his own cheeky attack on Cruz last month in a video mocking the “Cruz curse,” referring to the pattern of Texas sports teams losing games when Cruz is in attendance. “Sports fans from across Texas are suffering from the same affliction,” a mock-dramatic voiceover intones. “Want to win? Lose Cruz.” Allred has previously adopted a pro-LGBTQ+ stance, writing on his campaign website that such attacks “are particularly harmful to transgender kids and their families,” calling Republican rhetoric “shameful.”
In Missouri, Sen. Josh Hawley released an anti-trans ad of his own featuring Riley Gaines, the former NCAA swimmer who has since become a darling on the political right for advocating against trans-inclusive policies. Hawley’s opponent Lucas Kunce “supports the radical trans agenda,” Gaines claims in the video, while also falsely claiming Kunce supports “sex change operations for minors” (a common right-wing falsehood, contrary to data that shows such surgeries are rare and that chest surgeries are usually reserved for cis children) and repeatedly misgendering trans swimmer Lia Thomas. Like Gonzalez, Kunce’s official website does not mention LGBTQ+ rights or transgender people in particular, apart from a petition form to ban conversion therapy in the city of Blue Springs.
Equality Texas communications director Johnathan Gooch called the Republican slate of anti-trans ads “truly alarming” in comments to the Texas Tribune this week.
“[T]rans Texans have dealt with a lot. They don't need their lives politicized,” Gooch told the paper. “I think most Texans care about their grocery bill more than they care about anything else.”
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