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A note from Aaron: Apologies for the delay in publishing this edition of the newsletter on the morning of October 30. I made a mistake while trying to schedule it for publication last night.
“We have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later,” President Donald Trump babbled in Georgia last week.
“And you say, ‘Where’s my son? My son is in the hospital.’ Can you believe it?”
You should not believe it, obviously, because it is egregious, incendiary nonsense; no child is being whisked away by teachers to get surgery for anything without parental consent. Nonetheless, these bizarre lies about healthcare for trans children have become a staple of Republican rhetoric this campaign season.
In fact, vicious hatred of trans people is the core final midterm message of the GOP. One analysis found that Republicans candidates and Republican-supporting organizations had spent more than $100 million on more than 200 digital, broadcast, and streaming anti-trans advertisements between August and mid-October. Around $77 million of that occurred in Senate races in places like Alaska, Texas, and Ohio. Another analysis found that billionaire far-right bigot Elon Musk has alone spent $100 million on anti-trans ads. Republicans have also claimed (falsely) that prominent Democratic candidates like James Talarico and Annie Andrews are trans — often using outright anti-trans slurs.
One big reason that Republicans are doubling, tripling, and quintupling down on anti-trans bigotry is that they have nothing else. Polls find them trailing on virtually every issue, including areas of traditional party strength like the economy and national security. Republicans have lost 20 points on immigration since 2024, and the backlash against ICE makes it difficult for them to run on anti-immigrant bigotry as they often have in the past.
Republicans also love transphobic bigotry, though, because they are bigots, and harming trans people is a core part of their agenda. Trans hate is also a way to push the GOP’s broader patriarchal agenda and justify vindictive control of women, of children, of queer and nonconforming people, of disabled people. Fascism builds on hate to generate more hate.
The GOP wants to dehumanize trans people as a goal in itself, and to target others in an ever-expanding orgy of violent authoritarianism. That is why it is so important for Democrats to stand with trans people, rather than collaborating with the GOP in anti-trans messaging and hate.
Hate as a tactic
The GOP also spent tens of millions on anti-trans messaging in 2024. They claimed, then as now, that trans women have an unfair advantage in women’s sports, though this has been repeatedly debunked. They insisted, then as now, that gender affirming care for trans people is dangerous or harmful, though, again, this is completely at odds with high degrees of satisfaction among trans youth with gender-affirming care. They claimed, as Trump does, that trans care is being forced on children, though this is a lie.
These ads were probably not especially effective. Nonbinary journalist and Vice editor Nico Lang argued that the Republican hyper focus on trans hate was why Republicans underperformed in 2020 and 2022. In 2024, a Data for Progress survey found that 80 percent of voters wanted candidates to talk less about trans issues and more about the economy and inflation. And in fact most analysts, such as G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, agree that the main reason Harris lost in 2024 was “that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome.”
Nonetheless, winning parties tend to think that everything they did running up to a win was genius. Since they are now in power, ongoing elevated inflation is badly harming Republicans rather than helping them; Trump’s approval on inflation was at a record low 22 percent in a recent Fox poll. And since their other issues are clearly losers, Republicans are once again going to their safe space of vile anti-trans bigotry.
Many Democrats recognize that Republicans are trying to use anti-trans ads to change the subject. Evan Low, President of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, the largest PAC focused on electing LGBTQ+ candidates, said last year, “we want to talk about kitchen-table issues, not about identity. We are running to serve the people, not to distract on issues that divide.”
This is messaging that some Democratic candidates have embraced. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, in a Fox News interview, repeatedly pivoted from anti-trans and anti-immigrant questions to talk about the economy, inflation, and affordability. Sam Forstag, a Democrat running in a competitive House seat in Montana, responded to a slew of anti-trans bigotry from his opponent by forthrightly stating, “what I see with that kind of anger and rhetoric is a lot of singing and dancing, and they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets. I won’t stand for that.”
Hate as a goal
The GOP does use transphobic messaging to distract from other issues. But, as many trans people have pointed out, it doesn’t just use hate as a distraction.
Anti-trans ads are not necessarily very successful in swinging election results, but they do have measurable effects in convincing viewers to hate trans people. Ground Media found that people who viewed anti-trans ads were “3.7 percent less likely to support policies ensuring trans access to healthcare and 3.1 percent less comfortable with accepting a trans friend or family member.” That last finding, disturbingly, was true even among those who already had trans friends, family, or acquaintances.
It’s not just random viewers who turn against trans people after viewing these ads. It’s also, in some cases, Democratic candidates.
Long-serving Democratic Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, for example, responded to anti-trans Republican messaging by boasting, “I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools because parents know what’s best for their kids, and boys should not play in girls’ sports.” Kaptur not only targets trans people for bigotry, she actually uses anti-trans slurs. Trans girls are not “boys,” and saying they are is a deliberate effort to misgender and dehumanize them.
Kaptur, unfortunately, isn’t alone. South Carolina Senate candidate Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, has run an ad in which she says, “I don’t support biological men playing women’s sports and I don’t support — and haven’t ever performed — gender surgery for minors.” Advocating for the federal government to make decisions about gender-affirming care is ugly and cruel, and again, calling trans women in this context “biological men” is a slur. Josh Turek, a Democrat running for Senate in Iowa, has gone even further and said he wants a federal ban on funding for gender affirming care for adults as well as minors.
Political scientists Julia Azari and Christopher Federico both explain that there is very little evidence that these kinds of Democratic anti-trans appeals are going to persuade anyone. But they do dishearten and terrorize trans people. As Jessica Kant wrote for The Nation, “Many of us in the groups being most commonly targeted by the far right are left to wonder if this dogmatic pursuit of the least controversial platform is less a strategy than a cultivated apathy — or, worse, whether our ostensible allies ever cared for us at all if it is so easy to cast us aside.”
Again, pushing Democrats to turn on trans people, and creating a climate in which targeting trans people has broad, even bipartisan acceptance, is why the GOP spends money on anti-trans hate in the first place. The Lemkin Institute has pointed out that the Trump administration “has moved from identifying transgender people as a threat to the family and to the nation’s military prowess to claiming that transgender people constitute a cosmic threat to the spiritual health of the nation and the greatest direct threat to US national security in the world.”
In the words of trans Montana state legislator Zooey Zephyr, anti-trans legislative initiatives “ban our art forms. They ban our literature. They ban our histories, and they ban our healthcare.” This is all of a piece with the millions and millions in spending intended to convince voters, and politicians, to see trans people as less than human.
In that context, the Lemkin Institute argues, it makes sense to see the US as in the process of ramping up a genocide against trans people — which is to say, that the US under Trump wants “to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the US and globally.”
Hitler used hatred of Jewish people to try to build power, and then he used that power to eliminate Jewish people. The Republican Party has a similar relationship to trans hate. They hope it will help them win elections. But they also hope that winning elections, and funding anti-trans propaganda, will allow them to eliminate trans people.
Trans hate advances patriarchy and fascism
Some Democrats have pointed out that trans hate helps fascists erode resistance to attacks on other marginalized people.
In response to a question from a trans student in Maine, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rebuked Democrats attacking trans rights, and pointed out that “the moment you compromise the rights of a trans person in America, you compromise the rights of every citizen in America.” She noted that Trump has defunded the civil rights division enforcing Title IX and gender discrimination on campus.
“When they attack trans girls in sports, they’re also attacking all women’s ability to stand up against their abusers, their rapists, and their assaulters on campuses across America,” she said.
Others have pointed out that the right to privacy which should form the basis of trans people’s right to healthcare is also at the core of many other protections for marginalized people.
When Steve Forstag said, “Let’s let people live their lives with dignity and make their own private personal decisions, and let’s keep politics the heck out of it,” he was speaking of trans people’s healthcare. But he could just as easily have been talking about abortion rights — or marriage equality, or access to mental health medications and resources.
Trump heads a eugenic Christofascist movement which hates diversity and believes narrow norms of behavior, identity, desire, and appearance should be enforced through draconian, invasive force. From the GOP’s perspective, the fact that trans bans in athletics inevitably require abusive gender inspection of all girls, cis or trans, is a feature not a bug. Republicans want the state to have the power to police all non-normative bodies — including women, children, disabled people, and non-white people. They want to criminalize all identities but that of abusive white male patriarch.
Defeating Republicans means neutralizing trans hate as a tactic and winning the 2026 midterms. But defeating Republicans also has to mean defeating their goal of a world ruled by hate, and their goal of a world without trans people. Fascist propaganda is meant to divide us and destroy us all. If it succeeds, Trump wins, even if he loses a battle or two.
That’s it for now
We’ll be back with a new episode of the PN Pod at 1 p.m. Eastern today, then again with a special edition of the newsletter on Saturday.
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Thanks for reading.
This piece is another A+ PN piece. Spot on.
Thus the sad end of the Burlesque era