The cruel truth behind Trump’s new attacks on trans people

With mere days left on the 2024 political campaign trail, you might have noticed the Trump camp has increasingly turned to scapegoating familiar targets, including immigrants, the press, and women. It has also increasingly doubled down on attacks on trans people. 

A recent ABC News report found that nearly a third of recent campaign funds — or $21 million, according to the report — for television advertising has been spent on transphobic messaging from the Trump campaign and various conservative political groups. The independent journalist collective the Bulwark pushed the total even higher — to $40 million poured into transphobic advertising within the last five weeks.

The ads, paid for by the Trump campaign, use a litany of transphobic coding, including photoshopping Kamala Harris to appear as though she’s posing beside a nonbinary person in a mustache and a dress, despite plenty of evidence that this strategy is a turn-off for voters. “Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports,” one ad declares. All three ads attack Harris for supporting gender-affirmative care for incarcerated trans people, including surgery where medically necessary. 

“Kamala is for they/them,” each ad concludes. “President Trump is for you.”

Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most voters, many might find it baffling that Trump has focused so much of his attention on singling out trans people. Indeed, two media research groups, the left-leaning Data for Progress and video marketing firm Ground Media, working in partnership with GLAAD, each released studies last week finding that the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “mean-spirited.” 

So then why do them? Well, there’s “winning” in terms of appealing to voters, and then there’s “winning” in terms of determining the conversation. Keeping the focus on trans people — Harris’s actual policy proposals do almost nothing to advance their status — fires up a certain base and crowds out other discussion. 

But the fallout here isn’t voters distracted from the real issues. The fallout instead comes in an important detail from one of those aforementioned studies. Ground Media found that while the negative messaging didn’t change viewers’ minds about Harris, it did significantly increase viewers’ negativity about trans and nonbinary people across all demographics. 

In other words, these ads help to reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing — which is to say winning, in a very real sense — the larger ongoing culture war against queer and trans people. The willingness of Trump and his supporters to invest in these ads arguably indicates that even if Harris wins the election, marginalized communities in red states will still be under threat from Trump supporters and from growing legal restrictions on those regions. 

But trans people aren’t isolated targets. They are scapegoats in the historical sense — canaries in the coal mine for the growing march of fascism in the US.  That puts all of us in danger.

Trump centering transphobia in his campaign strategy is not new. It’s the culmination of a decade-long conservative political strategy of weaponizing anti-trans messaging to undermine and reverse what was a broad cultural shift toward LGBTQ equality. 

In 2013, in a landmark move, the American Psychiatric Association reclassified gender dysphoria — the feeling of not being aligned with your presumed-at-birth gender — so it was no longer classified as a mental disorder, thereby setting the stage for a much-needed societal shift toward accepting and understanding trans people. 

The following year, Time magazine placed Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox on its cover, declaring that trans rights were “America’s next civil rights frontier.” 

The backlash was almost instantaneous. A month later, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant religious group in the country, passed a resolution singling out trans people and stating, “[W]e oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity.” 

As the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage took effect, conservative groups turned away from targeting queer people to instead target trans people in a “divide and conquer” strategy, as a conservative organizer named Meg Kilgannon summarized in a 2017 Family Research Council panel: “For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile,” she told the assembly. “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”

To do this, conservatives joined forces with unlikely allies, including “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” to drum up antagonistic sentiments against trans people. Right-wingers spread alarmism, rolling out dozens of anti-trans bathroom laws across the nation, then using them to introduce other transphobic ideas into local conservative platforms, all of them coming straight out of the moral panic playbook. These tactics didn’t directly address the sociocultural progress that trans people were making; instead, they cultivated a new wave of unfounded fear and alarmism about trans people themselves.  

And the propaganda has only gotten more effective over time. Where transphobic bathroom bills mostly failed a decade ago, they’re now coming back into fashion; last week, Odessa, Texas, passed a “bathroom” bill that offers a $10,000 bounty paid to anyone who spies a trans person using the “wrong” bathroom. 

The core elements we see used to attack and oppress trans people in the US in 2024 aren’t really about trans people; we’ve seen these same fearmongering tropes weaponized against numerous marginalized groups throughout history. 

They serve a greater political purpose — not just to demonize one specific group of people but to reinforce an in-group mentality that can then be deployed against all enemies. These attacks are a political cudgel.

This strategy harks back to another era of fascism. It’s vital to recognize the parallels to Hitler’s Germany here (especially given John Kelly’s recent allegations that Trump praised Hitler himself): to understand that trans and queer people aren’t being attacked in isolation, but rather in tandem with immigrants, the disabled and mentally ill, and women. 

The strategy at work deploys moral hysteria, a culture-wide “othering” of marginalized groups, and most importantly a push for a government response to the perceived problem of these outlying groups. By unifying around the public’s negative perceptions of these groups, the Republican Party amasses power and control at all levels of government. Trump has threatened repeatedly to wield that amassed power against his political opponents if he is reelected. And this, ultimately, is the real threat — not just to trans people, but to everyone.