With just days left on the 2024 political campaign trail, you may have noticed that the Trump camp has increasingly turned to familiar targets, including immigrants, newspapers and women. It has increasingly doubled down on attacks on trans people.
A recent one Report ABC News revealed that nearly a third of recent campaign funds — or $21 million, according to ABC’s report — have been spent on television ads by the Trump campaign and transphobic messaging from various conservative political parties. Association of Independent Journalists Bulwark Transphobic ads poured in over the past five weeks, pushing the total to $40 million.
Ads paid for by the Trump campaign use one Litany of transphobic codingKamala Harris photoshopped to look like she’s posing next to a nonbinary man in a mustache and dress, despite plenty of evidence the tactic is a turnoff for voters. “Orange even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports,” one ad declared All three ads Harris attacks To support gender-affirmative care for trans prisoners, including surgery where medically necessary.
“Oranges are for them/them,” each ad ends. “President Trump is for you.”
That trans people make up Barely half of 1 percent The US adult population and that are trans-related issues Low on the priority list Among most voters, many may find it surprising that Trump has focused so much of his attention on isolating trans people. In fact, two different media research groups, leaning to the left Data for progress and video marketing firms Ground MediaWorks in partnership with happyEach study released last week found the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “meaningful.”
So why them? Well, there’s “winning” in appealing to voters, and then there’s “winning” in determining the conversation. Keeping the focus on trans people — Harris’s real policy proposal Do almost nothing Raise the status of trans citizens – creates a certain base and crowd out other discussions.
But the results here do not distract voters from the real issue. Fallout instead comes to an important detail from one of those aforementioned studies. Ground Media found that while negative messaging did not change viewers’ minds about Kamala Harris, it significantly increased viewers’ negativity about trans and non-binary people across all demographics.
In other words, these ads help reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing—to say victorious, 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 suggests 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 in those areas.
But trans people are not isolated targets. They are scapegoats in the historical sense — canaries in the coal mine for the growing march of fascism in the United States. Which puts us all in danger.
Trump’s focus on transphobia in his campaign strategy is nothing new. It is the culmination of a decades-long conservative political strategy to weaponize anti-trans messaging to undermine and reverse a broader cultural shift toward LGBTQ equality.
In 2013, in a landmark move, the American Psychiatric Association reclassified Gender dysphoria — the feeling of not aligning with your assumed birth gender — is no longer classified as a mental disorder, thereby setting the stage for a much-needed social shift toward acceptance and understanding of trans people.
The following year, Time magazine established Orange is the New Black Its cover stars Laverne Cox, announcement That trans rights were “America’s next civil rights frontier.”
The response was almost instantaneous. A month later, the country’s largest protestant religious group, the Southern Baptist Convention, passed A resolution Singles out trans people, saying, “[W]E opposes all cultural efforts to legitimize transgender identity claims.”
As the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage took effect, conservative groups such as Meg Kilgannon, a conservative organizer, moved away from targeting trans people with “divide and conquer” tactics. brief At a 2017 Family Research Council panel: “For all its recent success, the LGBT coalition is actually fragile,” he told the gathering. “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”
To do this, conservatives join forces with unlikely allies, including trans-exclusionary radical feminists, to foment antipathy against trans people. Right wingers fear, Dozens of anti-trans bathroom laws are being introduced across the country, then using them to introduce other transphobic ideas into local conservative platforms, all straight out of the moral panic playbook. These strategies did not directly address the sociocultural progress that trans people were making; Instead, they have cultivated a new wave of unfounded fear and apprehension about trans people themselves.
And the campaign has become more effective with time. Where transphobic bathroom bills largely failed a decade ago, they are now coming back into fashion; last week, Odessa, Texas, passes a bathroom bill It offers a $10,000 reward for anyone who spies a trans person using the “wrong” bathroom.
The key elements we see in the attack and persecution of trans people in the US in 2024 are not really about trans people; We’ve seen these same fear-mongering tropes weaponized against countless marginalized groups throughout history.
They serve a larger political purpose – not just to demonize a particular group of people but to strengthen a group mentality that can be deployed against all enemies. These attacks are political tricks.
This strategy harks back Another era of fascism. Here it is important to recognize the parallels to Hitler’s Germany (especially John Kelly’s Recent Complaints That Trump himself praised Hitler: for understanding that trans and queer people are not being attacked in isolation, but in conjunction with immigrants, Handicapped and mentally illand women.
The strategy at work deploys moral hysteria, a culture-wide “othering” of marginalized groups and, most importantly, a push for government response to the perceived problem of these outlying groups. By uniting around the public’s negative perceptions of these groups, the Republican Party amassed power and control at all levels of government. Trump did Repeated threats The power he has amassed against his political opponents if he is re-elected. And that, ultimately, is the real threat — not just to trans people, but to everyone.
