Republicans’ political breakthrough on attacks on transgender rights has profound implications for the coming off-year elections and a wave of legislative fights both parties expect will accelerate in 2025.
After a string of elections in which the attacks appeared politically ineffective, they suddenly came through for Republicans in 2024, resonating with at least some voters and putting Democrats on the defensive to such a degree that they hardly even fought back.
“I’m often not shy about expressing opinions, but for me, it’s actually politically the hardest issue. I have no good answers. I am not clear, you know — it just simply could be the case that it’s a losing issue for Democrats,” Rep. Ritchie Torres, a co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, told NOTUS. “I have not figured out what message would be effective at neutralizing that issue politically.”
Democrats caution that Republicans should not interpret the last election as a mandate to reshape policies affecting trans people, arguing that the issue had a much smaller, more nuanced role in Republicans electoral success. But even many of them concede that they have done postelection soul-searching to understand why the attacks worked after failing previously — and whether they can do or will do anything about them in the future.
“Democrats didn’t respond on the trans issue,” said Terry Schilling, president of the conservative American Principles Project. “They know it’s a loser, so they don’t want to talk about it. It’s like where Republicans were on abortion in 2022.”
Schilling told NOTUS that Republicans “found gold” with their anti-trans messaging and they’d be “absolute fools to ever stop talking or championing these issues” because it “drives a wedge right down the middle of the Democratic Party in the best possible way.”
Trans activists are already bracing for the impact of ongoing anti-trans rhetoric.
“I don’t think people understand how bad this could get. It’s almost like we’re counting days to when there are some horrific developments on this front, and I’m almost waiting for allies in the [Democratic Party] to say, ‘Gosh, I never thought this would happen,’ even though we’ve been warning them this would happen,” Democratic strategist and trans activist Charlotte Clymer said.
More than half of U.S. states ban gender-affirming care for trans youth, according to the Human Rights Campaign, and over 90% of trans youth aged between 13 and 17 years old live in states that have proposed or passed anti-trans bills. Researchers at The Trevor Project, which provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ+ youth, found in a September study that “[e]nacting state-level anti-transgender laws increased incidents of past-year suicide attempts among [trans and nonbinary] young people” by as much as 72%.
Debates over trans policies and politics have kicked up in just the last month: GOP Rep. Nancy Mace is leading an effort to ban Rep.-elect Sarah McBride — the first openly trans person elected to Congress — and other trans people from using their preferred restrooms on Capitol Hill; within the Democratic Party itself, Reps. Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi sparked an internal firestorm by suggesting that the party shouldn’t support allowing trans women to play in female sports; and House lawmakers passed a key defense bill that bans trans minors from receiving gender-affirming care under the military’s health insurance system.
Republicans spent $215 million on anti-trans ads during the election. Some polling showed the attacks worked: American Principles Project released a survey, conducted by GOP pollster Cygnal, measuring anti-trans ads’ impact on voters after the election. The poll found that 52% of those surveyed said they were more likely to vote for Donald Trump after watching ads about Vice President Kamala Harris “supporting sex-change procedures” for trans youth.
(Gender-affirming medical care is supported by leading medical organizations like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society, all of which say that such care “saves lives.”)
Schilling also directed NOTUS to the exit survey from the Democratic pollster Blueprint that found that the top three reasons to vote against Harris were high inflation, undocumented migrants crossing the border and “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”
Republicans and Democrats offer overlapping reasons for why the attacks resonated better this year than in previous races.
Some GOP strategists say that their candidates’ ads this election took a softer approach, de-emphasizing gender-affirming surgeries and “genital mutilation” that they fear turned off many voters watching at home, including those who might agree with the party’s underlying point. Continued news coverage of trans athletes in school sports helped, they added, as did a tranche of so-called “low information voters” who turned out this election and were particularly receptive to the party’s messaging on the issue.
Democrats also say they think that Republican candidates who would have once used an anti-abortion-related message to galvanize the party’s conservative base instead turned to trans issues, wary of bringing further attention to abortion access after the Dobbs decision.
But beyond individual tactical explanations, political operatives in both parties say they think the GOP benefited from a broader cultural backlash to trans issues and progressive causes, one that persuaded even some nominally moderate voters to look skeptically at the Democratic Party’s positions.
Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you” ads highlighting Harris’ support of gender-affirming care for trans inmates, for example, ended with images of a trio of trans women flashing on the screen, including Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health.
“When you show those images, this isn’t just ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ show now,” said Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at the socially conservative Family Research Council. “These people are in your government representing your nation, and are you OK with that? I think it’s pretty clear most people are not.”
Democrats say voters showed no sign last election that they support that kind of broad-based rejection of the trans community and argue policies rooted in that worldview will be punished during the next election.
But they also noticed how the Trump campaign used the images for their political benefit.
“They would never use a picture of a transgender person who you could never tag as transgender,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at the moderate Democratic group Third Way. “Their point was there was something wrong here.”
Erickson and other Democratic strategists said their electoral research found that many voters showed a growing discomfort with the debate over trans issues, confused over new terminologies and the inclusion of things like a person’s pronouns in their email signature. People generally support another person’s need to transition to another gender, the strategists add, but recoil at anything they think questions the existence of more than two genders or suggests gender is nothing but a social construct.
“The point is people can see and feel the change to society, whether it be the email signatures, or you go into a store and can’t tell the gender of the person helping you, and it can feel like what everyone knew to be reality is slipping through their fingers, reality is changing,” said Adrienne Kimmell, a Democratic strategist who has done extensive research on the politics of trans issues.
To some degree, Kimmell argued, a backlash was inevitable, especially in the aftermath of other recent cultural movements — including Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement.
“Do I think backlash is good? No,” she said. “Do I think it’s part of how some human beings operate from a psychological perspective because they feel their way of life is threatened? Yes.”
Some Democratic strategists nonetheless think that, even if trans issues played a role in the last election, it was far from the most important factor in Trump’s success. They cite inflation, immigration and President Joe Biden’s late departure from the race as much more important, arguing that transgender ads mattered only on the margins.
They also point out that even while winning the White House, many GOP candidates in Senate races who focused on the issue lost.
“Part of the frustration here is some folks are taking one piece of data and extrapolating it to say these issues lost us this election, and they’re wrong. That is not true.” Erickson said. “And then other folks are taking one piece of data and extrapolating it to say this is why we lost. And they’re wrong too.”
To conservatives, though, ads like Trump’s were strategic because they were not just singling out the trans community — they were interpolating the topic with other political issues.
“I don’t think, actually, trans issues necessarily are the leading issue. I think that Americans reject politicians who are ridiculous, and they just want politicians who are normal, who are like them,” said May Mailman, a former Trump White House legal adviser and director of the conservative Independent Women’s Law Center. “I think they’re very rarely about the policies, and they’re very much about an emotional connection to a person, or who do you trust more?”
A politician who suggests the government should cover “transgender surgeries to inmates” is just “not reasonable,” she said.
Quentin Fulks, who served as deputy campaign manager for the Harris campaign, admitted on Pod Save America that Trump’s anti-trans ads “made [Harris] seem out of touch” and that it was “very effective” in part because “it was sort of a pseudo economic ad underneath it because he was saying you’re going to pay for it with taxpayer money.”
Third Way and Erickson issued a memo after the election that offered advice for how Democratic officials should talk about trans issues, urging them to take up the fight in what they called “one of the most dangerous periods in America for transgender people.”
That’s not something Democratic candidates, including Harris, did often. That silence, Republicans and Democrats agree, was a major reason the attacks resonated with the public as much as they did. (Fulks said that ultimately the Harris campaign evaluated direct responses to the Trump ads, but “none of them ever tested as well” as Harris talking about “the future.”)
“Democratic leadership, especially in the DNC and on the Hill, are intimidated on this issue,” Clymer said. “They support trans rights on paper, but they don’t want to make an effort to learn about trans issues to effectively fight back against disinformation.”
Moulton told NOTUS that because Democrats “were unwilling to even engage in this conversation, the Republicans were able to take it and run with it. They were able to settle the debate on their terms, and that’s not only damaging for us politically, it’s damaging for trans people we’re trying to protect.”
At a recent No Labels conference, Moulton said that Democrats in his state are seeking to find a primary challenger against him in 2026 because he said after the election that “maybe trans rights should not be absolute.”
Rep. Becca Balint, a co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said it was ultimately difficult for Democrats — especially in Congress — to craft a direct response because the issues are “incredibly personal.”
“And so, are we comfortable talking about personal things like that as human beings? No. And I can tell you, most people in here are completely stunted,” she told NOTUS. “I’m really trying to take this really hard issue and make it something that members and Americans generally feel more comfortable talking about, because it impacts real people.”
Clymer said she doubted that Democrats will muster much of a defense of trans people in the coming year.
“I would love to think the six months to 12 months would be a great learning period for Democratic leadership. That’s the optimistic view,” she said. “But what’s more realistic is that they kick this can down the road again and it comes up again in 2026, only for Republicans to continue weaponizing trans rights while Democratic leadership are too scared to fight back.”
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Oriana González and Alex Roarty are reporters at NOTUS.