Transgender wars are a test of whether our humanity can trump focus-group politics

Like most people in the community she fights for on a daily basis, Philadelphia’s Naiymah Sanchez didn’t sleep at all on the night of Nov. 5. It wasn’t only because Donald Trump’s second election would intensify her work as trans justice coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. It was also the personal anguish that the 41-year-old transgender woman felt knowing Trump had been elected, in part, by spending millions of dollars on TV ads that dehumanized her and people like her in shocking ways American voters had never seen before.

“I took it very personally,” Sanchez — who spent years as an activist around tough issues like combating prison rape before joining the ACLU-PA in 2017, right after Trump’s first election — told me this week. “They voted against me. They wanted to harm me.” She noted how many voters seemed to respond positively to the GOP’s openly anti-trans rhetoric, before adding: “We rest, and then we fight again.”

While Trump’s narrow but decisive win over Democrat Kamala Harris is still Topic A, the early fights over the president-elect’s off-the-wall cabinet picks and TV debates over just how anti-democratically the Trump regime might govern are still an abstraction to most Americans. It’s very different in the transgender community. There, leaders like Sanchez are having gut-wrenching conversations with people wondering if they need to accelerate major life moves, like gender-affirming surgery or a legal name change, before an openly hostile government arrives on Jan. 20.

Indeed, fears of what life might be like under Trump 47 for at least 1 million transgender Americans already began to hit home this week when the community’s one bright star on Election Day — a victory for the first-ever transgender member of Congress, Delaware’s Rep.-elect Sarah McBride — quickly became a symbol of the GOP’s determination to turn ugly campaign rhetoric into harsh governing reality.

It felt all too fitting that the Christian fundamentalist House Speaker Mike Johnson chose the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance — a day intended to both memorialize past victims of violence, including at least 30 and perhaps far more murder victims every year, and to fight this scourge — to side with South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace’s vocal and bigoted efforts to prevent transgender people from using Capitol restrooms or other single-sex facilities of their chosen identity. Johnson claimed to be solving a problem that didn’t seem to exist for Capitol visitors or staffers before McBride’s arrival. More importantly, advocates like Sanchez know how such high-profile moves give license to everyday people to more openly voice anti-trans hatred.

This normalization of transphobia in American politics, and the signs of looming government repression, poses a major moral test — the first of many to come — for how the political leaders for the nearly 77 million Americans, and counting, who voted against Trump’s MAGA movement (for Harris or third-party candidates) are planning to respond.

Arguably, this is a real challenge for all of us. Can those of us not in the transgender community fully embrace the humanity of our friends, family members, or neighbors who are? Or, in the more meaningful than ever words of Sen. Bernie Sanders, be “willing to fight for a person you don’t know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself”? How many will instead succumb to a focus-grouped temptation of blaming the anti-trans TV ads for Trump’s win and keep silent as demagogues like Trump and his attention-crazed acolyte Mace step up their attacks?

The early indications are not hopeful. Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts — one of many seeking scapegoats for Harris’ electoral defeat and his party’s losses on Capitol Hill — threw down the gauntlet by saying Democrats are too worried about offending people before declaring: “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Moulton’s campaign manager did resign in protest over those remarks, but more broadly Democrats have struggled to respond — to Moulton but also to the Trump TV ads that seemed to utterly flummox Team Harris, which turned to polling and focus groups before deciding there was no good way to aggressively respond.

And the hard data suggest that, yes, unfortunately, a transphobic message does influence some swing voters — not a huge number, but not many were needed in an election that was arguably decided by fewer than 300,000 ballots in three battleground states. Republicans spent at least $65 million and probably much more on anti-transgender ads in a dozen key states, including here in Pennsylvania, where the spot with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” aired constantly during the Phillies’ late-season push or the evening news.

One polling group, Blueprint, reported that the third most-cited reason by voters for opposing Harris — after inflation and immigration — was this: “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” Blueprint added that this was the No. 1 reason for last-minute deciders rejecting Harris, while other polling groups argued that opposing transgender rights was far down their lists of voter concerns.

Still, the early data suggest why transgender activists fear too many Democrats think privately what Moulton voiced publicly. Thus, how hard will party leaders fight Republicans like Mace, who has already introduced a bill that would extend the Capitol bathroom restrictions endorsed by Johnson to all federal facilities across the United States?

The stakes couldn’t be higher as Trump prepares to take office. History has shown that the transgender community is often an early target of authoritarian strongmen. In the 1930s, for example, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis revoked “transvestite permits” that had been issued by the relatively liberal Weimar Republic, and shut down a transgender-friendly nightclub and research institute almost immediately upon taking power.

Today, in another fraught moment, it seems counterintuitive but the most effective voices for the idea of broadly embracing the humanity of transgender Americans seem to be Democrats who’ve also broken through in areas considered deep-red Trump country. Most famously, Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed bills that banned gender-affirming surgery for minors and barred trans girls from cisgender sports, and — although his vetoes were overridden by GOP lawmakers — still won reelection in his heavily pro-Trump state.

“Number one: I talked about why,” Beshear told CBS’s Face the Nation last Sunday. “That’s my faith, where I’m taught that all children are children of God, and I wanted to stick up for children [who] were being picked on.” Voters — enough of them, anyway — respected Beshear for sticking to his values rather than doing what a consultant might have advised him to do.

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This week in the Capitol controversy, the maddeningly complicated Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who won in 2022 after campaigning extensively in Pennsylvania’s reddest rural counties, responded to the attack on McBride not with platitudes but with a gesture: Telling the incoming House member she could use the bathroom in his office any time, and adding: “There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone.” (I’m going to skip the obvious diatribe about how Fetterman might want to apply that thinking to Gaza.)

It seems to me that if Democrats want to have any hope of staying relevant over the next four years, let alone regaining power in the anti-small-”d”-democratic climate of the Trump regime, they need to embrace their inner Andy Beshear, and reject the shortsightedness of the Seth Moultons out there. Again, think back to history. In 1964, just months after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74% of Americans said mass demonstrations were detrimental to racial equality. President Lyndon B. Johnson knew that signing civil-rights legislation would probably mean near-future political pain for the Democratic Party, and he was right.

But think bigger picture. During that era, Democrats and their liberal base did build — however imperfectly — a brand that they were the party that had fought for civil rights and equality, not only for Black Americans but for Latinos, women, the LGBTQ community, and other groups that felt marginalized by conservatives. That brand — built around a moral belief and not the polling data — is how Democrats won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections, even including the disappointment of Nov. 5. Selling out more than 1 million transgender Americans would wreck that brand, permanently — telling voters Democrats don’t stand for anything beyond surviving the next election.

I might be naive, but I think matters like addressing the needs of literally a handful of athletes or making everyone comfortable at a rest stop aren’t so complicated that America can’t work them out by starting at the simple place where Beshear starts: That we are all God’s children, with some basic human rights.

And if Democrats, as well as all of us still dreaming of a better world than Donald Trump’s dark vision for America, instead choose to say nothing because we are not transgender, people shouldn’t be surprised when their group is targeted next.

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