“For two years, near-unanimous Democratic opposition has prevented any anti-LGBTQ bill from becoming law since Donald Trump took office,” Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), the first out trans person ever elected to Congress, told Assigned Media last month. “And in the vast majority of races across the country, including competitive ones, Democratic candidates are holding firm in defense of all of their constituents.”
“We can elect a pro-equality majority in November, which will not only stop anti-LGBTQ bills from coming to the floor, but will lay the foundation for equality for the entirety of our community nationwide.”
2024 was the most transphobic campaign season in the history of the country, but that transphobia was not nearly as successful as many political commentators – on all sides – believe it was. Attacks on trans people have lost whatever little power they once had to win elections, which is largely why McBride can point out that one of the two major parties in the US remains pretty solidly in favor of protecting basic rights for trans people even as it faces another major election.
There is no need to call on Democrats to support trans people in this election, and there’s no need to call on LGBTQ+ people to vote for Democrats this November. Those are both going to happen. Republicans have made attacks on trans people the centerpiece of their 2026 strategy, which won’t work for them because, as I’ll show below, no one cares.
The real damage is coming from Republicans grasping at the notion that they can win another election by demonizing a small, historically oppressed minority. 2026 would be a great year to show them that there is no benefit to using trans equality as a campaign tactic and that it’s time for them to stop running ads with stock footage of a “trans girl” winning a 100-meter dash.
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Another kind of faith in politics
Sometimes the effects of an election aren’t apparent until years later, and you have to take it on faith that putting the better people in office will give you the best chance for good results down the road.
In November 2008, I was in my mid-20s and living temporarily with my parents in central Indiana. My dad and I got up before 6 am so that we could vote for Barack Obama before work in our heavily Republican town.
Indiana isn’t anywhere close to being a purple state, and being a Democratic voter in a county known for being particularly conservative, even for Indiana, makes voting an act of faith.
That was even more true then. Marriage equality, which most of the country was still against, was starting to seem like something that could happen nationwide one day. That issue was, effectively, a proxy for what a person or a politician thought about queer people in general. It was an issue of formal equality – it didn’t create protections from private discrimination but was solely concerned with discrimination that the government was directly performing – and, I believed, it was the key to everything else since it was effectively a question of whether the very thing that made gay and bisexual people different – our romantic relationships – could be accepted as equal. If we could just get that passed, I thought at the time, then other, more substantive achievements like antidiscrimination laws would be lighter lifts.
And Obama was firmly against marriage equality. It wasn’t just a position he noted when asked and then tried to change the topic; he went out of his way to explain why he opposed it.
“I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman,” he said in a campaign interview in a megachurch in April 2008. “For me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”
The idea that the government was performing a religious sacrament and that the government letting same-sex couples get married was somehow an attack on Christians’ beliefs was one of the biggest arguments that LGBTQ+ people were up against at the time, and here was the Democratic candidate for president saying he bought into it in front of the whole country.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of LGBTQ+ people voted for him that year, in part because the Republican candidate, John McCain, was clearly worse and was widely seen as running for Bush’s third term. George W. Bush, along with down-ticket Republicans, made 2004 the most homophobic campaign year ever.
That act of faith paid off. Not only did Obama win Indiana – something no Democratic presidential candidate had done since 1964 and something another has not done since – but he changed his mind on marriage several years later and appointed two of the Supreme Court justices who would join the majority in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, legalizing marriage in all 50 states.
A brief history of the anti-trans moral panic
It’s hard to imagine, but Republicans largely ignored trans people until 2020. North Carolina’s law banning trans people from using the bathroom associated with their gender had flopped just several years prior, Donald Trump’s attacks on trans rights in his first term were ineptly implemented, and the idea that people would care more about who is playing on their local middle school’s girls’ soccer team than, say, whether they’ll have a job post-pandemic, was absurd.
But one conservative activist – Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project (APP) – worked hard to change that. His organization funded a couple of spots attacking trans girls’ participation in school sports in an effort to show Republicans this was a viable issue for them.
“What I’m hoping is that once we release these ads and numbers start to move, the Trump campaign will see it’s a powerful issue that the Republican Party can use to its success,” Schilling told Politico in August 2020.
Trump lost that election, but the GOP immediately turned to attacking trans rights in state legislatures across the country. The attacks focused on trans kids, specifically in two areas: access to gender-affirming care and participation in school sports. No state legislatures had passed bans on either of these in 2020, but today 27 states have laws banning trans kids from playing school sports and 27 ban some level of gender-affirming care for minors.
By 2024, Republicans were ready to exploit this issue for votes in a national election. And exploit they did, with Trump’s campaign spending over $200 million on ads that turned “they/them” into a slur by repeating Kamala Harris’ statements about trans inmates having access to gender-affirming care (something that the first Trump administration also implemented because it is a constitutional right). Trump himself doddered along the campaign trail making completely false statements about trans rights – he was literally saying that schools were operating on kids behind their parents’ backs – to portray Democrats as wild gender radicals.
Trump won, and Republicans got majorities in the House and Senate, but was it because of the anti-trans attacks? Republicans definitely walked away from 2024 thinking that it was. Schilling himself said that the main reason Republicans won so big was “embracing the culture war.”
“Led by President Donald Trump, Republicans last year hammered Democrats on one of their biggest vulnerabilities — their support of left-wing gender insanity,” he said in a statement on that year’s election results. “This should provide a clear lesson moving forward that social conservatism is a political winner and that the best strategy for Republicans on cultural issues is to fight back, not call a truce. Following this formula will only serve to further bolster the GOP in 2026 and beyond.”
Did the attacks even work in 2024?
But it’s not actually clear that attacks on trans people won the election for Republicans that year. First, major national elections have many moving parts, and assigning causality to any one factor is difficult at best. Dissatisfaction with the economy grew while immigration climbed during Joe Biden’s term in office. Kamala Harris’ campaign started unusually late in the election season, and the electorate quickly forgot everything Trump did in his first term.
While Trump and his campaign talked a lot about trans rights in 2024, they also talked a lot about grocery store prices and immigrants eating the cats and dogs of Springfield, Ohio. And he didn’t even win a majority of the popular vote in the end.
Assigned Media published a piece last week questioning whether trans issues ever won elections for the GOP in the first place.
“It’s very clear Republicans think this works, and even when you listen to political pundits talk about this on CNN or elsewhere, they seem to have accepted this idea,” University of Kansas professor Don Haider-Markel said. “But as a social scientist, I can say there aren’t any studies to say this worked in 2024. And the evidence from special elections and off-cycle elections in 2025 suggests that it didn’t help Republicans at all.”
Republicans have used anti-trans attacks in several special and off-year elections. Virginia’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, Winsome Earle-Sears, focused heavily on trans rights in her 2025 campaign. And this year, numerous Republicans are talking about trans issues like sports participation and gender-affirming care for minors as if their states haven’t already passed blanket bans.
The GOP is desperate to make this a major issue once again. Polling shows that the public is broadly on their side – especially when it comes to trans athletes – and the party isn’t finding much support on other issues, considering Trump, whose approval rating is abysmal, has had his hand in trying to solve many of these issues (like prices) and only made them worse.
But the lack of proof that trans issues helped Republicans win in 2024 is compounded by more recent polling showing that voters are epicly indifferent to trans issues when deciding who to vote for, ranking them as lower in importance than any other major issue.
Meanwhile, signs are pointing to Democrats picking up seats in Congress in November despite remaining surprisingly solid when it comes to trans rights, even sports. McBride’s point, that Democratic opposition to attacks on trans rights has been “near-unanimous” over the past several years, is well taken. The internet often encourages people to focus on the negative examples, but even here they are few and far between.
Sure, there are a couple outright transphobes in the party, like Rep. Marcy Kaptur in Ohio and Rep. Don Davis in North Carolina, but they represent less than 1% of the Democrats running for Congress this year. There have also been a few more Democrats – like Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D) – who have made statements that made it seem like they were wavering in their support, but their voting records show that they support LGBTQ+ equality. Many of them – including Talarico and Moulton themselves – have walked back or apologized for their statements.
Democrats wouldn’t be able to keep the party so disciplined on this issue if support for trans equality were actually the third rail that Republicans seem to think that it is.
Even if they can’t win with transphobia, they can cause a lot of damage
That hasn’t stopped Republicans from trying to get votes with transphobia this year. Trump and other prominent Republicans are dropping slurs in public and saying they’ll “end” transgender people if they win in 2026, after having spent the last couple of years turning every single form of institutional power that they can get their hands on into a tool of discrimination and exclusion.
And that rhetoric can still do damage, even if it doesn’t get them any votes. LGBTQ+ youth face a higher risk of suicidal ideation, and 90% of LGBTQ+ youth, according to the Trevor Project, said that anti-LGBTQ+ laws and debates worsened their stress and anxiety.
Researchers behind a separate study at Virginia Commonwealth University found that anti-trans legislation created psychological distress that could be distinguished from that which is caused by direct discrimination. Respondents in the study said the legislative attacks felt like “an existential threat.”
Which isn’t far off from the truth. Conservatives are not shy about the fact that anti-trans legislation is intended to end the existence of trans people, either through legally erasing their identities, making participation in the public sphere so onerous that trans people stay home, or making living one’s life authentically so burdensome that people go back to hiding who they are.
Moreover, anti-trans campaigns spread stereotypes, legitimize discrimination, and send a message that some people are just worth less than others. The right is not subtle about this: The president of the United States is still saying that public schools are turning kids transgender behind their parents’ backs as a way to scaremonger around trans rights; the vice president is calling trans people terrorists; and high-ranking administration officials are using anti-trans slurs to dehumanize trans people.
The cartoonishly stark difference between the parties on LGBTQ+ issues largely explains why LGBTQ+ people remain loyal to the Democratic Party and active in politics. While many other historically oppressed groups moved to the right in 2024, LGBTQ+ people moved even further to the left, with 86% voting for Harris. And while there are some very noisy queer and trans people saying online that they’d rather stay home than vote for a Democrat, they’re a very vocal minority within a minority. A recent HRC study found that 92% of LGBTQ+ people say they’ll “definitely” vote this year, way above the 68% of the non-LGBTQ+ population that says the same.
And even if there are a few Democrats getting outsized media attention for turning their backs on equality, LGBTQ+ voters generally recognize that Democrats are far better than Republicans when it comes to equal rights, so much so that just making congressional leadership Democratic will mean that there will be a sea change in that institution. As Faefyx Collington pointed out, intraparty pressure will keep individual Democrats in line if they actually get elected, meaning that the few individuals like Kaptur and Davis won’t matter much in the end.
2026 should be the last year this happens
With all of the attacks on trans rights at the state and federal levels that we’ve seen since 2020, right now might seem like an odd time to declare that the tide is turning.
As I try to put myself into the mind of the average cishet person, I just can’t imagine caring this much about who is using what bathroom or whether a US airman stationed in Turkey was assigned male or female at birth.
I know that these attacks aren’t meant to speak to me. I know plenty of trans people in real life. Cis people who know trans people are a lot less likely to support anti-trans legislation, and trans people are my friends and colleagues. But surely that has to work in the other direction too, right? While cis people who don’t have trans people in their lives might not support trans rights as much as those who do, it must also be harder for them to go out of their way to hate trans people.
The bet that Republicans have apparently made is that people are willing to vote every two years for the rest of their lives to attack a minority that they never met. That bet relies on a particularly dim view of human nature: that people aren’t just selfish and gullible, but that they’re also sadistic and absolutely blind to what actually affects their lives. Moreover, that they’ll never change or move on with their lives.
It may be another matter of faith, but it’s looking like 2026 is the year we can turn this around, show the country these attacks don’t get votes anymore, and start the slow process of rebuilding equality.
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