Stop trans scapegoating

In the runup to last week’s elections, Republicans spent millions of dollars targeting transgender rights. They suggested that Democrats supported perverts wanting to go into women’s bathrooms. They framed the left as encouraging gender fantasies that had no basis in reality.

But those ad dollars didn’t have the desired effect this time.

Today I want to talk about the events that played out Tuesday around one particular culture-war issue: the faux-firestorm over trans people, young trans people in particular. I think that what happened offers a path for politicians to stand against these tactics. But it also shows all of us a way to stand up for everyone.

First, it’s important to think about where this came from and why trans people are facing a tidal wave of hate now. On a parallel culture-war topic, I’ll note that people have long had differing opinions on abortion, but the issue became a national flashpoint due to political money turning it into a wedge issue in the 1970s and 1980s.

It’s also critical to realize that in the midst of the Republicans now politicizing trans issues in a similar way, the U.S. is currently replaying McCarthyism. Witness all the talk of cultural Marxism. Colleges are censored and professors put on watch lists. A parallel phenomenon that unfolded alongside the Red Scare was the Lavender Scare. In 2025, we’re seeing resurrections of bizarrely out-of-context anti-communist arguments alongside rampant homophobia.

The easiest way to target a vulnerable group for political gain is to use communities that have a history of being disenfranchised and mistreated. Trans panics can be created because of this kind of history—and it’s not just the modern conjuring of terror over bathrooms or the Lavender Scare. What’s happening today also relies on deep, deep mistreatment of women across history.

Gender can be used to as the spark for a firestorm because of the strange puritan streak and the deep desire to control women that has been a bedrock of U.S. culture for centuries. We regularly see sad-sack billionaires bantering on social media about “alpha” maleness and fretting over birth rates that only seem to include white people.

It’s not an accident that Matt Walsh titled his 2022 anti-trans film What Is a Woman? The reactionary right wants to control and categorize women at will. Nothing undermines the subservient worker-drone hierarchies they want to impose more than suggesting that men and women might not always be deeply and fundamentally different, with clear power differentials—or that society might not be able to arbitrarily place human beings in assigned silos.

I often have the sense that ignorance about trans people can be weaponized into fear and resentment in part because so many people know little or nothing about the community. But in truth, we see the same kind of vilification of immigrants in the U.S., and they make up a much larger percentage of the population (approximately 15% to more like 1%*). So what we’re seeing now may be primarily traceable to these long channels of historical discrimination and ways people have been trained to hate in the past.

Along with the misogyny I mentioned, a lot of people over the age of forty (basically, Gen Xers and boomers) grew up on a steady diet of unapologetic homophobia, particularly as public awareness of AIDS developed. I’ve talked before about propaganda, and how dangerous it can be when applied over years in massive doses. The religious right pushed homophobia hard for political ends in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s*.

Younger readers may not know that Joe Biden’s gaffe (or perfectly timed comment) wound up pressuring the Obama administration to back gay marriage ahead of the 2012 election. For those who aren’t part of the queer community, it may also be easy to forget that Obergefell was decided only a decade ago. (I’m thankful that this week, SCOTUS refused to revisit that ruling for the time being.)

Unweaving the fabric

Of course trans people have always existed, but a lot of the more visible progress is recent. Unscrupulous politicians have targeted the steps that society has been taking toward making trans lives more livable, because they see that they can gain political advantage by attacking the recent changes.

What are they trying to undo? For now, a whole field of medicine. For decades, medical researchers have invet into gender-affirming care for trans people. The American Academy of Pediatrics has weighed in. Parents and children worked with medical professionals to determine standards of care and to figure out what led to the best outcomes for gender-questioning and trans children.

Though transphobic actors often pose as protectors of children, in several cases, they have also tried to turn women into children, and protect them as well. After bathroom usage in schools and teen sports, anti-trans measures are also undoing sound medical policies evolved over decades in settings—like the Olympics.

Civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo noted earlier this week that, “The International Olympic Committee is set to ban trans and intersex women from competition. This is despite the fact that for 20 years, the IOC has allowed trans athletes to compete and only 1 has ever competed and none have ever won a medal.”

She pointed to a story from 2000 that announced an end to gender testing in Olympic competition, and the support for that decision from the medical community.

Trans politicians’ outlook

We now have trans elected officials, including Congresswoman Sarah McBride from Delaware and Virginia state senator Danica Roem.

I can’t speak for the trans community and exactly what kind of representation they want from these two women. But speaking just for myself, I would say that they are in an impossible situation. They didn’t run on being trans—as far as I can tell, they ran to be basic-bitch elected officials who want to do bureaucratic jobs. Which I’m grateful for, because I don’t want to do those jobs.

Back in February, Rep. Sarah McBride said in an interview with the 19th, “We have to reclaim the narrative and the humanity in the public’s mind of trans people. The most good that I think I can do is to be a full human being, to not be siloed and reduced to only one part of who I am, as proud as I am of that part.”  

Danica Roem, a trans senator in the Virginia legislature, became famous during her early campaigns in Virginia not for talking about storming the ramparts of the patriarchy or confounding gender expectations but for talking about infratstructure.

It’s the politicians targeting trans people that want to make the conversation about transness all the time. And it’s up to those of us who aren’t trans to be sure that trans people aren’t the only standard-bearers in their quest for civil rights and the ability to lead lives as boring as the rest of ours.

Global anti-trans shifts

As in the U.S., some progress on trans rights around the world has happened in my lifetime. But there has also been backlash. One group getting rights for the first time can be played by bad actors and something being taken away from everyone else.

Russia in 2013 instituted anti-LGBTQ laws that used very vague and all-encompassing language to say that promoting homosexuality a crime, as if acting on the false presumption that Russian youth were being corrupted by perverts.

That framework of pretending to protect children from perversion has been widely adopted in the U.S. and elsewhere for use against trans people. The pattern is holding, even as leading figures in the organizations supposedly established to protect children face accusations of being abusers themselves.

In Hungary, the country’s constitutional court had gone so far as to rule in 2018 that the constitution protected trans rights—only for the legislature to try to roll back those protections beginning in 2020, making it impossible for anyone going forward to change the gender they were assigned at birth.

But perhaps nowhere has been as shocking as the shift in the U.K. Even in traditionally progressive circles of British intellectual women, in which trans people—especially trans women—became vilified in disturbing and widespread ways. Across the years, it has inexplicably turned into almost a full-time job for J.K. Rowling.

Some pundits seem inclined to interpret this global shift in recent years to some kind of inherent danger to supporting trans people politically, and an indication that politicians should avoid engagement with the community. But all it shows is that targeted propaganda villainizing trans people can have political effects, and this is true of nearly any minority.

Pundits often emphasize how effective creating a villain can be in politics. And negative ads do have an effect. I’ve said before that the relentless propaganda has shown us how vulnerable any population can be. It’s not a surprise that power-hungry people find a way to benefit form that abuse.

But research shows it may be a mistake to assume finding a villain is the most effective approach to framing policy. All the way back in 2010, I interviewed Michael Jones, a youn researcher who was investigating political framing. I asked him about the role that characters play in an effective narrative, and his answer surprised me:

“Villains tend to be important in policy narratives, but I found something else in my dissertation that actually shocked me. The hero really matters. The hero in each of the stories that I put out there, as the respondent grows more affectionate toward them and likes them more, the more they believe everything in the story, the more willing they are to accept policy prescriptions… Nothing else performed quite as successfully as that variable.”

Yet we see politicians out there creating villains, from immigrants to Black people and trans folks. Republican candidate for Virginia governor Winsome Earle-Sears spent 57% of her ad budget scaremongering over trans issues and trying to sandbag her opponent by tying her to vulnerable kids and adults.

Meanwhile, only four percent of voters listed the issue of transgender students as their most important concern. The good news is that Earle-Sears lost by almost 15 points.

In recent months, a lot of ostensibly liberal pundits have wanted Democrats to hide or downplay support for transgender constituents. But mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani took the opposite approach.

He went to the Christopher Street Pier and sat at a desk he brought along (presumably to suggest how he would govern as mayor). Mamdani gave a history lesson on trans people in NYC, honoring Sylvia Rivera. He carried a trans flag in the NYC Pride march. He did this while also offering concrete proposals targeted at benefiting New Yorkers as a whole.

These universal proposals weren’t just smart politics in terms of winning votes. They also inoculated him against the perennial charge that any politician who expresses support for marginalized groups must somehow be planning to work against groups who aren’t similarly oppressed.

In the case of the Virginia governor’s race, Abigail Spanberger disappointed some voters by not taking a stronger stance when she was asked directly about the anti-trans ads run by her opponent. She said, “I recognize the concern that families and community members might have about the safety of their own kids, about competitiveness, about fairness.”

But her performance during her debate with Earle-Sears was fascinating. Instead of letting the matter drop with the invocation of trans panic, Spanberger pointed to what was behind that panic, that deeper history of exclusion that transphobia is part of and rises out of. She criticized Earle-Sears for being against same-sex marriage.

“My opponent has previously said that she does not think that gay couples should be allowed to marry,” Spanberger said. She pointed out that her opponent doesn’t care if employees get fired for their sexuality.

“That’s not discrimination,” Earle-Sears insisted. Spanberger managed to tie her to the larger prejudice and revealed the bigger frame behind the current anti-trans preoccupations. I think that being able to step back to reframe discussions and show what they’re really about is a key element in how we go forward.

An even more ambitious approach

But we also have to sometimes flip the table entirely, in this case by publicly embracing everyone in our communities. In his victory speech election night, Mamdani vowed to continue support for the vilified and disenfranchised, saying, “Here we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall.”

When pundits say that we have to throw trans people under the bus, they’re saying they don’t know how to win without doing that. And it may be true that they don’t know how to do it, but other people do. And they’re already showing us the way.

Still looking for that villain

Fighting this kind of malicious exclusion of whole groups is a lesson we’re slow to learn, in part because we all been swimming in propaganda for years. It’s hard to imagine a politics that doesn’t actively punish someone.

Republicans have found a way to use wedge politics to target vulnerable minorities, and at least intermittently, have been able to convince key groups of voters that conservatives are standing up for them. The way to counter that is not to do the same thing—firstly, because it’s wrong, and secondly, because you can only win at that race by becoming more cruel than the Republicans.

The Democratic Party has struck on another mode here, one that has promise. By focusing on policies that benefit everyone and standing up very deliberately for the most marginalized groups, you can show that you are strong enough to stand up for everyone.

Different factions of voters may occasionally have competing interests. But they aren’t the villains, and we shouldn’t look away when they’re treated as such. The villains are those who are already out there harming every single American and destroying the best parts of our institutions.

In February 2025, Zohran Mamdani made his position clear, and he never deviated on this point afterward. “You need not even know a trans New Yorker to stand up for trans New Yorkers,” he said. “This is a trial of all of us to see who we are willing to give up. And our answer is ‘no one.’”

We just need heroes at every level, from everyday life to elected officials, who will make clear that we can do better than a politics—and a world—based on cruelty and exclusion.

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