Trump’s new anti-trans ad is pure scapegoating

With just days left in the path of the 2024 political campaign, you may have noticed that the Trump camp has increasingly turned to scapegoating high-profile targets, including immigrants, the press and women. The number of attacks on transgender people has also continued to double.

A recent one report by ABC News revealed that nearly a third of recent campaign funds — or $21 million, according to ABC’s report — for television advertising have been spent on transphobic messages from the Trump campaign and several conservative political groups. The independent journalist collective the Stronghold pushed the total even higher, to $40 million poured into transphobic advertising in the past five weeks.

The ads, paid for by the Trump campaign, use a litany of transphobic codingincluding photoshopping Kamala Harris to make it look like she’s posing next to a non-binary person with a mustache and a dress, despite ample evidence that this strategy is a turn-off for voters. “Kamala is even in favor of allowing biological men to compete against our girls in their sports,” an ad reads. All three ads Attacking Harris to support gender-affirming care for trans prisoners, including surgeries where medically necessary.

“Kamala is for them/them,” each ad concludes. “President Trump is for you.”

Considering that transgender people are doing well barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list among most voters, many may find it baffling that Trump has paid so much attention to singling out transgender people. There are indeed two different media research groups, the left leaning Data for progress and video marketing company Ground mediain collaboration with GLAADeach released studies last week showing that the ads had no real impact on voters’ decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “small-minded.”

So why do they do that? Well, there’s “winning” in terms of appealing to voters, and then there’s “winning” in terms of defining the conversation. Keeping the focus on transgender people: Harris’s actual policy proposals do almost nothing to advance the status of trans citizens – fuels a certain base and crowds out other discussions.

But the consequences of this are not to distract voters from the real issues. The consequences instead come in an important detail from one of the studies mentioned above. Ground media found that while the negative messages did not change viewers’ opinions of 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 the larger, ongoing culture war against queer and trans people — which is to say, they are winning, in a very real sense. The willingness of Trump and his supporters to invest in these ads arguably indicates that even if Harris wins the election, marginalized communities in red states will still be threatened by Trump supporters and by increasing legal restrictions on those regions.

But transgender people are not isolated targets. They are scapegoats in a historical sense: canaries in the coal mine for the growing advance of fascism in the US. That puts us all at risk.

It is not new that Trump puts transphobia at the center of his campaign strategy. It is the culmination of a decade-long conservative political strategy of weaponizing anti-trans messages to undermine and reverse a broad cultural shift toward LGBTQ equality.

In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association launched a milestone reclassified gender dysphoria – the feeling of not being aligned with the gender you were assumed to be at birth – so it was no longer classified as a mental disorder, setting the stage for a much-needed societal shift towards accepting and understanding transgender people.

The following year, Time Magazine was published Orange is the new black star Laverne Cox on the cover, to declare that trans rights were “America’s next civil rights frontier.”

The response came almost immediately. A month later, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant religious group, was adopted a resolution singling out transgender people and stating, “(W)e resist all cultural efforts to validate claims of transgender identity.”

When the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage took effect, conservative groups turned away from attacking queer people and instead targeted transgender people in a “divide and rule” strategy, such as the conservative organizer Meg Kilgannon mentioned. in summary on a 2017 Family Research Council panel: “Despite all its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile,” she told the meeting. “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we will be more successful.”

To achieve this, conservatives joined forces with unlikely allies, including “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” to stoke antagonistic sentiments against trans people. Right-wingers spread alarmism, rolling out dozens of anti-trans toilet bills across the country, and then use them to introduce other transphobic ideas on local conservative platforms, all of which are straight out of the moral panic playbook. These tactics did not directly address the sociocultural progress transgender people were making; instead, they cultivated a new wave of unfounded fear and anxiety about transgender people themselves.

And the propaganda has only become more effective over time. While transphobic bathroom bills largely failed a decade ago, they are now coming back into fashion; last week, Odessa, Texas, has passed a bathroom bill which offers a $10,000 bounty to anyone who spies on a trans person using the “wrong” bathroom.

The core elements we see being used to attack and oppress trans people in the US in 2024 are not really about trans people; we have seen the same fear-mongering tropes weaponized against countless marginalized groups throughout history.

They serve a larger political purpose – not just to demonize one specific group of people, but to reinforce a group mentality that can then be deployed against all enemies. These attacks are a political cudgel.

This strategy goes back to a new era of fascism. It is vital to recognize the parallels here with Hitler’s Germany (especially given that of John Kelly). recent accusations that Trump himself praised Hitler): to understand that trans and queer people are not being attacked in isolation, but rather together with immigrants, disabled and mentally illand women.

The strategy at work utilizes moral hysteria, a culture-wide “othering” of marginalized groups, and, above all, a push for a government response to the perceived problem of these remote groups. By coalescing around the public’s negative perceptions of these groups, the Republican Party is amassing power and control at all levels of government. Trump has repeatedly threatened to wield that amassed power against his political opponents if he is re-elected. And this is ultimately the real threat – not just to transgender people, but to everyone.