What’s at Stake for Trans People in This Election | Opinion

This September, at the annual Moms for Liberty summit in Washington, DC, Former President Donald Trump doubled down on anti-trans rhetoric with the totally false claim that schools were performing gender-reassignment surgeries on kids, saying “Think of it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.” He repeated those claims again at a rally in Tucson. And has since dropped $65 million of anti-trans dialing up the volume on this issue.
These words, from some of the darkest corners of the internet, were injected into the heart of American political discourse. To see what’s happening here, we have to be clear about what is true.
No child receives surgery at school to change their gender. More to the point, gender affirming care for minors is an incredibly complex and highlystandardizedprocess involving parents and doctors that rarely even involves surgery at all.
The reason that this lie about kids has become a talking point in the general election is because of a long-standing coordinated right-wing effort to spread vast quantities of medical misinformation about transgender people and make the debate over “gender ideology” a mainstream topic.
This manipulated political conversation underscores the fact that this year’s national, state and local races present trans people with existential choices up and down the ballot.
But trans lives have been hanging in the electoral balance for a while now.
Starting in 2021, after Joe Biden defeated Trump for the presidency, there was an explosion of anti-trans legislation introduced and passed in states across the country. These laws have become increasingly targeted and expansive—moving from policing transgender youth to transgender adults—and designed to push trans people to the margins of all aspects of society.
In 2021, the number of anti-trans bills (155) introduced nearly doubled from the previous year, 2020, (85), exploding into a record number of bills introduced both in 2023 (615) and this year (652). This year marks the fourth consecutive year of a record-breaking numbers of anti-trans bills being considered by legislatures in the United States.
These bills have targeted transgender youth and adults in a wide range of categories, including limiting access to bathrooms, silencing trans youth in schools, restricting access to school sports, and prohibiting access to gender-affirming care.
With the election of the GOP House majority, anti-trans bills passed the lower chamber. Rep. Majorie Taylor-Green (R-GA) was particularly notable for her active role in driving them forward.
The reason we’ve seen this dramatic uptick in both the scale and scope of anti-trans bills is because being anti-trans has now become a core pillar of the Republican Party political platform, and a litmus test for simply being a member of the GOP.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb stand out as two examples of how anti-trans politics have consumed the Republican Party. In 2022, governors Cox and Holcomb generated significant fanfare when they vetoed legislation which would have banned transgender youth from participating in school sports.
But their political courage didn’t last long.
Cox has since signed a number of anti-trans bills, including banning gender-affirming care for trans youth, and barring trans people from using the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity. Gov Holcomb has signed similar bills, even going as far as to sign legislation that would require schools to out transgender youth to their parents.
How anti-trans politics became a core pillar of the Republican Party isn’t a mystery. At TransLash Media, we’ve exposed how institutions like the Heritage Foundation spent decades incepting anti-trans medical misinformation into the public dialogue and creating a focus on trans identity as a core motivating issue for Republican voters.
It’s little surprise then that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—a playbook that outlines what Trump and Republicans will do if they are returned to power—contains a number of far sweeping anti-trans proposals.
Project 2025 attacks the validity of trans identity on page one. It aims to confine expressions of gender and bodily autonomy to those necessary for procreation. All other manifestations of this would find Americans on the losing end of bureaucratic regulations and American law.
Project 2025 would rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics; rescind Biden-era Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students; eliminate transgender health care in Medicare and Medicaid; reverse policy allowing transgender people in the military; rename the Department of Health and Human Services to the ‘Department of Life’ and repeal and replace policies that support LGBTQ+ families, with a direct incentive to “put an end” to “woke transgender activism;” and abolish the White House Gender Policy Council.
The whole point is to erase any deviation from gender binary from American society.
The stark nature of what has already happened and what could happen means that the stakes for voters are higher than at any point in living memory.In fact, it could even be existential. The clarity of the impact on trans people means that America has a choice to make when it comes to the human rights and dignity of everyone. Let’s hope that they do so wisely.
Imara Jones is the founder and CEO of Translash Media, and host of its investigative podcast, the Anti-Trans Hate Machine.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.